The Italian conductor Gaetano Merola was born in Naples in 1881. He worked at the Met and elsewhere in New York until, in 1918, he conducted the San Carlo Opera in San
Francisco for the first time. Five years later he founded the San Francisco
Opera which, under his guidance, was to become one of America's foremost companies,
and of which he was General Director for thirty years. An imaginative conductor
of considerable skill, Merola died in 1953.