Terence A. McEwen; Former San Francisco Opera Chief

Terence A. McEwen, for six years the general director of the San Francisco Opera, has died at his home in Honolulu. He was 69.

McEwen, who resigned the post in 1988 citing chronic diabetes, died Sept. 14 of a heart attack. He suffered a stroke a few years ago.

Devoted to opera, McEwen spent much of his career in the classical music recording business. A native of Canada, he joined Decca records in London in 1950 and moved to New York in 1959 to manage Decca’s London records classical division. He rose to vice president in 1973 and executive vice president in 1978.

Four years later, he moved to San Francisco as only the third general director of the then 60-year-old opera company. Unlike founder Gaetano Merola and second General Director Kurt Herbert Adler, McEwen was not a conductor. So in 1985, he hired the San Francisco Opera’s first music director, Sir John Pritchard of the BBC Symphony.

During his tenure, McEwen earned pans and praise from opera buffs and critics, including The Times’ former music critic Martin Bernheimer.

“Just when we thought it was safe to close our eyes at Terence McEwen’s San Francisco Opera, along comes ‘Salome.’ There may be hope,” Bernheimer wrote a few months after McEwen’s arrival in 1982. “Until Friday night, the new general director had led us to fear that he was little more than a supercanary-fancier. He collected voices, occasionally spectacular and sometimes promising voices, and displayed them either in eclectic hand-me-down productions from nearby warehouses or in glamorous decors recycled from afar. The music seemed to be the thing for McEwen; the drama was incidental.”

This “Salome,” however, the critic concluded, “happens to be a prime example of daring yet coherent modern musical theater.”

McEwen attracted by far the most international notice when he staged Richard Wagner’s four-opera, 17-hour “Der Ring des Nibelungen.” San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House had hosted the entire extravaganza in 1935 and 1972 and parts of it several other times.

“Contrary to popular local myth, Terence McEwen, the beleaguered general director of the San Francisco Opera, did not invent Richard Wagner. He certainly did not give Baghdad by the Bay its first ‘Ring’ cycle. But this month he did give the city its first bona fide ‘Ring’ festival, and its first chronic case of mass ‘Ring’ hysteria,” Bernheimer wrote in 1985.

The critic praised McEwen for raising the city’s consciousness with Wagnerian exhibitions, lectures, seminars, panels, movies, chamber music and both waterfront and park concerts. McEwen’s efforts were credited with making the opera a media event, prompting restaurants to give food Wagnerian names and prodding then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein to proclaim “Ring” Month.

McEwen’s successor, Lotfi Mansouri, said a revival of the “Ring” cycle next year will be dedicated to McEwen.

In addition to his work with Decca and the San Francisco Opera, McEwen was well-known for his commentary as a panelist on the “Texaco Opera Quiz” segment of New York’s Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts.

Born in the Ontario town of Thunder Bay and raised in Montreal, McEwen was educated at George Williams College in that Quebec city.

He is survived by five siblings.