Patron Gives $35m to San Francisco Opera

A wealthy donor has pledged to donate $35m (£19m) over five years to the San Francisco Opera - thought to be the largest donation ever made by an individual to an opera company in the US.

The gift, from Jeannik Mequet Littlefield, a long-time patron of the company, will help to stabilise the company's finances and to build its endowment.

The money comes at a time when the opera world is still attempting to recover from the downfall of its biggest private patron, Alberto Vilar. The Cuban-American investor and philanthropist was the most sought-after of opera benefactors until he was arrested on charges of securities fraud and money laundering last year.

Vilar was famous for his lavish pledges of donations: £10m to the Royal Opera House in London, $45m to the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, and $50m to the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. In return for his largesse, Mr Vilar received recognition that some thought unseemly. The Royal Opera named the centrepiece of its controversial rebuild the Vilar Floral Hall; Mr Vilar had a front row seat permanently held for him at the Met.

But many of his pledges were never turned into cash and his clients started to turn against him. The Royal Opera dropped his name from its branding after it received just £4.5m of the original pledge.

However, other donors have recently returned to the high-profile business of giving money to opera companies. The Met in New York recently received a gift of $25m from the socialite Mercedes Bass and her husband Sid Bass, while the Los Angeles Opera was given $6m by the real estate magnate and philanthropist Eli Broad to stage a Ring cycle. The company, which has an annual budget of $54m, had suffered financially following the withdrawal of a $12m pledge from Mr Vilar. While the post of general director of the Los Angeles Opera would be renamed the Eli and Edythe L Broad general director in recognition of the donation, Mrs Broad said that recognition was not the motivation for the gift.

"I wanted to see a Ring, and my husband didn't really want to take me to Europe to hear it," she told the Los Angeles Times earlier this month.

San Francisco Opera's general director, David Gockley, said the $35m gift came from Mrs Littlefield without conditions. Ten million dollars would go towards the company's annual operating expenditure while the remainder would be put into the company's $90m endowment fund.

The announcement comes after Mr Gockley took up the post of general director at the start of the year and just weeks after the company's 84th opening night gala, one of the biggest society events in San Francisco. Mr Gockley's tenure has already seen changes at the company, with the announcement in mid-September that music director Donald Runnicles would not renew his contract at the end of the year.

Although San Francisco Opera has a long and illustrious history, it came to the fore as an innovative production house in the 90s under general director Lotfi Mansouri. The company commissioned and premiered several notable new works, including John Adams's The Death of Klinghoffer, Harvey Milk, Andre Previn's A Streetcar Named Desire and Dead Man Walking with a libretto by Terrence McNally. The current season opened with Deborah Voigt in a production of Verdi's A Masked Ball.

Mrs Littlefield is the widow of shipping company magnate Edmund Wattis Littlefield, who sold his company to General Electric in 1976 in what was then the biggest corporate merger in history.

"It is safe to say that Ed was not the most avid opera fan," she said in the opera's programme. "He knew I loved it, so he supported my interest."