Opera at the Golden Gate

In its handsome, classic auditorium, the San Francisco Opera last week opened its 22nd season with Aida. A capacity house was pardonably proud, from the cheering galleries to the McNears, Ehrmans and Fleishhackers in their beige and gilt boxes. A roster of the finest stars (many from the Metropolitan), a superb orchestra (the San Francisco Symphony) and a well trained municipal chorus would present four weeks of repertory as elegant as any city could boast. Then the company would move down to Los Angeles, where it would give a Hollywood-studded audience the only really grand opera Los Angeles ever hears. In population, San Francisco is the twelfth city in the U.S. In opera, it is second. New York City exceeds it, but only in quantity.

The San Francisco Opera is, among other things, one of the few in the world that breaks a little better than even, financially. This season it has a new support. California's big Safeway Stores chain will sponsor broadcasts of the last acts of 14 performances.

Mr. Merola. The man who more than anyone has kept the San Francisco Opera on an even artistic and financial keel is Gaetano Merola, a 63-year-old Neapolitan with a vegetable-wagon accent. Merola arrived in San Francisco in 1921 as one of the batoneers of the barnstorming San Carlo Opera. He promptly lost his shirt and lightened several other people's pock ets producing an outdoor opera season at the Stanford University Stadium.

The fiasco failed to dim either Merola's enthusiasm or his dark-eyed powers of persuasion. In 1923, backed by a $35,000 advance sale and $25,000 from the members of Nob Hill's rich Pacific Union Club, Merola launched his first regular season.

San Francisco society women sewed costumes, donated furniture for props, decorated San Francisco's Civic Auditorium with tree prunings from Golden Gate Park. Merola ended the season with a nervous breakdown.

Nine years later San Franciscans rewarded him with one of the most beautiful and best equipped opera houses in the world. Since then, despite war and economics, the San Francisco Opera has not missed a season. And Merola has assumed the manner of the great impresarios.

A restless traveler between seasons, he is known and feared in the kitchens of Italian restaurants from Manhattan's Del Pezzo's to San Francisco's Fior d'Italia. On a recent trip to Los Angeles he was met by the proprietor at the door of Victor Hugo's, his favorite local eating place.

"Look," said the proprietor, gesturing desperately, "this morning the pipes in the kitchen went out. Fifteen minutes ago the cook quit. Now you want to come in here.

Go away. Take this $10 and go somewhere else. Go away."

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