San Francisco Opera, which just finished celebrating its centennial season, occupies the War Memorial Opera House, a Romancolumned edifice designed after the fashion of the Palais Garnier, in Paris. Across the street is City Hall, another heap of aspirational Beaux-Arts architecture. No other major American city gives such prominence to its opera house; the juxtaposition of culture and power is European in spirit. When I visited last month, Pride festivities had overtaken the Civic Center area, and I thought back to the company's most charged political moment. In 1978, the epoch-making gay politician Harvey Milk was assassinated in his office at City Hall. A lavish memorial was held for him at the Opera House, becoming part of tumultuous demonstrations on behalf of gay rights and against police brutality. Milk had seen "Tosca" there two nights before his death, and wrote to a friend, "The crowd went so wild that Mick Jagger would have been jealous... Ah-life is worth living."
Forty-five years on, San Francisco Opera is facing the same struggles as performing-arts institutions across the country. Subscriptions plunged during the pandemic and show no immediate sign of returning even to pre-2020 conditions never mind the full houses that prevailed in Milk's time. Nevertheless, the orchestra seats appeared mostly full at two events I attended in June. A program sponsored by the heirs of Ray Dolby, the sound guru, may have helped: at each performance this season, at least a hundred prime seats were made available to Bay Area residents who hadn't been to the opera in the past three years. The tickets cost ten dollars-their price in 1932, when the Opera House opened.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة July 10 - 17, 2023 (Double Issue) من The New Yorker.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
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هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة July 10 - 17, 2023 (Double Issue) من The New Yorker.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
YULE RULES
“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point.”
COLLISION COURSE
In Devika Rege’ first novel, India enters a troubling new era.
NEW CHAPTER
Is the twentieth-century novel a genre unto itself?
STUCK ON YOU
Pain and pleasure at a tattoo convention.
HEAVY SNOW HAN KANG
Kyungha-ya. That was the entirety of Inseon’s message: my name.
REPRISE
Reckoning with Donald Trump's return to power.
WHAT'S YOUR PARENTING-FAILURE STYLE?
Whether you’re horrifying your teen with nauseating sex-ed analogies or watching TikToks while your toddler eats a bagel from the subway floor, face it: you’re flailing in the vast chasm of your child’s relentless needs.
COLOR INSTINCT
Jadé Fadojutimi, a British painter, sees the world through a prism.
THE FAMILY PLAN
The pro-life movement’ new playbook.
President for Sale - A survey of today's political ads.
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll. There were few people on the streets-like the population of a lot of capital cities, Harrisburg's swells on weekdays with lawyers and lobbyists and legislative staffers, and dwindles on the weekends. But, on the façades of small businesses and in the doorways of private homes, I could see evidence of political activity. Across from the sparkling Susquehanna River, there was a row of Democratic lawn signs: Malcolm Kenyatta for auditor general, Bob Casey for U.S. Senate, and, most important, in white letters atop a periwinkle not unlike that of the sky, Kamala Harris for President.
