Moved from September during the orchestra’s contract talks, the gala that is the largest fundraiser for San Francisco Opera and its Guild sells seats from $450 to $10,000, and the company’s leading titles carry the names of patron families.
The red carpet goes down at 6 p.m. on Thursday, two months later than planned, under the dome of San Francisco City Hall.
Opera Ball, the white- or black-tie gala that traditionally opens San Francisco Opera’s season, was supposed to take place on Sept. 12. Instead, it arrives on Nov. 12 as a standalone party, with a red carpet and cocktail reception at 6, dinner at 7, music and dancing to a live band from 9 and an 11 p.m. finish, according to the company. There will be no performance at the War Memorial Opera House that night. The co-chairs are Sydney Leung and Jennifer Walske.
The ball is the largest fundraiser of the year for both the Opera and the San Francisco Opera Guild, whose education programs the company says reach thousands of students across the Bay Area. Proceeds also support the company’s artistic initiatives.
Why the date moved
The delay was a product of the fall’s labor standoff. On Sept. 1, the company announced that it was moving the gala after the San Francisco Opera Orchestra said it would not perform unless a new contract was in place by opening night. Producing the ball, the company said, “involves many logistics and many external providers,” and moving it would give both sides “more space to reach a successful resolution.”
“I am deeply grateful to all those involved in Opera Ball for pivoting to this new November date, particularly the co-chairs and host committee who are working tirelessly to make this such a special fundraiser,” Matthew Shilvock, the general director, said then.
On Sept. 17, after a week of negotiations, the Opera and the musicians, represented by the American Federation of Musicians Local 6, reached a tentative four-year agreement running through July 2030, subject to ratification. Both sides credited Mayor Daniel Lurie and his staff with helping broker it. “Arts and culture are driving San Francisco’s recovery,” Mr. Lurie said. The season opened on Sept. 22 with Verdi’s “Simon Boccanegra.”
What a seat costs, and what it buys
The ticket tiers read like a society register in miniature. A Great Benefactor seat costs $10,000, or $100,000 for a table of 10, and comes with premier dinner seating in the Rotunda. Grand Benefactor seats are $5,000 ($50,000 a table), Benefactor seats $3,500 and Advocate seats $2,000. A Buffet Dinner Soirée, with dinner and dancing but without valet parking, costs $450.
The company translates the higher tiers into what they pay for. One Grand Benefactor ticket, it says, equals the cost of a set of classroom visits by an opera educator; a Benefactor ticket covers one principal singer’s wig and makeup; an Advocate ticket pays for one pre-curtain talk.
Ticket holders who bought for September were offered a choice: keep their tickets for November, take a refund, or donate the value to the Opera and the Guild for a full tax deduction.
The names on the doors
At San Francisco Opera, patronage is written into job titles. Mr. Shilvock is formally the Tad and Dianne Taube General Director. Eun Sun Kim, who conducts the orchestra, is the Caroline H. Hume Music Director. Its Atrium Theater sits in the Diane B. Wilsey Center for Opera.
The Taube title dates to February 2020, when the company announced that Tad and Dianne Taube had committed $6 million to support the general director’s position. Mr. Taube, a Bay Area real estate executive, is chairman of Taube Philanthropies. “We wanted to establish a lasting and meaningful legacy,” he said at the time, “and it seemed to us that the best way to ensure our opera company remains one of the world’s best is to invest in the Opera’s ability to recruit and retain brilliant general directors.”
Ms. Taube has a direct connection to Thursday’s event. She has served on the San Francisco Opera Association’s board since 2001, was a board member of the Opera Guild and chaired Opera Ball in 2000, the company said. The family has supported more than a dozen mainstage productions and provided signature funding for the 299-seat Dianne and Tad Taube Atrium Theater, and the Taubes have sponsored Opera at the Ballpark, the free simulcasts at the Giants’ stadium that the company said in 2020 had reached more than 300,000 Bay Area residents since 2007.
The Getty legacy
The Gettys have long been among the company’s most prominent patrons. Forbes estimates the fortune of Gordon Getty and his family at $5.8 billion, as of Nov. 11, and lists his residence as San Francisco. In 2023, when the company gave him its Spirit of the Opera award, it credited Ann and Gordon Getty’s gifts with helping bring world premieres to the War Memorial stage, including John Adams’s “Girls of the Golden West,” and with underwriting new productions and the company’s 2018 “Ring” cycle, as The Inquirer reported last month. Mr. Getty, 92, is also a composer whose opera “Usher House” the company staged in 2015.
San Francisco Opera does not publish a guest list for the ball, and The Inquirer has not reported one. The company’s public materials name only the co-chairs and the host committee’s role. The broader map of the city’s philanthropic fortunes is in the Inquirer’s survey of San Francisco’s 100 wealthiest families.
San Francisco Opera’s press office and Taube Philanthropies did not respond to requests for comment sent Tuesday. The Getty family’s office was not contacted for this article; details about the family’s giving come from San Francisco Opera’s public statements and Forbes.
Pilar Ashcombe covers San Francisco society and the public lives of its billionaires, from galas, museum and opera boards and art collections to landmark homes and the city’s old and new fortunes, for the Inquirer’s Billionaires desk. More from Pilar Ashcombe
