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?