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.
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