Mad for Opera.

While tall tales and the Davy Crockett almanacs celebrated the rough-hewn culture of the frontier, the West was not without pretensions to elite art. In San Francisco during the gold-rush years grand opera grew into a popular entertainment. Opera had its devotees in Chicago and New Orleans, but it was San Francisco that, as one historian has put it, went "mad for opera." Some scholars have explained this as the city's attempt to emulate the East, an assertion that San Francisco could be as cultured and sophisticated as the East and even Europe. Another view is that the melodrama of opera—with its heroic striving, pledges and betrayals, and shifting fortunes—mirrored the volatile and sometimes violent nature of life during the gold boom.

Opera's Debut.

Opera's probable debut in San Francisco was in 1850, when Mathilda Korsinsky, a...