Museum Mondays

Detail, Annunciation

Fra Filippo Lippi, c 1443-45

Alte Pinakothek, Munich

July, 2026

 

New Member of the Household

This little dog – she weighs 27 pounds – came to live with us about a month ago. Her name is Lucy, and your guess is as good as ours as to her ancestry. Obviously one of the short-legged breeds (Dachshund, Corgi, Basset hound), probably some kind of terrier, other than that, who knows.

We chose her for her size and behavior: small enough to be carried down stairs, if necessary, good with cats.

That's working out fine. I actually picked her up today (I'd let her climb somewhere that maybe she shouldn't jump down from) and she was good with that.

Here she is with Julius the day they met:

She has annoyed him a few times enough that he has hissed and taken a swat at her, but he hasn't drawn blood. They are fine with each other.

She is a cheery dog with a sweet temperament, though shy. She was quite fearful when she moved in but she's settling in nicely and is less fearful on walks and when she meets other people.

She knows "come," which is good, but not really any other commands. We're making progress on "sit," but as it happens, Julius now has a more reliable "sit" than she does. He is very food motivated.

 

Feast of St. Francis of Assissi

Philippe Sly (Saint François)

Saint François d’Assise, Messiean

Salzburg Festival, August, 2026

Photo: Monika Rittershaus, courtesy of the Salzburg Festival

Director/Sets/Costumes/Lighting, Romeo Castellucci) 

More photos of this stunning production.

 

San Francisco Opera Announces 2028 Ring Casting

Die Walküre, Act 1

2018 San Francisco Opera Ring

Brandon Jovanovich (Siegmund) and Karita Mattila (Sieglinde)

Photo: Cory Weaver / San Francisco Opera

San Francisco Opera will revive Francesca Zambello's production of Der Ring des Nibelungen (Richard Wagner) in 2028, and they've announced full casting this week, almost a year after the initial announcement. Pricing is also available; subscribers and anyone who has donated at least $150 can apply for Ring tickets starting on October 13.

If you're not sure whether Wagner is for you, you can always get a June, 2027, subscription ticket to Das Rheingold, the prologue and shortest of the Ring operas. There are also numerous excellent Ring productions available on DVD or streaming. 

Seeing the Ring, in several productions and with several conductors, has been among the greatest theatrical / operatic experiences of my life. I am very much looking forward to hearing SFO music director Eun Sun Kim conduct the Ring; her Wagner to date has been superb. If you can swing it, I encourage you to go. (And if you have any thoughts about the cast, I welcome comments!)

SUMMER 2028 OPERA SEASON: DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN

 

CYCLE 1: June 13 (7:30 p.m.); June 14 (6 p.m.); June 16 (6 p.m.); June 18 (1 p.m.)

CYCLE 2: June 20 (7:30 p.m.); June 21 (6 p.m.); June 23 (6 p.m.); June 25 (1 p.m.)

CYCLE 3: June 27 (7:30 p.m.); June 28 (6 p.m.); June 30 (6 p.m.); July 2 (1 p.m.)

All cycle performances are presented on Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday

 

Production:
Conductor	Eun Sun Kim
Director	Francesca Zambello
Set Designer	Michael Yeargan
Costume Designer	Catherine Zuber
Original Lighting Designer	Mark McCullough
Revival Lighting Designer	A.J. Guban
Original Projections	Jan Hartley
New Projections, Remounted by	S. Katy Tucker
Choreographer	Denni Sayers
Associate Director     (Das Rheingold, Siegried)	Denni Sayers
Associate Director     (Die Walküre, Götterdämmerung)	Christian Rath
Chorus Director	John Keene

 

Co-production with Washington National Opera

Sung in German with English supertitles

 

DAS RHEINGOLD by Richard Wagner

June 13 (7:30 p.m.), 20 (7:30 p.m.) and 27 (7:30 p.m.), 2028

 

Approximate running time:	2 hours, 35 minutes without intermission
World Premiere:	Munich; September 22, 1869
First SF Opera Performance:	November 1, 1935
Most Recent SF Opera Performance:	June 2018
Cast:
Wotan	Brian Mulligan
Loge	Brenton Ryan
Alberich	Falk Struckmann
Fricka	Judit Kutasi
Erda	Sadie Cheslak
Mime	Zhengyi Bai
Fasolt	Kwangchul Youn
Fafner	John Relyea
Froh	Christopher Sokolowski
Donner	Lauri Vasar
Woglinde	Sofia Gotch
Wellgunde	Laura Krumm
Flosshilde	Taylor Raven

 

San Francisco Opera Orchestra

 

 

DIE WALKÜRE by Richard Wagner

June 14 (6 p.m.), 21 (6 p.m.) and 28 (6 p.m.), 2028

 

Approximate running time:	4 hours, 30 minutes with two intermissions
World Premiere:	Munich; June 26, 1870
First SF Opera Performance:	November 4, 1935
Most Recent SF Opera Performance:	June 2018
Cast:
Brünnhilde	Tamara Wilson
Wotan	Brian Mulligan
Sieglinde	Julie Adams
Siegmund	Christopher Sokolowski
Fricka	Judit Kutasi
Hunding	Kwangchul Youn

 

San Francisco Opera Orchestra

 

 

SIEGFRIED by Richard Wagner

June 16 (6 p.m.), 23 (6 p.m.) and 30 (6 p.m.), 2028

 

Approximate running time:	5 hours with two intermissions
World Premiere:	Bayreuth; August 16, 1876
First SF Opera Performance:	November 6, 1935
Most Recent SF Opera Performance:	June 2018
Cast:
Siegfried	Simon O’Neill
Brünnhilde	Tamara Wilson
Mime	Zhengyi Bai
The Wanderer (Wotan)	Brian Mulligan
Alberich	Falk Struckmann
Fafner	John Relyea
Erda	Sadie Cheslak
Forest Bird	Sofia Gotch

 

San Francisco Opera Orchestra

 

 

GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG by Richard Wagner

June 18 (1 p.m.), 25 (1 p.m.) and July 2 (1 p.m.), 2028

 

Approximate running time:	5 hours, 15 minutes with two intermissions
World Premiere:	Bayreuth, August 17, 1876
First SF Opera Performance:	November 9, 1935
Most Recent SF Opera Performance:	June/July 2018
Cast:
Brünnhilde	Tamara Wilson
Siegfried	Simon O’Neill
Gunther	Lauri Vasar
Hagen	John Relyea
Waltraute	Annika Schlicht
Gutrune	Julie Adams
Alberich	Falk Struckmann
First Norn	Sadie Cheslak
Second Norn	Annika Schlicht
Third Norn	Mary Hoskins
Woglinde	Sofia Gotch
Wellgunde	Laura Krumm
Flosshilde	Taylor Raven

 

San Francisco Opera Orchestra and San Francisco Opera Chorus

  

Friday Photo

Cassoulet (duck in glass jar, pork in a tin can), jarred ratatouille, and jarred cardoons

Seen in a small grocery store

Aix-en-Provence

July, 2026

 

MTT and Joshua Robison's Home for Sale

2670 Pierce Street, San Francisco

Michael Tilson Thomas and Joshua Robison called the house in the photo above their home for 30 years. They're both gone now, MTT in April, of glioblastoma, and Robison in February, in his sleep, presumably of the effects of a fall some months previously.

Now it's on the market, for nearly $10 million. It has seven bedrooms, 4 full and three half baths, a gorgeous kitchen, and various reception rooms, all over about 7,000 square feet. Note that it was last sold in 1994, for $1.4 million. That certainly gives you a glimpse of what has happened in SF real estate.

It is a gorgeous house, and you'll see from the photos that it has been carefully staged. There's a crib in the photos but no sign of dogs. I'm guessing that it has also been repainted, as I would expect a certain amount of blue, MTT's favorite color on the walls somewhere in the house.

Big sigh. They're really gone, always to be missed.

 

For the 342nd Time...

If your organization has an info@ email address or a contact page with a form where people can ask questions or make comments, make sure somebody is monitoring the email address(s) to which such questions and comments go and make sure they're answered promptly.

Yes, I do have more than one organization in mind. No, I'm not going to disclose which ones. But either answer people's email or take down your contact information. Maybe people will write you printed letters instead. 

Museum Mondays

Saint Cecilia

St. Bartholomew Altarpiece, detail

Master of the Bartholomew Altarpiece

Alte Pinakothek, Munich

July, 2026

 

Mary, Queen of Scots at SF Opera

Heidi Stober as Mary

Mary, Queen of Scots, Thea Musgrave (1977)

Photo: Matthew Washburn, courtesy of San Francisco Opera

Thea Musgrave's 1977 opera Mary, Queen of Scots, opened on Thursday, Sept. 24, at San Francisco Opera. The first performance was supposed to be on the 20th, but it was delayed by the SF Opera Orchestra strike. Mary only lost one performance; Simon Boccanegra lost three, alas.

I raved about it in the SF Chronicle. I think the score is terrific, with great orchestration, and it's dramatically very effective. The performers are all brilliant, and the most brilliant of all is Heidi Stober's magnificently sung and acted Mary. Holy cow, what a singer she is. This was the second time I've raved about her this year, following the Seattle Daphne.

Go see it if you can! Several performances to go, including tonight's.

You can't read my feature about Thea Musgrave right now, because the SFCV website is down, but Hugh Morris covered some of the same ground in the NY Times. My article includes comments from Heidi Stober, Ashley Putnam (creator of the title role, who can be heard on the recording), and director Stewart Liang. Grateful thanks to all of them for chatting with me.

Round-up (more links to follow....):

• Lisa Hirsch, SF Chronicle (gift link) / SFCV
• Joshua Kosman, On a Pacific Aisle
• Charlise Tiee, Opera Tattler
• Michael Strickland, SF Civic Center
• Lisa Hirsch, SFCV, feature about Thea Musgrave and the opera; note that the website is down as I post this. I interviewed Thea and conductor Peter Mark, her husband, about her career and the opera. She was a total hoot to talk with!
• Lisa Hirsch, SF Chronicle, SFO preview of Mary and Simon
• Hugh Morris, NY Times feature (gift link)
• San Francisco Opera program for Mary, with many informative articles

Previously:

• Andrew Porter, The New Yorker
• Nicholas Kenyon, The New Yorker
• Harold C. Schonberg, NY Times
• Stephen Wadsworth interviews Ashley Putnam, NY Times

Friday Photo

Sidewalk

Bregenz, Austria

July, 2026

 

Museum Mondays

Wassily Kandinsky

Parties diverses, 1940

Lembach Haus, Munich, Germany

July, 2026

 

Friday Photo

Pickled vegetables in a grocery store

Salzburg, Austria

August, 2026

 

San Francisco Opera Orchestra Strike

War Memorial Opera House

Saturday, September 12, 2026

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

I took the photo above at 7:25 p.m. on Saturday, on my way to what was supposed to be opening night at San Francisco Opera. As I expect readers of this blog already know, it didn't take place.

Shortly after, I received a press release from the orchestra, time-stamped 7:29 p.m., announcing that they were on strike. At 7:52 p.m., Matthew Shilvock, general director of the company, appeared on stage to confirm that the orchestra was on strike and the evening's performance of Simon Boccanegra was cancelled.

Since then, the company has cancelled three more performances and the planned livestream, as follows:

Wednesday, Sept. 16 - Simon Boccanegra

Saturday, Sept. 19 - Simon Boccanegra and the livestream of the opera

Sunday, Sept. 20 - Mary, Queen of Scots

Negotiations are ongoing; there have been no announcements by either labor or management about them. We will hear when there is a settlement or when more performances are cancelled.

Management reportedly started negotiations by offering a 26% pay cut, which eventually became an offer of a 20% pay cut. At the moment, the offer is reportedly something that keeps pay "level" for five years, meaning, given inflation, it's effectively a pay cut.

Cutting people's pay in a period of significant inflation and worldwide energy crisis (owing to the wholly unnecessary U.S. war on Iran) is a policy likely to result in massive bad publicity, ongoing bitterness, and, when they can, the departure of orchestra members for better-paying jobs, for example, in full-time high-level U.S. orchestras, when such jobs are available. (These jobs are few and far between, and the auditions are hard to win because so many highly-skilled players try out for them. Still, the current condition of the horn and trombone sections of SF Symphony shows what can happen. A combination of retirements and departures for other orchestras has had quite an impact.)

I think that everyone should take a look at the finances of San Francisco Opera and what has changed in the last 45 or so years to understand what the company is dealing with. I want to emphasize that SFO is financially healthy at the moment, owing to a combination of factors. These include efforts by David Gockley, former general director, and Matthew Shilvock to increase the company's endowment, secure large one-time and ongoing donations, increase a declining subscription base, and spend money prudently.

The endowment is currently a healthy $300 million, the largest among American opera companies and larger than many or most of the big-budget U.S. symphony orchestras. For comparison – and this is exactly what you don't want to have happen – the Metropolitan Opera, the largest opera company in the country (and actually the biggest performing arts organization in terms of budget and number of performances), has seen its endowment spent down from $327 million four years ago to $188.3 million as of the most recent form 990, which I consulted yesterday to get these figures. 

That is a four-alarm fire of an emergency for the Met. Everyone in the opera world remembers that New York City Opera went under when its board spent the entire endowment trying to keep the company afloat. There's a book about it, Heidi Waleson's Mad Scenes and Exit Arias. Nobody wants to see SF Opera's future endangered.

All of that said, here are some numbers and some history for your consideration as you think about what SF Opera, a unionized company working at the highest levels, can do to stay financially healthy.

1966: SFO put on 19 productions and toured to Los Angeles and Sacramento. Seven operas were done under the rubric Spring Opera Theater and weren't in the opera house because SF Ballet was performing there. Twelve operas were on stage from around Sept. 22 to the end of November. I would ask you to consider the quality of all 19 productions; there were 2 to 4 performances of each opera and when you put on 12 in two months, how much rehearsal time do they get, anyway? They were mostly well-cast, but they can't quite be regarded as equivalent to what the company puts on now.

Here are some figures that David Gockley provided to Janos Gereben in 2014, for publication in San Francisco Classical Voice, about the past and anticipated future at San Francisco Opera; the last line was, of course, projected figures:

                             Operating budgets         Subscribers                  Ticket sales as a % of total budget

1980                     $11 million                      165,000                        58.7%

2015                     $75 million                        93,000                        32%

2022                     $92 million                        80,000 (hoped for)     29% (hoped for)

       

In 1980-81, SFO put on 21 operas plus a concert; in 2015-16, it put on 11 plus two concerts; in the current and last two seasons, 6 operas plus four concerts (Opera in the Park, Opera Orchestra Strauss concert, Chorus Concert, Pride Concert). The 1980-81 and 2015-26 seasons each included a double bill of two short operas.

                                                 
Two points: You can verify these figures from the company's IRS Form 990s. These are public and viewable at ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, though they don't go back to 1980. SFO's centennial season took place a year late, in 2023-24, owing to the pandemic and I think they spent about $93 million that year.

Currently, SFO says that ticket sales cover about 14% of the budget. The vast majority of the rest comes from fund-raising and draw from endowment.

I know that the orchestra and many audience members are saying that more performances are the answer, but given that ticket sales cover only 14% of the overall cost of putting on opera, for every performance added, you need to somehow secure the other 86% of the budget from other sources.

Here's another way to look at the cost of opera. Earlier in this century, SFO was putting on about 70-75 performances per season on an annual budget of $70-$75 million, so let's say that each performance cost roughly $1 million. Of course this includes things like the cost of heating or cooling the opera house, office supplies, salaries, payments to solo singers (they are not employees of SFO; they are freelance singers), the orchestra, the chorus, all other employees, health care, and on and on.

This season and last, the company will be putting on around 45-48 performances of six operas plus several concerts on an annual budget of nearly $90 million, or about $2 million per performances.

I believe that all employees at arts companies should be paid equitable wages that they can live on. The Bay Area is fantastically expensive to start with. Opera is expensive to put on, since it involves, for a typical production, an orchestra ranging in size from 40 to 108 (hello, Elektra! SFO produced it in June with only 95 in the pit, or close to that), a chorus of up to 100 (hello, Les Troyens!), a conductor, numerous people in the wig, costume, and makeup areas, stagehands, lighting people, the video staff, and on and on, with the administrative apparatus to support everything that's on stage.

Where should the money come from? Members of the current generation of Really Rich People – the billionaires – are remarkably uninterested in the arts. That is too bad, because when you have $300 billion at your disposal, writing.a check for, say, $50 million/year is pretty easy! But so far they're not really stepping up to the plate, with a few, very few, exceptions.

It is true that SFO has had some success here. Dr. and Mrs. William Coughran are donors at a level that means they're contributing at least $1 million/year (Bill Coughran was a Google VP). Jensen and Lori Huang – he's the billionaire CEO of Nvidia – have recently committed to several years of donating $5 million annually. Yes, that isn't much out of their wealth, but it's a very helpful percent of SFO's annual budget.

The U.S. government provides some smallish grants to particular projects, but unlike in Germany, there's little direct support for the ongoing operations of arts companies (and of course no indirect support like universal health care). And as we've learned, the federal government isn't dependable; the current administration might be on the verge of taking a literal wrecking ball to the Kennedy Center after wrecking its programming.

So, again: where's the money coming from for this fabulous and expensive art form?

21V Seeks New Artistic Director

21V, the innovative Bay Area chorus of adult treble (soprano and alto) voices of any gender, is looking for a new artistic director,  because founding artistic director and conductor Martin Benvenuto is moving back to his native Argentina. Here's the beginning of the job announcement:

About 21V 

Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, 21V is an innovative select ensemble of soprano and alto voices of all gender identities dedicated to telling the stories of the 21st-century Americas. Founded by Dr. Martín Benvenuto, 21V is a catalyst for change through a new choral sound, committing to bold, contemporary repertoire and reimagining traditional performance models. Our work intentionally centers composers and voices from across the Americas, with a particular focus on those historically underrepresented in classical music. 

21V’s vision is to be a "house of ideas" that opens up unexplored spaces of artistic expression, and a "house of belonging" that expands interconnectedness. For more information, please visit www.21vchoir.org 

Position Summary 

The Artistic Director serves as the chief artistic leader of 21V, responsible for shaping and advancing the ensemble’s vision, programming, and broader cultural impact. This position reports directly to the Board of Directors. The role is part-time and project-based, with 21V generally presenting two artistic projects each year – one in the fall and one in the spring. Each project typically includes approximately five weeks of rehearsals and generally culminates in two performances. The schedule varies seasonally, with a greater time commitment during active rehearsal and performance cycles, including evenings and weekends. The Artistic Director works in person for rehearsals, performances, and select meetings in the Bay Area, while completing remaining administrative work and meetings remotely. 

Read all about it on the 21V website.