Gaetano Merola

Gaetano Merola (4 January 1881 – 30 August 1953) was an Italian conductor, pianist and founder of the San Francisco Opera.

Merola was born in Naples, the son of a Neapolitan court violinist and studied piano and conducting at the Naples conservatory. He emigrated to the United States in 1899 and served as an assistant conductor at the Metropolitan Opera, Henry Wilson Savage's opera company in Boston and Fortune Gallo's travelling San Carlo Opera Company. Oscar Hammerstein I hired Merola as choral conductor of his Manhattan Opera Company where Merola remained until the company folded in 1910. He then served as conductor in Hammerstein's London Opera House before returning to New York as an operetta conductor. Merola conducted the premieres of several shows, including Victor Herbert's Naughty Marietta, Rudolf Friml's The Firefly and Sigmund Romberg's Maytime.

It was while touring with the San Carlo Opera that Merola began making annual visits to San Francisco. He first heard Luisa Tetrazzini, a recent arrival to America, at the city's Tivoli Opera House in 1904 and recommended her to Hammerstein. San Francisco had had a long history of opera houses dating back to the Gold Rush. Recognizing the city's potential as a major opera center, Merola decided to stay in the Bay Area and launched his first company in 1923 with a summer season of Carmen, I Pagliacci and Faust at the Stanford University football stadium where over 30,000 attended. Though that first season resulted in a deficit, he pressed on the next year, adapting the Civic Auditorium to his purposes. He recruited some 2,000 individuals and local businesses to become Founders of his opera company. By 1927, he presented the local premieres of Tristan und Isolde and the then-new Turandot, and in the following years, he introduced Falstaff, La Fanciulla del West and Die Meistersinger.

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