Licia Albanese and Luciano Pavarotti

Over the long course of my operagoing, a very few great performances have, in the end, also summed up for me an era of greatness. One can sense this sometimes even in the midst of a performance, but one knows it fully, I have found, only in thoughtful recollection of such an event: Jussi Björling, Licia Albanese, Tito Gobbi, Italo Tajo, and Salvatore Baccaloni together in La bohème in San Francisco on Columbus Day in 1948; Sena Jurinac, Christa Ludwig, and Manfred Jungwirth in Der Rosenkavalier in 1971; Ezio Pinza and Tajo as master and servant in Don Giovanni in 1948. On rare occasions, too, the event has been not a fully staged performance but an operatic concert. So it was, one overcast Sunday thirty-one years ago (2 September 1973), in San Francisco's unforgettable Golden Gate Park.

Licia Albanese and Luciano Pavarotti, with General Director Kurt Adler conducting the San Francisco Opera Orchestra, were to offer a program honoring the memory of Gaetano Merola, the Opera's founder, who had died (on the podium conducting another Sunday outdoor concert) twenty years before. The singers could hardly have been more aptly chosen. In all the years of the company's existence, Albanese had surely remained the city's most beloved soprano. Just the year before, she had sung at a similar gathering (of 20,000) celebrating the company's fiftieth anniversary. Many other singers had been there, some performing, some recalling memories of the company's early years (Lauritz Melchior sang nothing but smilingly led the orchestra in a celebratory march), but Albanese's "Un bel dì" roused a response the warmth of which cannot be forgotten.

Albanese had debuted with the company in 1941, and, an immediate sensation, as she had been at the Metropolitan the year before, she continued to sing in almost every San Francisco season until the late fifties. Over that period she appeared in twenty-two leading roles. There were of course her famous Puccini heroines and Violetta, Marguerite, Micaëla, Manon, Desdemona, and Anne (Falsta ff), and then there were also her non-Metropolitan delights: among them Suor Angelica, Margherita (Mefistofele), Maddalena (Andrea Chénier), Zerlina, Antonia, and Concepción (L'heure espagnole). In eight of her seasons she appeared in a third or more of that year's repertory. It was not that there was no one else; it was love. Over her years in San Francisco many of the world's leading sopranos shared Albanese's roles, among them Bidú Sayão, Lily Pons, Dorothy Kirsten, and Renata Tebaldi. She sang opposite such remarkable divos as Jan Peerce, Jussi Björling, Ferruccio Tagliavini, Richard Tucker, Mario Del Monaco, Tito Gobbi, Ezio Pinza, Salvatore Baccaloni, Italo Tajo, and Nicola Rossi-Lemeni. Their performances matched the highest international standard. Now she was on the verge of retirement from the stage, although not from the world of opera. Surely it was her fond memories of Merola, and the unending affection of San Francisco audiences, that brought her back for this concert.

Pavarotti's was a somewhat different case. His career was only a decade old. He was about to begin his fifth San Francisco season and was well on the way to becoming the world's favorite lyric tenor. As far as anyone knew, he and Albanese had never before sung together. She had left the Metropolitan with the closing of the old house in 1966, two seasons before his debut. In her youth she had made the still definitive recording of La bohème with Beniamino Gigli, whose international status, among lyric tenors at least, Pavarotti now most nearly matched. The concert, as I soon realized, had assumed legendary status even before it took place.

I arrived at the music concourse at 9:30 in the morning, certain that these singers would quickly bring forth a huge and lively crowd. Now, though, the concourse was nearly empty. With its hundreds of park benches and its great stone shell gray under the arch of September fog, the concourse looked mythically immense. Already, however, a few aficionados were lounging about, five hours...