European flair, U.S. accent

On Tuesday nights, San Francisco’s opera patrons dress. Anything else goes in this proudly permissive city, but society stays high. So, on a recent Tuesday afternoon, Pamela Rosenberg, who became general director of the San Francisco Opera last year, isn’t quite sure how the evening audience will respond to the opening of a new production of Handel’s “Alcina.”

“They’re the toughest crowd, the biggest sponsors,” she says in her airy office. What she doesn’t say is that they are a bastion of tradition, and what she has in store for them is Baroque opera performed with singers they probably haven’t heard of and staged with provocative, idea-intensive, gender-bending direction. And a touch of nudity. The production was developed at the Stuttgart Opera in Germany in the 1990s, while Rosenberg was its head. It was a hit; it toured, it was broadcast on European television, and it has been issued in America on an Arthaus Musik DVD.

A couple of men in black tie do walk out that night, and there are a few more empty seats after intermission than before. When the German production team takes a bow, it meets with a lonely boo or two. But nearly everyone else is on their feet in a standing ovation. It is possible that many in the audience have never seen opera as dramatically committed as this, for the simple reason that the San Francisco Opera has never before presented such opera. For that matter, most of the United States doesn’t see opera like this either.

With the first new productions of Rosenberg’s reign this fall -- the American premiere of Messiaen’s “St. Francois d’Assise,” which received nearly universal raves, and Janacek’s “Kat’a Kabanova,” which featured an unforgettable performance in the title role by Karita Mattila -- as well as with “Alcina,” it feels as if this 89-year-old company has been startled awake from a decades-long slumber. And much to Rosenberg’s surprise, even conspicuously conservative audiences, like the Tuesday night gown-and-tux crew, have gotten with the program.

“I expected that it would take three or four years to gain the audience’s trust,” she admits. “But it’s as if they were waiting for this all along.”

A surprising choice for S.F.

Three years ago, the announcement of Rosenberg’s appointment to head the second-largest opera company in North America came as a complete surprise to the opera world. The company’s recent reputation had been as a showcase for star singers and little else. Under its previous general director, the attention-loving and often frivolous stage director Lotfi Mansouri, the company showed little imagination and occasionally distressing vulgarity.

Friendly, unassuming and so uninterested in the spotlight that it is no easy matter to get her in front of a camera, Rosenberg was born in Los Angeles in 1945 and attended UC Berkeley. But for 35 years she made her career in Europe, where she married German modernist composer and writer Wolf Rosenberg (who died in 1996) and held various positions at opera companies in Frankfurt and Amsterdam before becoming head of the Stuttgart Opera in 1990. An advocate of director’s opera and a champion of young singers, she turned Stuttgart into a center of operatic innovation and one of Germany’s most celebrated companies.

“I quite frankly had no intention or ambition to come to the States,” she said last year, shortly after she had taken over the company. “I didn’t want to spend 80% of my time fund-raising. I knew that opera in America is very, very, very conservative. And I didn’t want to spend too much time away from my grandkids. But San Francisco just kept pestering me to at least talk. Maybe it was my vanity, but I began to think that I would like to make a dent in the American opera scene and get it to a place where most of the rest of the world is. I thought actually being a Californian, maybe it was meant to be.”

At the beginning of 2001, eight months before she began her tenure in San Francisco, Rosenberg announced a five-year plan that was bursting with ideas. She proposed seven themes that would be interwoven through the five seasons, among them a look at seminal modern works, a survey of Berlioz and Janacek operas and a set of operas based on the “Faust” story.

Heroines such Turandot, Alcina, Madame Butterfly and Salome, she categorized as “Women Outside of Society: Laws Unto Themselves.” Under the heading “The Nature of the Human Condition,” she would consider whether Billy Budd and Macbeth should be deemed “outsiders or pioneers.” Themes sometimes even overlapped -- Janacek’s “Kat’a Kabanova” fell under both the “Women Outside of Society” “Composer Portrait” rubrics.

All this context provides an operagoer with a lot to think about, and it doesn’t stop there. As a tie-in with “St. Francois,” this fall she collaborated with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to present a multimedia introduction to Messiaen with the help of electronic music composer Morton Subotnick and John Zorn, a postmodern composer and improviser. At UC Berkeley she sponsored a free symposium that made Messiaen scholarship comprehensible to the average operagoer. The program books handed out at performances go far beyond the usual American product, with far-reaching interpretations of each opera’s music, words and dramatic meaning.

But it is the process of opera -- the front-end creative development, the rehearsals, every twist and turn of the staging -- that Rosenberg loves the most. She is an active participant of every rehearsal. She has hired a dramaturge, the only one currently employed at an American company, bringing Wolfgang Willaschek from Germany to work with directors. And her evangelical zeal, her advocacy of productions in which every small detail means something, has paid off.

“There had been a certain amount of nervousness around when I announced I was doing ‘St. Francois,’ ” she says. “I really didn’t know whether people would even want to come to see it all.” But she went all-out for this five-hour, nearly static religious spectacle, and it so transfixed audiences that it wound up selling the biggest percentage of tickets so far in a season that has also included such standby favorites as “Turandot” and “Otello” -- the last three performances were sold out with lines around the block at the box office.

All of this, Rosenberg says, shows that if something is important, it will speak for itself, and that is what it’s all about: “We’re doing art for a reason, and I think any time that it stimulates people, stretches them, makes them question, thrills them, that’s the function we have. If not, then don’t do it.”

Running a deficit

The success of “St. Francois,” however, did little to help the company skirt the hard times that have affected most performing arts organizations these days. Shortly after the raves ran in newspapers across the country, she announced that San Francisco Opera had a $7.7-million deficit.

It is the result of a combination of factors, she explains. Box office fell off precipitously last year after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The dot-com bust, which has been pronounced in San Francisco, is more bad luck, arriving just as Rosenberg hoped to lure its hippest denizens into the opera house with her cutting-edge stagings. The general economic slowdown has prevented some donors from fulfilling their pledges and has made others jittery about investing in anything right now.

Next season, she will save $2 million by canceling Achim Freyer’s Stuttgart production of Weber’s “Der Freischutz,” and by replacing a Paris production of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Le Coq d’Or” with San Francisco’s own production of “The Magic Flute.” More changes over the next four seasons, which are already planned, are likely, because it will take several years to whittle down the debt.

“Putting a season together is complex, and deconstructing one is even more complex,” she cautions. “And without an absolutely clear vision, you can end up throwing the baby out with the bath water.”

The core thematic programming stays, and she has just signed a contract for a major commission intended for the fall of 2005. Although word has long been leaked that it will be a new opera by composer John Adams, poet Alice Goodman and director Peter Sellars, the team that created “Nixon in China” and “The Death of Klinghoffer,” she won’t release any details until she has her co-commissioners in place.

The fiscal crisis has made Rosenberg all the more adamant that the only thing that matters is doing good work. “I don’t think people are going to open their wallets for something that’s mediocre,” she says. “Maybe we will have to do a bit less, but there will be no compromise in the quality of the programming or the quality of the productions.”

There is one more place where Rosenberg says she will not cut back: the San Francisco Opera’s training program for young singers. So far, she has added to what was already something of a model program, spending the money necessary to increase the rehearsal period for the program’s annual production from three weeks to seven, so that the singers can get much deeper into the process of putting opera on stage.

Typically hands on, even with the students, Rosenberg emphasizes that her goal is to open opera to the wider world and vice versa. “Last season, we put on Mozart’s early opera ‘La Finta Giardiniera,’ in a production directed by Roy Rallo, with a set by Marcia Ginsberg, who have done things for Long Beach Opera,” she recalls. “On our first day, before the rehearsals got going, Roy told them about the concept and said it sort of has the atmosphere of a Nan Goldin room. And I said, ‘Let’s stop right there. Who of you don’t know who Nan Goldin is?’ ”

Every hand went up -- the singers were clueless about the New York photographer. Rosenberg went into action.

“I said, ‘You really don’t know who she is? She’s exhibited all over the world! She’s an icon! She’s living! You can react to her work however you want, but you have to know that it is there. In your field, in this field, you cannot have blinkers on. You have to know what is going on in contemporary art, in the visual as well as the aural arts.’ ”

Rosenberg drops her voice to a slightly conspiratorial laugh.

“Lo and behold,” she says with delight, “after the performance, one of the sopranos came to me and said, ‘Ask me anything you want about Nan Goldin.’ ”

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Mark Swed is The Times’ music critic.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Brave new opera

Times music critic Mark Swed weighs in on three innovative productions at San Francisco Opera, now under the guidance of general director Pamela Rosenberg:

“Saint Francois d’Assise”

Olivier Messiaen

“Messiaen wrote his opera as a series of scenes in the progress of Francis’ spiritual enlightenment. Francis overcomes fear by kissing a leper, is transformed by meeting an angel, becomes one with nature penetrating the Babel of bird song ..., finds ultimate joy in agony as he receives the stigmata and moves on to higher realms at his death, which set the very War Memorial Opera House vibrating along with the tolling of otherworldly bells.” (review, Sept. 30)

“Kat’a Kabanova”

Leos Janacek

“Fears persist that [Rosenberg] will alienate the city’s traditional opera supporters, who think of the War Memorial Opera House as a venue for star singers and a playground for high society rather than a home for vital theater.... She has brought in a fashionable German production team ... to give the drama’s sexuality a postmodern edge. Still, San Francisco’s avid canary fanciers need not worry. What really sets apart this “Kat’a” is singing.” (review, Nov. 5)

“Alcina”

George Frideric Handel

Jossi Wieler’s Stuttgart staging is a study in attitude and little (see-through) black dresses. In Alcina’s enchanted realm, now an irrational dream world of free-flowing sex and creativity, Handel’s characters purge themselves of their inner desires. And with Catherine Nagelstadt, a former Los Angeles Opera chorister, leading an exceptional cast of singing actors, this production turns Baroque opera into startling modern psychological theater.