50 years of the San Francisco opera

This is a book written by a man who served as the music critic of the San Francisco Call-Bulletin, and after that raffish rag folded, for the old Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner. I clearly remember reading his newspaper review columns when I lived in San Francisco. Bloomfield has performed a useful service here by digging out ancient programs, sifting through fading memories and putting them in print. The book bursts with items of this sort: --The War Memorial Opera House opened on October 15, 1932. Claudia Muzio starred as Tosca. --Lili Pons and /Francesco Merli sang at the second performance on October 17 in "Lucia di Lammermoor." --Merli was unwell, sang poorly, cancelled his contract and never again appeared with the San Francisco opera. In so far as I remember those things that I myself experienced or can conveniently check against other sources, Bloomfield was an admirable drudge. The book's primary organizing factor is chronology. One tends to read it on a year-by-year basis. In addition to the factual statements, alas, Bloomfield also offers critical judgements, as here in his comments about the "Faust" production of 1970: "The only real dramatic dud of the season was the Faust, [which caught brilliant director Allen] Fletcher in an irreconcilable conflict between his wish to explore dramatic implications of the score ... and his realistic assessment of the opera as polite middlebrow entertainment. The result, with a cast including some considerably less-than-ideal actors, Alain Vanzo (Faust) and Roger Soyer (Mephistopheles) was disheartening." Now, it so happens that I saw this very "Faust" that year. Bloomfield's remarks are of such asinine fatuousness that they might almost have come from a Bush White House press release on the Iraq War. First, that "brilliant" director's work was so old-fashioned that Caruso and Scotti might have felt right at home. Second, to blow off Vanzo and Soyer as "less-than-competent actors"--actors, mind you, not even singers!--is proof that the man had an ear of purest tin. I entered the War Memorial Opera House one night in 1970 knowing no more about Vanzo than that he'd had some success with the Paris Opera. I left the place convinced then, as I still am, that never in my lifetime would I hear a better tenor in the role of Faust. As I remember it, a couple of thousand people in the Opera House heartily agreed with me. Only Bloomfield didn't get it. He never got it. It was because the self-important, tin-eared, carping hacks on the daily fishwrappers that I passed through the 1950s and 60s blissfully unaware that I was experiencing the post-War Silver Age of operatic singing. These carrion crows cawed so continuously and insistently found such fault in truly great performers that I and many like me regarded them as no more than routinely competent. In 1962, for example, Bloomfield airily dismissed Mario Del Monaco, on the one hand, as a B-movie actor, even as on t