Music: San Francisco Smash

A quarter of a century ago. the San Francisco Opera Company was only a sort of West Coast annex to the Met. It even sandwiched in its season−mid-September to mid-October− ahead of New York’s so that it could use Met singers. The traditional season in San Francisco has not changed, but last week, as the company celebrated its 35th year and its 25th anniversary in its ornate opera house, it was clearly nobody’s annex. In some ways San Francisco isnow the finest opera company in the U.S., often on a par with the Met in quality (if not in size), and consistently ahead of the Met in dash and daring.

Sentiment & Flair. Much of the credit for San Francisco’s success goes to Vienna-born General Director Kurt Herbert Adler, 52, who took over the company three years ago, after the death of Impresario Gaetano Merola. A sentimental Neapolitan, Merola had built up the company and fenced it in with a traditional repertory. But Adler inherited not only a flourishing company but a sophisticated audience ready for new and different opera.

He started off with great flair, giving the city handsome productions of Cherubini’s short The Portuguese Inn, and Honegger’s Joan of Arc at the Stake, both performed for the first time on a U.S. opera stage. The next year he followed up with the U.S. premiere of Sir William Walton’s Troilus and Cressida. Adler also revived such difficult classics as Verdi’s Macbeth and Wagner’s Flying Dutchman, gradually building up his own high-caliber stable of singers, including Germany’s Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Vienna’s Leonie Rysanek, British Tenor Richard Lewis, and a strong group of young American discoveries. This season’s highlights: the brilliantly staged U.S. premiere of Francis Poulenc’s religious opera, The Carmelites (TIME, Feb. 11), and Richard Strauss’s seldom-produced Ariadne aufNaxos, a kind of Baroque double feature, sometimes as serious as Salome, sometimesas raffish as Rosenkavalier. With Soprano Rysanek in the title role and Pittsburgh’s Conductor William Steinberg in the pit, the production was a triumph.

Misfires & Shrugs. One reason for such achievements: Adler knows music as few opera managers do: he used to be a conductor. A man of charm and inexhaustible energy, Adler spends weeks each winter combing Europe for talent, works 18 hours a day during the season. The logistics for his short season are tricky, with 31 productions of twelve operas scheduled in the San Francisco area in 38 days, and 16 performances of 13 operas set for 17 days in Southern California.

During his regime Adler has at times misfired: last year’s Boris Godunov, for instance, was a murky failure. But how well Adler has done is amply demonstrated by the fact that last month he and his company casually shrugged off cancellations by Sopranos Maria Callas and Antonietta Stella, promptly went on to give San Francisco what may well be its most stimulating opera season to date.