On 13 December 1981, some 3,000 people rose to their feet in the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House. They shouted bravos for Kurt Herbert Adler, who had just put down the baton at the season-closing Carmen. This was the end of his 28-year reign over the house (though he was to return to conduct there even at age 80, but only as a "guest").
The ovation went on for a quarter hour. This was a watershed event in the history of the opera company "made" by Adler, but he did not smile, and his eyes were dry. Grim-faced, he took stiff-backed bow after bow. The audience he faced stormed with conflicting, intense emotions. Among those standing, applauding and crying for the end of an era, were scores, perhaps hundreds, of former employees he had hectored, put down, shouted at, and fired (some repeatedly). Their hearts went out to the man whose charm, almost always expressed for a purpose, they rarely experienced. But they were applauding and dabbing their eyes because they were mourning a long, important portion of their own lives.
The legendary, feared and admired boss of the San Francisco Opera was not a "beloved figure," but he towered in the life of the city and in the world of opera as an important, unforgettable character to anybody whose path crossed his.
Not only did he push and support hundreds, perhaps thousands, of careers, but he also had an impact without really trying. Reri Grist will never forget her first meeting with Herr Generaldirektor: When the singer (another minority artist finding a home in the House Adler Built) arrived in San Francisco in 1963, Adler said hello by way of telling her not to bother him, just to see his assistant, Ulf Thomson.
Indignantly, Grist went off in the indicated direction, found "a big, empty office with this very attractive man sitting at a desk," and soon enough, they were married. Adler didn't play unwitting Cupid all the time, but everybody remembers meeting him the first time - and just about every time after that. Though I had stared down Soviet diplomats at United Nations press conferences, when I sat across his desk at our first interview, Adler made me feel terribly self-conscious and uncomfortable without really trying.
Adler kept an eye on everybody, on every detail, even while he personally lorded over thousands of performances of 117 different productions, including two world premieres and 12 American premieres of 20th century works. As he moved around in the house, ceaselessly, no detail escaped his attention.
When Laurie Feldman directed the SFO's 1990 Ring (at a record-breaking young age of 31), she recalled Adler's stern warning to her when she joined the company as a teenager "never to chew gum at rehearsals." She never did.
Running an opera company by committee is not a ready option, but in Adler's case no one ever thought of that possibility. Many years before "hands-on management" first came into the language, Adler already defined it.
His greatest single accomplishment was to attract a stunning galaxy of European stars, some at the beginning of their careers, to a small city at the other end of the world, often at significantly lower salaries than New York or Chicago would offer. Through personal contacts, an iron will, an uncanny ability and ruthless cunning, Adler launched the American careers of (in chronological order):
Giulietta Simionato, Cesare Valetti, Inge Borkh, Ludwig Suthaus, Georg Solti (in a 1953 "Elektra"), Gertrude Grob-Prandl, Mado Robin, Richard Lewis, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Oliviero de Fabritiis, Leonie Rysanek, Boris Christoff, Leyla Gencer, Birgit Nilsson, Francesco Molinari-Pradelli, Gianni Raimondi, Rita Streich, Giuseppe Taddei, Rolando Panerai, Jean Fournet, Leopold Ludwig, Giuseppe Zampieri, Silvio Varviso, Sena Jurinac, Gabriella Tucci, Geraint Evans, Sandor Konya, Ingrid Bjoner, Graziella Sciutti, Fritz Uhl, Janos Ferencsik, Raina Kabaivanska, Pilar Lorengar, Ferdinand Leitner, Hildegard Hillebrecht, Franco Tagliavini, Marie Collier, Robert Ilosfalvy, Horst Stein, Claire Watson, Federico Davia, Stuart Burrows, Mario Bernardi, Margarita Lilova, Ingwar Wixell, Anja Silja, Teresa Zylis-Gara, Otmar Suitner, Liljana Molnar-Talajic, Margaret Price, Henri Guy, Bohumil Gregor, Brigitte Fassbaender, Rolf Bjoerling, Ryland Davies, Manfred Jungwirth, Teresa Kubiak, Marius Rintzler, Marita Napier, Jesus Lopez-Cobos, Izabella Nawe, Alberto Remedios, Roger Soyer, Eva Randova, Anna Tomowa-Sintow, Goesta Winbergh, Dieter Weller, Juan Lloveras, Eric Tappy, Mstislav Rostropovich, Josella Ligi, Claes Ahnsjö, Kolos Kovats, Matti Kastu, Dale Duesing, Hanna Schwarz, Franz-Ferdinand Nentwig, Jozsef Dene, Richard Bradshaw, Maria Parazzini, Nunzio Todisco, David Atherton, Spas Wenkoff, Guenther Wich, Stefania Toczyska, Robert Lloyd, Evgeny Nesterenko, Anny Schlemm, Christof Perick, Valerie Masterson, Gerd Albrecht, Adam Fischer, ... and scores of others.
You'd think that this list is sufficient for the glory of a dozen impresarios, but Adler has gone far beyond that, with his discovery and nurturing of young American talent as well.
He gave Leontyne Price her debut role (in "Dialogues of the Carmelites") before black artists were accepted in other opera houses, though Mattiwilda Dobbs had appeared with the company in 1955. Under Adler, San Francisco opened careers for a variety of artists from dancer Cynthia Gregory to director-designer Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, who became Adler's major and often glorious production overseer. Adler brought Dorothy McGuire, Lee Marvin, Walter Slezak and Hermione Gingold into the Opera House.
Perhaps most importantly for the future, Adler started the Merola training program, educational and outreach programs (before the name was invented) and "opera in the park." He introduced Spring and Summer opera with varying success, and somehow managed to deal with the craft unions, something that didn't come naturally to the imperial director from upper-middle-class Vienna.
Music critic Paul Moor remembers that during the 32 years he worked in Europe before moving to San Francisco in 1982, "my contacts with singers engaged by Adler had made me think of his company - for overall quality - as the finest in the USA, with no serious competition.
"His record for U.S. premieres of really important, even major contemporary operas made every other company's look sick. He also had a brilliant record for recognizing and signing major new singers before anybody else in the USA."
The Los Angeles Times' music critic during the Adler years, Martin Bernheimer, remembers the times when he visited San Francisco season after season:
"Kurt Herbert Adler was, I am told, tough and cantankerous, even egocentric and nasty. He certainly didn't suffer fools, gladly or otherwise. He had no reason to love critics in general, this critic in particular. But, unlike some of his impresario-colleagues on the West Coast, he was inevitably thoughtful, kind and courteous on the occasions when our paths would cross.
"Some of his productions were musically uneven (costly established stars cast opposite inexpensive would-be's), and some looked bargain-basement shoddy. Nevertheless, he maintained generally lofty standards against the odds. He had a knack for recognizing talent early, a vast knowledge of the repertory, a useful sense of adventure and a keen understanding of interpretive styles," Bernheimer says.
"A stubborn supporter of rapidly diminishing ensemble values, Adler served as a company director of the fine old school. He is remembered, fondly, as an unabashed autocrat, a hopeless workaholic, something of an artistic visionary, and, yes, a very good second-rate conductor."
Born in Vienna in 1905, Adler was not yet 20 when he went to work for Max Reinhardt. By 23, Adler had his first job in the opera, working his way up to chorus master in Kaiserslautern. He conducted in Italy and in Vienna's Volksoper before joining the similarly young Erich Leinsdorf and Georg Solti as Arturo Toscanini's assistants at the Salzburg Festival.
Then, just as German troops started marching into neighboring countries, Adler left for America to spend 1938 through 1943 with the Chicago Opera. At Gaetano Merola's invitation, Adler then came to San Francisco as director of the Opera Chorus. When Merola died (on the podium) in 1953, Adler took over, and ran the company through 1981.
He never accepted the idea of retirement. When his successor, Terence McEwen, announced in 1988 that he was stepping down because of illness, Adler's reaction was that he could fill in and run the company, at least on a temporary basis.
He died on 9 February 1988, just one day after volunteering to return to work. Among the mourners of the ever-robust 82-year-old were Sabrina and Roman, two children born to Kurt Herbert and Nancy Adler when he was in his seventies.
Janos Gereben