San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Witty impresario made opera accessible to wider audience
Early in his career as an opera impresario, Donald Pippin hit upon an ingenious costcutting method. If he stood in front of audience members and told them that the scene they were about to witness was playing out in a grand, ornately decorated ballroom — and if he took a moment to describe the chandeliers, the tapestries and the parquet floors — he wouldn’t have to spend a penny on sets or costumes.
That in turn meant that Pocket Opera, the shoestring company that Pippin founded and ran almost singlehandedly for decades, could focus on assembling highquality local singers without breaking the bank. And it meant that listeners, too, could concentrate more on the music.
That combination of witty pragmatism and artistic commitment were recognizable trademarks for Pippin, who died in his sleep on Wednesday, July 7, at his home in a San Francisco retirement community. He was 95 and had been in failing health for several years.
His death was confirmed by Nicolas A. Garcia, who succeeded Pippin as Pocket Opera’s artistic director.
Pippin’s devotion to music was deep and lifelong. Through Pocket Opera, which
officially incorporated in 1977 but reflected a history of public performance dating to the early 1960s, he introduced a wealth of unfamiliar repertoire to Bay Area audiences. Alongside wellworn favorites by Mozart and Donizetti, Pippin oversaw intimate productions of less wellknown operas and operettas by such composers as Handel, Offenbach, Telemann and Smetana.
Except for Handel, all of these operas were sung in English, in smoothly clever but accessible translations that Pippin turned out year after year. His catalog of Englishlanguage librettos ultimately grew to 90 and is used by large and small opera companies alike around the world.
“His legacy changed the way people view opera in English,” Garcia said. “Especially in the period before supertitles, there was this snobbish notion that it was up to audiences to be familiar with the opera librettos. But Donald felt very strongly that English is a beautiful language to sing in, and a beautiful language to hear.” The Pocket Opera experience was irresistible and remained constant over the decades. Pippin would preside from the piano, accompanying the singers along with a small handful of string and woodwind players dubbed the Pocket Philharmonic. Sets and staging were often minimal to nonexistent.
Before each act — sometimes before an individual aria — Pippin would rise from the piano bench, take center stage in his trademark beret, and deliver a bit of spoken narration in a droll deadpan. These asides were invaluable, not only for dramatic purposes but to remind the audience that one could love opera without taking it too seriously.
“Those narrations were such a hit,” Garcia said. “He could take these complicated, bizarre opera plots and make them accessible with a wink and nudge. He brought the audience in on the joke.”
The same air of camaraderie extended to the performers, recalled mezzosoprano Donna Petersen, who appeared regularly with Pocket Opera from its earliest years.
“We all had a very relaxed feeling working with Donald,” Petersen said. “We didn’t feel pressured — it was just the pleasure of making music and being with friends. And the audience was always very responsive because they were getting something new and fresh.”
Pippin was born Dec. 8, 1925, in Zebulon, N.C., and spent his formative years in Richmond, Va. He came to music as a performing pianist, and often said that the piano was his first and primary love.
At 14, Pippin appeared as a soloist with the National Symphony Orchestra in Richmond, prompting a writer for the Richmond Times Dispatch to devote an entire Sunday column to the boy’s stature as a “prodigy” and “coming genius.”
He went off to Harvard University at 17 on a scholarship, but it didn’t agree with him and he left before completing an undergraduate degree.
“I really am not a very scholarly type,” Pippin told The Chronicle in a 2002 interview. “My mind works in a sort of obsessive way — I like to get involved in one thing and spend all of my time on it, rather than jumping around. So I went to New York because I’d heard that a pianist could play for ballet classes for $2 an hour. That was a sum greater than I’d ever imagined. By playing 15 hours a week, what more could one need?”
In 1950, still restless, Pippin accepted an invitation from a high school buddy — composer Ben Johnston, later famous for his experimental compositions using alternate tunings — to come to the Bay Area and study with another famous experimentalist, composer and instrument inventor Harry Partch. Pippin never left. Two years later, Pippin became a fixture of beatnik culture when impresario Enrico Banducci hired him to give weekly classical piano recitals at his North Beach nightclub, the hungry i.
Audiences were uncertain at first. “People came to hear (comedian) Mort Sahl and got me instead,” Pippin recalled. “They weren’t too happy about that.”
But those solo recitals soon expanded to include chamber recitals, then operatic excerpts, and finally entire operas with piano accompaniment. Under the name Opera Concertante, Pippin began organizing full seasons of operas in the back room of the Old Spaghetti Factory, an Italian restaurant in North Beach.
It was during those early years that Pippin began crafting his libretto translations, despite what he said was a lack of fluency in the foreign languages involved, and developed the crowdpleasing style that served him so well for decades.
Pippin stepped down as Pocket Opera’s artistic director in 2018, but remained closely involved with the company even afterward.
He is survived by his brother, Raymond Pippin of Charlotte, Va.; sister Judith and her husband, Richard Graham, of Queensbury, N.Y.; sister Susan and her husband, Jon Sullivan, of Salem, Mass.; half brother, Calvin, and his wife, Nancy, of Zebulon, N.C.; and niece, Melissa Pagnotta, of Lake George, N.Y.
Plans for a memorial service are pending. In lieu of flowers, the company suggests a donation to Pocket Opera.