Page:California a guide to the Golden state-WPA-1939.djvu/209

THE ARTS 153 mosphere, the Tivoli did more perhaps to popularize opera than almost any other American theater. Its contemporary, the Grand Opera House, was built in 1876 as "a new and elegant temple of the drama" seating over 3,000, with a handsome proscenium and mezzanine boxes. Here a long line of famous singers appeared in an operatic career culminating in a brilliant performance of Carmen with Sembrich and Fremstad, Scotti and Caruso, on the night before that memorable date in the history of San Francisco, April 18, 1906. Among the singers who began their careers in California were Emma Nevada, Luisa Tetrazzini, and Lawrence Tibbett.

Opera is still popular in California—kept alive by the San Francisco Opera Association under the direction of Gaetano Merola—though the season lasts only a few weeks. Here the Nation's only municipal opera house, completed in 1932, offers a standard operatic repertoire. The Federal Music Project, established in 1935, has presented such classics as Hansel and Gretel, Faust, Aida, and Lohengrin in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Diego, and San Francisco. Operas, operettas and musical satires by modern composers, some of whom are connected with the project, have also been given.

Because of the mildness of the seasons, al fresco music has become an integral part of California culture. In the Hollywood Bowl, audiences of 25,000 people listen to a six-weeks' summer series of symphonies under the stars. Its establishment in 1921 was chiefly due to the efforts of Artie Mason Carter, unpaid enthusiast who built the Bowl on the nickels of the people when the rich failed to grasp the significance of her vision. Audiences are never lacking at the Woodland Theater in Hillsborough, the Dominican College performances at San Rafael, the Greek Theater in Berkeley, and the Ford Bowl in San Diego.

San Francisco, which heard its first symphony concert in 1865, now subsidizes its symphony orchestra. The Los Angeles Philharmonic, founded in 1919, has become an outstanding orchestra thanks to the generosity of the late W. A. Clark. To the development of California's metropolitan symphony orchestras, conductors Walter Henry Rothwell, Alfred Hertz, Issay Dobrowen, Artur Rodzinski, Pierre Monteux, and Otto Klemperer, among others, have contributed much. In Stockton, San Jose, Sacramento, Santa Rosa, San Bernardino, and Pasadena, smaller orchestras perform symphony music.

Since pioneer days, there have been choral societies in California cities and towns. The choir of Trinity Church in San Francisco sang most of the standard oratorios over a period of many years, but there was no large municipal chorus in San Francisco until the coming of Dr. Hans Leschke, whose success with the choral works of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Handel, and Stravinski has amply justified his labors. Through the annual November Bach festival, inaugurated by Director John