Armando Agnini and The San Francisco Opera Stage

source: San Francisco Opera Company. 

Scenery and décor are essential elements for staging grand opera and the San Francisco Opera benefited greatly from Merola’s recruiting of his nephew, Armando Agnini, to fill that role here. Agnini, who also worked with the Metropolitan Opera, was the first stage and technical director for the San Francisco Opera Company. He designed most of the productions from 1922-1953 and the Opera continued to draw upon his stage designs for many years afterward. He trained performers and technical staff and also played a role in the acoustic design of the War Memorial Opera House that opened in 1933.


Armando Agnini at the Lighting Controls in the new San Francisco War Memorial Opera House (source: San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection).

Born in Naples, Italy in 1884, he came to the United States aboard the  at the age of 18. (Ancestry.com notes his arrival aboard the SS Augusta Victory on April 5, 1902). He had studied the cello and electrical engineering in Italy. In America he first worked in a piano factory, then his uncle Gaetano Merola employed him as a baggage master with a touring opera company.  One day the stage manager disappeared on tour and Merola pressed him into duty as the stage manager.  His first appointments as an operatic stage director were in Montreal (1911-1913) and Boston (1913-1917). While in Boston he joined a group of artists who travelled to Paris in 1914. Parisian newspapers note his participation in a performance of Manon Lescaut at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, but this adventure ended with the outbreak of the First World War.

He went to work at the Metropolitan Opera in 1917 where he was stage manager, but also occasionally appeared in as an actor or in the dance ensemble. He later served as a guest director in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, London, Paris, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Chicago.

Armando Agnini with a Wagnerian dragon (source: San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection)

A 1927 San Francisco Chronicle review of Turandot described Armando Agnini’s labors in staging grand opera in the San Francisco Civic Auditorium:

Not only was Agnini responsible for the training of the principals and chorus and the preparation of the mass action but he spent part of his leisure this summer designing the scenery

The audience at the opera sees only the outcome of infinite labor and may not realize the immense detail to be taken care of in production, especially under Auditorium conditions.
Sets have to be designed and prepared and made ready on the day of each performance for their quick arrangement on the stage. It doesn't help Mr. Agnini a bit to have to work in a theater practically without facilities for storing props...

The company is as yet too young to own all the materials it has need of in its elaborate seasons. These must be built, begged and borrowed each summer and fall. Meantime the amateur chorus is being trained in its entrances and stage business, and ensembles of the individual singers have to be hammered into shape.

And then there are lights, which have to be chosen and mixed for best effect and regulated and changed throughout intricate performance. And there are the ballet, the choice of individual choristers for special small group actions and the supervision of costuming and makeup of the entire ensemble.

All these problems are tackled by Armando Agnini. His work begins the moment he arrives in San Francisco, long before the season opens, and it continues day and night until the packing of the props and the demolition of the improvised theater at the end.

Although Agnini was often on the move working on opera sets and direction all over North America, he was listed San Francisco City Directories between 1937 and 1943, residing first on Nob Hill and later in the Marina.  The 1943 directory shows him employed as the director of the Opera Academy of San Francisco.  Agnini also did a little work in Hollywood working as the opera technical director in the Bing Crosby film Going My Way 1944, and the Ray Milland, Jane Wyman film The Lost Weekend in 1945. He finished his career as the Stage Director for the New Orleans Opera Association where he worked from 1954 until his death in 1960. 

Agnini At Work At a Preparatory Diorama (source: San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection)

Bibliography

AFI Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in The United States (R.R. Bowker Co., 1999).

"Armando Agnini Dies," New York Times March 28, 1960.

"Armando Agnini Narrates Episodes of Operatic Career," San Francisco Chronicle November 19, 1933.

“Armando Agnini, Opera Aide, Dies,” San Francisco Chronicle March 29, 1960

Fried, Alexander, “Agnini, Opera Veteran, Dies,” San Francisco Examiner March 29, 1960.

"'Manon Lescaut' Musique de Giacomo Puccini," Comoedia May 4, 1914.

"Opera Director Urged to Give 'Turandot' Again," San Francisco Chronicle September 22, 1927.

  San Francisco Opera Company. [programs].  [The Company, 1925-1928]. 

Variety Obituaries (Garland Pub., 1988).