Robert P. Commanday, Editor

Now that the latest classical music radio crisis has been narrowly averted with the decision that the Metropolitan Opera Broadcasts will be carried over KBZS-AM (1220), a finance and business news station in Palo Alto, where does that leave us? Met-wise, with a lower fidelity signal that will annoy at least those who tape the operas off the air if it is good enough to satisfy the regular listeners' regular ears. It leaves a large, loyal and devoted part of the listening audience still being jerked around by commercial interests, station managements and boards--the industry.

The Metropolitan Opera's refusal to allow west coast stations to broadcast other than live, that is at a later hour through tape delay, seems haughty, but that's historically consistent. The Met has never been anything else. We must still recognize that for longer than we can remember, most Americans heard their first opera over these broadcasts.

Scratch any American opera singer, or for that matter any American opera lover, and there's a 95% chance you'll find that he or she was first drawn to opera through the Met broadcasts. You don't imagine, for instance, that Samuel Ramey, a Montana native, heard his first opera in the Bozeman Opera House! There are a great many opera singers, past and present, who grew up in rural surroundings, found that they had voices in church or school choirs and then discovered opera over the radio. I suspect that even many in the Bay Area opera audience, among the world's most active, trace their interest back to those broadcasts. When the Met broadcasts begin on the first Saturday in December, coincident with the close of the San Francisco Opera's main season, a good percentage of our opera audience tune in and stay with opera that way. The effect on the San Francisco Opera's audience development is incalculable.

So what ever happened to the SF Opera broadcasts? The last one was in 1995, of Dvorak's Rusalka, the final performance of that season, broadcast live. Before that, in 1992, four operas were broadcast locally over the late KKHI-FM and in Seattle, Los Angeles, Monterey and Denver. Continuing backwards in time, in 1987, 10 operas in taped re-runs from the 1983-86 seasons were played over KKHI and the WFMT network. From 1977 to 1982, the entire seasons were broadcast, carried live locally over KKHI, then given delayed re-broadcasts over NPR stations nationwide. That last stretch had a great audience and response, the SF Opera making a big impression nationally. Those were the days. The history goes back much further, back to the 1932 broadcast of the first act Tosca that inaugurated the Opera House. From then until full season broadcasts began in 1977, the San Francisco Opera was a frequent though not a steady presence on the air.

High costs keep the San Francisco Opera off the air today. The company faces the high broadcast pay for all employees who belong to the many unions with which it has contracts. That, we are told, is prohibitive. If there are corporations which might be interested and in a position to sponsor one or more broadcasts, none are stepping to the plate. It's just as possible that it is company development policy not to push for radio sponsorship but rather solicit those corporations for contributions to the general operating fund or other preferred items. Considering the great and obvious benefits of broadcasting, it would seem in the company's interest to budget for at least one broadcast a season, sacrificing one new production if necessary, to make that financially possible.

In the 1997-98 budget, the item for marketing came to $3,658,000, 7% of the total $50,905,000 budget. It seems logical that costs of broadcasting not covered by advertising sponsorship, come under marketing. I suspect a good case can be made that broadcasting serves the Opera in that area a lot more effectively than say, some of its expensive display advertising.

On the other side of the equation, classical music radio in the Bay Area, presents an increasingly pathetic picture. The programming policies at KDFC-FM are already so well-known and so broadly disliked, there's no need to go into that sad case. The anti-music attitude at KQED has not changed. When questioned about whether that station was considering taking on the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts, its manager, Joyce Wallace, flatly stated that was "not a possibility" and not in the future. "We are not contemplating it," she added, and referred to the 1987 decision by the station staff and board of directors that the "program service would be news and information." In response to an earlier phone call to Mary Bitterman, KQED president, a spokesman for "The Office Of The President" (I'm not making that up), confirmed Wallace's statement and added that among NPR stations, KQED initiated the news and information format and competes with WNYC (New York City) for the lead in listenership. .

KALW-FM broadcasting any classical music? At this point, forget it. Michael Johnson, station manager, denied entertaining any consideration of broadcasting the Met. "It is a question of the sound of this station," he said. Translation: KALW does not want to broadcast classical music. That much came out last Spring at the public hearings by the station's owner and operator, the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD), which is considering changes in the station's format. Apparently that matter is still on the table, for Johnson said that the public hearings and discussion would resume in about six months.

So two of the three stations that could conceivably include classical music in their programming are not interested and the third has a programming policy which gets "a mixed reponse," to put it kindly. Who's to blame? You and I, all of us, for not getting on KDFC and its advertisers about its programming, for not getting on the members of the San Francisco (Unified School District) school board (no point in phoning or writing Michael Johnson), and for not working over the board of KQED. Members of KQED who love classical music and want it included have a voice, a vote. Individual and corporate contributors, interested in the audience development for music performing entities they support and in the quality of life in the Bay Area, can make their choices count. There's no reason for the public to sit back and take whatever a few managers and board members choose to dish out.