EXIT LINES.(Lotfi Mansouri resigns from San Francisco Opera)(Brief Article)

LOTFI MANSOURI STEPS DOWN AFTER FOURTEEN YEARS AS GENERAL DIRECTOR OF SAN FRANCISCO OPERA

Half a century ago almost to the day, a twenty-one-year-old, dollar-a-gig super in an Otello in Los Angeles's cavernous Shrine Auditorium was so bitten by the opera bug that he chucked his pre-medical studies forthwith. Fifty years later, on the telephone from his general director's office at San Francisco Opera -- back from a bit of moonlighting, staging Mozart's Idomeneo for San Diego Opera -- Lotfi Mansouri accounts for those past years with his usual voluble exuberance.

"My life has all been spent in interesting places at interesting times. Back home in Iran after college, I worked at the Shah's opera house just before he was overthrown. Later there were the thirteen years as head of Canadian Opera in Toronto, struggling to get a proper opera house built -- which didn't happen and still hasn't -- but otherwise watching the city explode from a provincial nowhere to a major cultural venue. Then the fourteen years in San Francisco, including an earthquake, an orchestra strike, a struggle to get this proper opera house put back together -- which, thank God, did happen."

Those San Francisco years end -- officially at least -- this summer, as Mansouri vacates his office to Pamela Rosenberg, the company's fifth general director in its seventy-nine-year history, and its first native Californian. Mansouri's name may be off the door, but the traces remain. He owes the company one more production, a Merry Widow scheduled for November. "I had thought to make my exit quietly, on the Marschallin's arm at the end of Der Rosenkavalier," he says. "Now I'll waltz my way out the door to a bit of Lehar instead, arm-in-arm with Flicka von Stade." One of his future projects involves a book -- not the name-dropping tell-all memoir that retired opera impresarios have been known to write but "something about the growth of opera as an art form in my lifetime."

His contributions to that growth -- and, more to the point, to the growth of opera consumerism in his time -- are indeed impressive. It was in 1983, during his stewardship in Toronto, that he dreamed up the notion of English-language "supertitles" (simply from watching an opera on TV and applying a little common sense). If any development has drastically changed the sight and sound of opera, and the breadth of its appeal, in Mansouri's quarter-century, it must be this rupture of the language barrier -- opposed by some managements at first (famously, by the ...