Thanks to a friend's generosity, I've been re-living some San Francisco Opera performances of yesteryears. That's back in the good old days when there were SF Opera broadcasts, and hence, recordings that folks took off the air. Ah! The thing about revisiting in that way a performance that you actually attended (at least one in a production run you experienced live) is a special kind of reality. There are particular and unique things that awaken memory and bring a most ephemeral yet particular adventure back to life. It's entirely different from just listening to a published recording of the opera.

For example, the first "old " performance I checked in on was the 1975 L'Elisir d'Amore , recognizing as if it were yesterday, the pure, clear sound of Judith Blegen's singing . (She had succeeded Reri Grist as Adina in this second revival of the 1967 production. That was an enchanted, magic elixir, Lotfi Mansouri's first real directorial triumph here.) Just the sound of the rugged, swaggering voice of Ingvar Wixell, the best of Belcores, brought the image of Robert Darling's charming sets back as if on a real screen. And while Jose Carreras wasn't quite the Nemorino of 1967 (Alfredo Kraus) or of 1969 (the young Pavarotti), in 1970 he was singing really well, and not yet a consolation prize. Paolo Montarsolo, the 1970 Dr. Dulcamara, was a pretty darned good successor to Sesto Bruscantini. The conductor, Carlo Cillario, was no Giuseppe Patane -- nobody else was or has come close--but--and this is one point I won't quit hammering, Cillario's Italian opera conducting was still better than most of what we've been getting lately.

Getting back to nostalgia: when you hear on that broadcast the stage sounds, the clumping of feet, slapping of hands, rolling of the cart wheels, the chorus sounding as they do while acting on stage (not as a recording studio chorus), and coupled with the sound of those voices, you are there as you once were 29 years ago. You smell the casein from the newly made scenery. It's not like a commercial recording of the opera, made in a studio.

Music lovers are funny when it comes to recalling performances that are twenty or thirty years in the past, and opera lovers are the funniest. Some pretend to absolute recall. What I think most people remember is not the actual interpretation in any detail, or even the vocal tone so much as the impression the performance made on them. That's quite another thing of course, entailing their vulnerability at that moment in their lives, the newness of the experience, the work itself, or the context (first time at La Scala, at the Met, whatever).

Hearing the old broadcast again is a reality check, in the good sense. It can be a very special way of being carried back to a moment in time. So many things resonate. I happen to pick on the 1970 L'Elisir. It could as well have been any of the other tape-recorded broadcasts my friend lent me-- the 1973 Peter Grimes, the 1960 or 1969 Aida, the fabulous 1969 La Cenerentola, starring Teresa Berganza in the first and best performance of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's masterpiece of a production.

I wish that the San Francisco Opera could get on the airwaves again. Partly so that its patrons could savor the productions later, down the years. Yes, that, and it's only fair that they be able to do that considering their financial investment in tickets these days. But also, it means a lot to the company that its productions be heard far and wide, by people in the area who can't afford tickets, by real, incipient and nascent opera fans across the country.

After all, the Opera receives close to $1 million from the Hotel Tax, justified in part by the contribution the Company makes to the City's reputation and the impact that has on tourism. This is one reason why I wonder at the economic reasoning that makes it more important to spend $.5 to $1 million on just one of a season's new productions than to use that money to help underwrite one or more broadcasts.

Along with every other part of opera, broadcasting has become horrendously expensive since San Francisco Opera performances were broadcast both partially and complete in the 1940s, and since whole seasons were broadcast in the 1970s and up to 1982, thanks to sponsorship for much of that by Standard Oil of California. Single opera performances from 1983 through 1986 (and the entire Ring of 1985) were broadcast up until 1987, three operas in 1992 and one in 1995, but nothing since.

Money's the problem, the cast, the chorus, the musicians having to be paid recording rates, as is only fair, and the rest of the production staff. The big corporations and the major donors prefer seeing their names as underwriters of new productions. Why that should be more prestigious or glamorous or attention-getting than playing the role Standard Oil played here or that the Texaco Company plays for the Met broadcasts is not at all clear. With education on everyone's lips and both party's and all candidate's agendas, I should think that the public relations value of underwriting opera broadcasts would be much higher than a program notice, "This production is sponsored by Microdisk International," read and considered by a small percentage of the live audience in the house.

Time to start the drum beat, time for the Opera's board leaders and development folk to take another hard look at this, time to give it another try.