Gaetano Merola (4 January 1881 – 30 August 1953) was an Italian conductor, pianist and founder of the San Francisco Opera. Biography Merola was born in Naples, the son of a Neapolitan court violinist and studied piano and conductor 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 traveling 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. San Francisco years 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 1906 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, by 1921 Merola decided to stay in the Bay Area and launched his first Bay Area opera season in 1922 with a summer season of Carmen, I Pagliacci and Faust at the Stanford University football stadium where over 30,000 attended. Though the Stanford season resulted in a deficit, he pressed on and founded the San Francisco Opera Association the following year, 1923, 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. War Memorial Opera House For years, the local citizenry had spoken of building a new opera house. The aftermath of World War I had also kindled a desire to honor the city's war heroes with a veteran's building or art museum. Eventually, those ideas coalesced into a joint project that was to consist of two Palladian-style edifices. One building would house an art museum with veterans rooms while the other would be home to Merola's San Francisco Opera. Two lots