Although I Loathe Opera : VERDI AT THE GOLDEN GATE: Opera and San Francisco in the Gold Rush Years, <i> By George Martin (University of California Press: $30; 343 pp.)</i>

Talk about a case of mistaken identity! When the book review editor called to ask me if I would be interested in reviewing a book titled “Verdi at the Golden Gate” for the Times, I said I would. But then our conversation took a curious turn: She asked, “How do you feel about opera?”

“I loathe opera,” I said enthusiastically.

Maybe too enthusiastically, it appears, because she concluded our conversation, “Great. I’ll send the book out to you tomorrow.” All I can figure out is that she thought I said, “I love opera.” Well, I don’t. I was right in the first place. I put opera pretty much in the same category of caterwauling as Billy Ray Cyrus and Achy Breaky Heart. I once worked for the government in a minor diplomatic role, representing a federal agency during a brief visit in Germany. The Germans made the mistake of considering me cultured and treated me to three straight weeks of opera.

I would rather have listened to three weeks of bad transmissions and breaking glass. Who was it who said that drunkenness and grand opera are sins that carry their punishment with them? In the third week of my Teutonic and operatic ordeal, I fled from an opera house at the intermission and joined our drivers, who were drinking huge mugs of beer and singing regional folk songs in a seamen’s bar. They saved my life. One more aria and I would have contracted a terminal case of the fantods.

Nonetheless I read George Martin’s book, “Verdi at the Golden Gate,” an examination of high opera and high culture in San Francisco during the second half of the 19th Century, very carefully. And I enjoyed it. It is, after all, not just a book about opera, but about opera on the frontier. I know little about opera, and what I do know I don’t like, but I know a lot about the frontier, and there is little about it that isn’t fascinating.

In fact, my operatic agony in Germany, far frgives me, I believe, a special insight. I am preenthusiasts for the opera had to deal. After allopera and actually stay awake are likely to beli16686398601970282605performances, reviews of individual performers, brief histories of opera houses, evaluation of Gold Rush opera in national and international contexts--the sort of data I suppose is of interest to opera enthusiasts--George Martin has generously spiced his serious study with the riot and ribaldry of the frontier--the sort of material that amuses and instructs cultural historians (and general readers) like me.

As I read of serious artists struggling to perform on stages where melted wax and broken glass fell on them from chandeliers above, where members of the audience might actually be shooting at each other, I actually began to wish these hardy pioneer performers good fortune. When Martin tells of the indignation of proper ladies when common hookers began to show up in opera audiences, I found myself curiously torn between understanding the wish of the mothers and wives to find some fragment of civility within the stench and much of the frontier and the wish of the fancy ladies to share the dignity of the mothers and wives. As a writer who speaks to scholarly and popular audiences, I felt compassion for the singers who sang what they had to to survive, slipping in, whenever they could, higher standards of performance and program in order to be true to their art.

Martin perhaps makes too much of the common man’s urges to better himself by listening to noises of distress writ on paper, but he has a right to that: he likes opera (and has written several other books on the subject). He wants to see increasing gates and attendance figures as the century progressed as indicators of cultural growth, when the fact of the matter is, life on the western frontier was so monotonous that, if you had announced it in the newspapers, most of the city would have shown up just to watch a mule loaded with scrap iron. If you had labeled the event cultural, attendance would have doubled. Martin tells us opera performances were sometimes discontinued upon notification that a ship with news had arrived in port because it was understood that the audience was going to spring to its feet and dash out into the streets anyway.

And it is precisely that conflict between elitism and frontier realities that constitutes the drama and humor of this book. Fops, dandies, snobs, hookers, thieves and politicians attend opera yet today to lend some patina of respectability to their tarnish, but the thing is, fops, dandies, snobs, hookers, thieves and politicians are so pedestrian and boring these days that no one pays much attention.

Not in 19th-Century San Francisco. The folks George Martin writes about may have included fops, dandies, snobs, hookers, thieves and politicians, but they were definitely not pedestrian and boring!

Tom Maguire, however, increasingly was recognized as the city’s most important impresario, and it became his habit to conduct his business in the street, splendidly dressed and standing usually before his opera house or in the main plaza, Portsmouth Square. One day, in the street before the opera house, he was approached by Mrs. Crabtree, the mother of Lotta M. Crabtree, who was on the threshold of becoming the country’s most famous and enduring child star, singing and dancing her way into everyone’s heart for the next 40 years. Mrs. Crabtree suggested an engagement for Lotta at Maguire’s prestigious house, which he refused, supposedly with a harsh comment on Lotta’s talents. The child’s doting father thereupon pulled out his revolver, fired and grazed Maguire’s arm. Maguire turned and strolled off.

Martin is desperately parochial in his insistence that San Francisco offers a unique example; every burg west of the Mississippi likes to think it offers a unique example. Every village in Nebraska had its opera house, and its characters, and its conflicts, and its artists and frauds and phonies. The only difference between San Francisco and Wood River, Neb., is that San Francisco is big and had a gold rush.

If you love the opera, I think you might find “Verdi at the Golden Gate” interesting and useful. Even if you don’t like opera, if you love San Francisco, you are sure to find this book a remarkable insight into the history and personality of the city.

But I still loathe opera.