The CJM Blog

by Renate Stendhal, Ph.D., author of Gertrude Stein: In Words and Pictures. Walking through Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories , I noticed that the show is just like Gertrude Stein herself: sumptuous, good-humored, highly intelligent, brainy and eccentric, sophisticated and unpretentious all at the same time.

Once a generation, a major institution like the San Francisco Opera stages the four-part Ring Cycle by Richard Wagner. The slightly arch title of our June 23 program, Who’s Afraid of Richard Wagner? , is suggestive of the difficulty of engaging this titan of nineteenth-century music, both because his work is sonically overwhelming and because his politics were anti-Semitic.