Behind the Scenes with the San Francisco Opera
57:42 Share

Support for KQED Podcasts comes from Star One Credit Union, now offering real-time money movement with instant pay. Make transfers and payments instantly between financial institutions, online or through Star One's mobile app. Star One Credit Union, in your best interest.

Support for KQED Podcasts comes from Berklee Repertory Theatre. Star of Downton Abbey and Paddington, Hugh Bonneville, performs in a vibrant new production of Chekhov's classic Uncle Vanya, from February 14th through March 23rd only. More info at berkleerep.org. From KQED.

From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Nina Kim. Coming up on Forum, opera. Devoted fan? Or not for you? If you're part of the latter group, perhaps learning what it really takes to pull off an ambitious opera production will help you appreciate it more.

The San Francisco Opera joined me last week for musical performances and an onstage conversation with its music director Eun Sun Kim, the first female conductor of a major U.S. opera company, and other special guests. We go behind the scenes after this news. Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

You're listening to student soprano Olivia Smith, accompanied by Julian Grabarek, performing at a live onstage KQED event last week, all about the intensive effort and artistry that go into putting on an opera.

With San Francisco Opera's music director Eun Sun Kim, general director Matthew Shilvock, and filmmaker Elena Park, who made a documentary about the opera's production of Wagner's Lohengrin Last Ball, we talk about the realities of being an opera singer, an orchestra musician, and of being the conductor who holds them all together. ♪

is

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

Oh, God.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

Wow. Another-- bravo. That was incredible. Olivia Smith and Julian Robarek.

And now it is my great pleasure to invite to the stage the panelists from San Francisco Opera, Matthew Shilwock, Eun Sun Kim, Eleanor Park are with us tonight. Matthew Shilwock is San Francisco Opera's general director overseeing the second largest opera company in the United States.

with a passion for telling profound stories of humanity through the art form. Elena Park is a filmmaker who directed the documentary, "A Journey Into Lohengrin," which you will see this evening. And it's about the massive undertaking of performing Wagner's "Lohengrin" at SF Opera. And of course, music director Eun Sun Kim is with us.

She studied conducting in her native South Korea and in Germany before beginning her tenure at SF Opera in 2019 following a company debut of quote astonishing vibrancy and assurance. This is according to the San Francisco Chronicle. So let's give them a warm welcome to the stage. Hi Nina. Hi.

Matthew, tell us about the song we just heard and why you all chose this for us to hear tonight. Well, that opening aria there from "Idomeneo Mina" is from one of the operas we have coming up this summer in June. So we're back on stage and Anson will be conducting that opera. And it's a great piece. Mozart wrote that when he was only 25 years old.

and the opera just has these amazingly deep and powerful themes. You have two young lovers, forbidden love because they're from opposing sides of war. That was one of the young lovers we heard there, Ilya. And then you have a king who makes a pact to save his ship at sea, but that pact actually is the death sentence for his own son.

and then you have a spurned lover who tries to upend everything, and there's a sea monster for good measure as well. So it's a great piece, and that aria we just heard, Illya is being captured, she's on the island of Crete, and she is sad that she has lost her father, her brothers, her family, but then she's also saying, and I kind of fell in love with the son of the enemy as well. Oh, the drama. The moral dilemma.

And the two incredible young artists we had on stage, they're Adler Fellows? They are Adler Fellows, named after one of the legendary general directors of San Francisco opera, Kurt Herbert Adler. And it's one of the preeminent training programs in the world for young professional singers. We have about 10 to 12 singers and pianists each year.

and they have a huge amount of training not just in voice and music but also in drama, in breathing, in languages, diction and even things like financial skills so that hopefully by the time they finish they are well equipped to take on the world outside. Yes, because it is a tough world out there, a competitive world to have a musical career, right? And so I know that you have a lot of respect for what singers have to do. What do you find that most people don't realize

is required of an opera singer from the physicality of it to everything they have to learn? Well, the first thing that I would say is I didn't want to be an opera singer. Because I was so nervous on the stage or even in a family gathering when I had to sing for my family.

My face was very crampy and I got really nervous. My voice got really trembling and that's the thing. The first thing is probably the breath that you have to control. And the day like today, the weather is so grey and it's raining. The first thing probably you notice physically is your voice is really tired when you get up.

If you can imagine that singers have to deal with their voice on every performance day and even for a matinee day. So if the matinee starts at 2 p.m., they have to get up probably at 6 a.m. to warm up their voice and make that fit.

And that's why probably I'm also visiting their dressing rooms before each show to check in their conditions and how they feel every day as I feel also very differently every day physically. Sometimes when you are tired, you are like under pressure, you want to be...

really going faster probably intentionally because you don't want to drag the whole thing because you feel tired and sometimes the result is the opposite side but all that matters and that's the probably the most interesting thing for me to have one piece in the run like eight to nine performances

because it's the same piece, but every performance is therefore very, very different. The outcome is different.

and my orchestra and I, we are also, our team, we are very aware that all of you, the audience member, will probably hear it for the first time while we are actually playing it again and again. So my goal probably every night is to make it really fresh for everyone in the audience.

I did see that you will meet individually with each singer on a performance day. How do you apply what they tell you to your conducting that evening? Well, I pay attention to their physical. Actually, the opera process, making an opera, takes a long period of time. So they usually rehearse the singers four weeks in.

and then the orchestra joins and then we have the stage rehearsals and then the runs start. So during those four weeks of time probably I'll get to know them better and their habits and their probably concerns as well. So I have that in mind but before every performance

you have to ask them. So you have to have that access to the singers as well so they can share it with you. We're listening back to my live conversation earlier this month with Eun Sun Kim, music director at the San Francisco Opera. And after the break, we're going to hear more about the musicians who create the sounds of the opera. You're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. ♪

Xfinity Mobile was designed to save you money. So you get high speeds for low prices. Better than getting low speeds for high prices. Jealous? Xfinity Internet customers. Get a free unlimited line for a year when you buy one unlimited line. Bring on the good stuff.

Welcome back to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're listening back to my live onstage conversation last week with Eun Sun Kim, music director for the San Francisco Opera. Matthew Shilvock is also with us, general director of the San Francisco Opera, and Elena Park, documentary filmmaker who directed Eun Sun Kim, A Journey into Lone Grin.

Elena, Lohengrin has musicians in four different locations in the Opera House, right? Can you talk about what you were trying to show in terms of just the scope? So there are moments where when you're watching, there's a dramatic thing happening and there are musical effects.

And when it's beautifully rendered, you're just feeling the swell of emotion based on the drama, and you're getting carried away by the musicians or the singers. And Eun Sun, who is always conscious that she's the leader, so she's very, very focused,

and giving everyone what they need at all times. So one of the biggest feats in Lohengrin has to do with musicians that are scattered in all parts of the building at different times to give certain dramatic and theatrical effects.

You know, Matthew, one of the things that it also makes one realize is that this is the kind of opera that you can only do in a large opera house, right? It's the forces, and you've already begun to see some of the forces in the clips we've seen already. It's vast. I mean, Wagner's operas are these vast epics, often actually very intimate stories, but told in these vast worlds.

And so we're talking about a chorus of 80 people, an orchestra of about the same, a vast amount of stagehands backstage to make all of these things happen. There's only a few companies really who have that caliber. And the tradition of Wagner, Wagner in San Francisco goes back to the 1920s.

So this is a tradition that has been building and then to see that now shaped with Anson and how she is taking that and morphing it into a new tradition is extraordinary, but it requires a musical leadership that can pull all of that together into this amazing synergy, but also coming back to that idea of freedom that has the emotional capacity in it as well. It's not just a technical exercise. It's, you know, this amazing emotional outpouring. So no, it's,

It's amazing to be a part of a company that can pull that off. How incredible that we have that right here in San Francisco, in the Bay Area. I love that they've been doing it since the 20s. It's like, go big or go home. Let's see the clip.

We have musicians essentially playing in four different locations. We have the orchestra in the pit, and then we also have sets of trumpets on each side in the organ bays so that the audience is hearing those to the side and behind them. And then we also have musicians behind the orchestra in the torpedo room. And each one of those locations requires a separate conductor. And although they're spaced far apart from each other, they're all trying to kind of lock in to the same pulse.

So I would say in the history of Lohengrin, probably the number of times this music really sails off without a hitch are few and far between because it is so fiendishly difficult. But it's also one of the most exciting things to try and aspire to, making that music leap off the page.

how many trumpets are all over the hall playing? And I'm sitting there thinking, you know, is that train going to come off the rails? Is the trumpets on the left getting a little hit of the trumpets on the right? ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

This is happening every night. She's controlling all of that. And you could hear it. She's like, oh, back, back, back, back. I'm just sitting there thinking, what's going to happen tonight? Eleanor, you have called making an opera, or maybe others have actually described your depiction of making an opera in this way, but really a celebration of collaboration, right?

Oh, yes. A friend of mine saw the film and called it a treatise on collaboration. And I love that because whether it's opera or it could be a sports team, it could be a surgical team, it's all of these people, human beings striving, doing their thing as well as they possibly can to

to plug into a whole and I think that's the beautiful thing about opera. I mean symphonies and chamber music and there are many, many beautiful expressions of music but opera, it's like costume and stage management and musicians and I mean set design and all of these things all together

creating one hopefully enthralling artistic experience, I think it's kind of satisfying to watch what these artists do together. Satisfying to watch, but also, do you find that that earnestness to put on such an incredible performance, to give your all for the audience to be part of this incredible production or creation, also sort of pushes back on the idea of opera being something sort of inaccessible or elitist? I know these...

Do you have thoughts on this? I think that it's just more tradition and the foreign language is it feels inaccessible. But if you like music and you like theater, you're just in for a great ride with opera. So I feel like if you approach it in a certain way and make sure everyone feels welcome. And there are great stories in the opera house that are on stage and then there's great stories

to be told about all the different people working on their part of it. So I don't know. I think it's very human, very moving, very accessible in people's hands who do it as well as this company is able to do it.

Elena, you mentioned the prompter, and I do want to play the clip of the prompter. Is there anything you want to say before we see it? He's not ID'd on this clip because we see him earlier in the film. It's Matt Pyatt. The level of detail for someone like Matt and Eun-sun who are working in tandem over the course of four hours is extraordinary. And I asked him when I interviewed him, so in the curtain call in Lone Grain, the final night, were you like, yay? Were you excited? Did you feel satisfied? And he said, no.

I was running the lines in my head for Elixir of Love because we had a rehearsal in the morning. So the minute the curtain went down, he's already thinking of the Italian lines that he has to go through at 10 in the next morning, and that's how he rolls. But you'll see him. And I would say, in case it's not clear, he's in the level below the stage. So he would be right here under a little hood. A friend of mine calls him the man in the cave. Let's see the prompter.

Promptor is like a second conductor. The singers are very busy and they might forget a word just because we're human beings. The prompter's function is there to support them in those kinds of moments. ♪ ♪

Wow.

That was a role I had no idea existed before. I watched your documentary, Helena, just incredible. And just the idea of like... Right after that, the mezzo-soprano Judith Cotezi, she said, she's like, the minute you begin to lose all the words, she said, I look at him with my googly eyes, and she said, and you know he will save you. That's what she said.

So, Anson, I want to get into your, just your personal background a little bit. You've dropped a couple of hints that you would get very nervous performing. You started out playing piano, right? Right. But I already knew that I was not going to be a performing artist because I was always nervous on stage.

whether singing or playing piano. But then I majored in composition. I stayed with music, but the composers don't need to be necessarily on stage. They just need to bow at the end. So I majored in composition, but I always stayed with the singers or instrumentalists, accompanying them in their lessons.

And then I ended up playing piano like a coach for La Boheme production at my university. And that was the moment where my teacher kind of discovered the talent

in me that I could be a conductor. What did your teacher see? I asked him afterwards and he tested me with my hearing, ears, whether I had good pitch or like, and also how I worked with the singers, how I rehearsed with the singers. And then I think the last thing was that he probably saw my character, my personality,

that I'm very realistic. So I knew when he suggested that I was just studying conducting, but it was not like, oh, I'm going to be a conductor. So it was not about the job, but it was about learning that studying music with conducting. And he told me, you know, a lot of students say,

when they major, when they start majoring in conducting, they act like they're already conductors. But you were different. You knew exactly that you were just a student who is now just studying and delving into the scores probably. So I think that's how he made me a conductor, to be a conductor.

One of my favorite stories that Maestro shares in the film was about managing emotions at that time. Because the comment Rufus made about there's no beat going on and the management of emotions. Can you share that story? Right, so when I was...

accompanying at the piano in that poem production at the end of act four, last moment in a poem, I used to cry a lot. So the moment that I knew that, oh, this scene is coming, that Mimi is going to cough, and I knew, then I started crying, and I ended up sometimes, like, crying really loud, playing piano, like, and then...

Like tears in my eyes. And then my teacher says to me, like, you should stop crying. And you can't be a conductor if you get that much emotional. So you have to control yourself. You know it, but you have to control what you have to do with your brain. And then you still have that passion and love for music and for that moment, for that storytelling. But you can't just be...

I sometimes talk about those emotions on the stage with the singers because they are the ones who have to

speak the text as well, the lyrics. And I sometimes say to them, that sounds like a self-pity. If it becomes too emotional and they take care too much about their feelings, like the singer's feeling, not the role's feeling, it becomes very personal on stage. And that was...

Because in my experience, like, that was the moment where I was in the audience and I said, "Okay, that's suddenly... I lost the role of my figure in that storytelling, but all I saw was that singer." So that's kind of how we have to handle, and that's about the beat. Yeah.

So I understand that you are the first woman and woman of color to conduct, to be music director at a major opera company in the U.S. And I know this is not something that you dwell on, but is there a part of that that is personally meaningful to you?

You know, I mean, we're Koreans, but almost Koreans. We actually had a joke because I used to.

I told them, when you hear Koreans say, "Oh, no, no, no, no, no," you have to understand it's actually a "yes." Because we just want to be very polite. So, "Do you want it?" "Oh, no, no, no, no, no, but it's a yes." So, in that sense, Matthew might understand that because he is British. Exactly. What you say is not what you mean.

So, you know, I oftentimes say in the interviews that no one in the world, including all of us, chooses actually gender or ethnicity before we are born. I happen to be born to a Korean family as a daughter, and I'm actually very proud of

who I am and of my family and my parents. So yes, the audience might feel very different or refreshed to see an Asian woman on the podium. And I noticed that more and more actually whenever I have concerts elsewhere,

Young kids are waiting for me, especially the girls. They're waiting for me at the stage door and they say like, oh, I want to be a conductor as well. And they don't know what they're actually saying. They have different, you know, I mean, not about the job, but I would never have said when I was younger,

probably five-year-old, I want to be a conductor because that didn't exist for women. And even when my teacher asked me, would you study conducting with me? I was shocked because I've never seen any female conductor until then. And I knew that there was one, like Simone Young, but it was very, very...

shocking actually that woman could take a conductor as a job but now it's becoming normal probably so last week I was in LA with LA Phil and

Before the first rehearsal, two young ladies came to my room and I just automatically, probably I'm now also getting older, automatically thought they were from admin offices, but they told me they were assistant conductors. So I realized, oh, it's happening. So yes, but I'm probably...

how should I say, I feel like the weight of I should be better in my music making so the next generation can really dream that yes, women can also

be the leaders or the conductors. So you do feel that pressure a little bit. It's not the pressure because I have I put a lot of pressure on myself anyway. So it's not just about women or being a female conductor but

And one day probably it will become really normal. I think I said also about my grandmother when I was announced to be the music director at San Francisco Opera, because my grandmother was born in 1912 and she lived actually hundreds of years. So she died 2012. But she was one of the first musicians

female doctors in Korea and we used to call female doctors like in Korean female doctors but by the time that she passed away that that words disappeared. Female. Female. Yeah so everyone is just doctor but not female doctor anymore so I guess the conductors will

follow that too, I hope. That's Eunsun Kim, music director at the San Francisco Opera. We're listening back to an onstage conversation about opera on February 4th. I'm Nina Kim.

Turing with Tia is the quirky YouTube talk show where Tia Creighton is the host and all her guests are talking AI chatbots. Whether it's health and beauty, science and technology, pop culture, or current events, Turing with Tia delivers answers about everything.

That's T-U-R-I-N-G, Turing with Tia, a funny and fascinating way to experience artificial intelligence. Only on YouTube at Turing with Tia. Support for KQED Podcasts comes from Star One Credit Union, now offering real-time money movement with instant pay. Make transfers and payments instantly between financial institutions, online or through Star One's mobile app. Star One Credit Union, in your best interest.

This is Forum. I'm Nina Kim. We're listening back to my live onstage conversation earlier this month with Eun Sun Kim, music director at the San Francisco Opera, Elena Park, documentary filmmaker, and Matthew Shilvak, general director of the San Francisco Opera.

I'm so glad, Matthew, that Ensign's been mentioning La Boheme a couple of times just a little bit ago because this feels like a lovely moment to hear another performance and in fact it will be from La Boheme? Yes, we're going to hear from two more of our Adler Fellows. Julien will be back on piano and then Caroline Corrales, second year Adler Fellow and Samuel White who's a first year Adler Fellow, he's just begun a few weeks ago with us.

And Bohème will be back on stage in June next to a domineo, so coming up soon. So we're going to get a glimpse of what's to come. And of course, Bohème is just the most incredible timeless romance and of course, tragic romance. As Anson said, we end with tears at the end.

But this is from the beginning and this is the sequence that takes place at the end of the first act. We're set in this drafty garret in the rooftops of Paris. It's Christmas Eve and this group of artists is living in this garret.

And at this particular scene, the other artists have gone out, the poet Rodolfo has stayed behind to write a few more verses, and a knock on the door happens, and it's that proverbial cup of sugar moment. And Mimi has just moved in, and she's not asking for sugar, but she's asking for a light for her candle. And the two of them have this sequence, and we have an aria first from Rodolfo, and he introduces himself as a poet,

and then Mimi introduces herself as a seamstress, and then we move into the duet we're about to hear, and they suddenly realize that they're falling in love. Now, in opera, it takes people a long time to die.

But you can fall in love very quickly. And this is the most passionate love. And they just realize that they have this great affection for each other, this great love for each other. And then at the end, we hear the music begin to fade away. And actually, oftentimes in the staging, the singers will exit offstage and they'll sing the last line from offstage because they're leaving out into the Paris night on Christmas Eve to go and join their friends at the cafe.

Oh, sweet little girl, oh, sweet face, of life circled in the moonlit night.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

- Per pietà! - Sei io? - V'aspettare.

- Curiosa!

Caroline Corrales, Samuel White, and Gillian Pupaya.

So La Poème will be part of SF Opera's summer season. Yes. And then I understand that the new season just dropped the lineup for the new season. So give us some highlights, Matthew. Yes, so we have this season that begins in September and then it takes a little hiatus now and then comes back in May, June. And so we've just announced the season coming up in September. And so as we continue from Lohengrin, talking about Lohengrin in the film...

Each season we're doing a Wagner opera that Anson is conducting. Last season we did Tristan, this season. And then we just announced Parsifal, which is Wagner's final opera. This amazingly transcendental work, this sublime piece about the passing of tradition from generation to generation, told through the Knights of the Holy Grail.

And we're building this as a brand new production. This is a big moment for us. Literally, right at the moment they are building the sets down in Burlingame, the costumes right here in the city. So this is very much a made in San Francisco production.

And then Anson will also, each year she's doing a Verdi title, and so we have the great, great classic Rigoletto to open the season. And then Anson will also be conducting Electra, one of the most monumental stories and operas of the repertoire. A hundred-piece orchestra, all of the angst of Greek myth told on stage, three powerful singers. So really some amazing opera to look forward to.

Maestro, it's a priority of yours to have contemporary opera in the lineup, right? Why? You know, we're actually performing also pieces from 200 or 300 years ago. But the time when they played it, it was contemporary for them. So I feel like when we play that piece, whether it's Rigoletto or Pasifal,

it's also contemporary because we're performing it, you're there, so we are doing it. But...

contemporary pieces by a living composer is also very important because it's about today that we're living in, the time, about the time and the language and the emotions are very different. So when I really like listening to the recordings of the conductors who are dead, so to speak,

Because I want to always hear... We're getting further and further from the composer's time. So I want to hear the recordings who were closer to the composer's time first. What their emotion or how their habit was. So I think that changes a lot in music making as well. If you listen to the recordings...

close to the composer's time, it might be way slower or way faster than we might feel. Why is it that fast? And why are you talking that fast or slow? So it all changes in our lives as well. So that's why I put also the importance on performing the contemporary pieces by living composers.

I understand too that you think it's important for the conductor to be able to speak the language of the opera that they are conducting. So that means you speak how many languages? But that doesn't, I don't mean that. Like totally fluently. No, no, no. But I don't mean like all the other composers. Conductors should do this. That's right. It's just a rule you set for yourself. No, it's how I approach the score. So I speak six.

languages. You speak six languages. So then what is a language that you have not learned yet, but you really want to, so you can do an opera in that language? Russian. Oh, Russian.

I've not conducted any Russian opera yet. We were actually planning. We planned before the pandemic. We planned it, but then it was rescheduled. But Russian opera will be my next. But before that, I need to buy the grandma book. So you want to know what the singers are saying. You want to know what...

I want to know what composer wanted to say. Yeah, because it influences the way you will interpret the music. That's right. And the pace of storytelling, the pace of their language. And also, I mean, if it's German, let's say, we have so many German composers, Wagner and Strauss or Mozart and Beethoven and everyone. But they all have different words.

style of their speaking. It becomes their music as well. I mean, all of us also have different style of speaking. Sometimes you get to meet a person who speaks really, really fast or really slow. So when the composer writes in the score, like it go faster here, this person who speaks

fast anyway, they would go really fast. So that all changes the details of music making. And I would really want to understand first what the composers really meant and then to recreate that score

in the pace of my understanding of that language and the terms that he used or they used. But I have to probably add one probably last thing is yes with the text and with the singers it's very obvious because they're using the language itself but with orchestra

It really affects... So in Lohengrin, because we watched the Lohengrin film now, I put probably, I don't know, 50 or more than 50 terms, like expressions, into the orchestra part, the scores that the musicians use.

And for piano, piano is in musical term like a soft, but I put next to the piano, sometimes piano soft or piano clean, piano pure, piano friendly, or like piano devastated, or piano... So all the dramatic moments that we have to play, I put it. And you know how...

how you are going to explain it technically what they did you can't and that's

probably the mystery of making music or the art, and it should also stay as mystery, because you can't really verbally explain how that happened. But I put... There was a moment in the rehearsal, like Pianissimo, Devastated, and they played it, and I had like, you know... That was it. That was it. And I asked them, like, what did you do? How did you do? And they were like...

We just played it. But as you imagine that you want this sound or this sound, you can make it. And that's why I think the language or understanding language of composer is so important. Because it's not just about the lyrics that the singers have, but it's also about the sound of the orchestra as well. I think one of the...

beautiful things that you see when Anson is conducting is just the connection to the stage and there's a real sense of symbiosis between pit and stage and you've spoken before Anson about you are sort of the point between the audience and the stage and so you encapsulate all of it and when we did when Anson made her debut in 2019 it was with Dvořák's Rosalka which is in Czech

And even though we had a prompter like you saw in the film there, Anson is giving all of the language to the singers on stage.

and mouthing it to them and being in the moment with them. And there's just something, there's a beautiful trust in that where I think the singers really feel that you are there with them at every moment. And again, because you have taken the time to not only learn the score but the language as well, just as they've had to go and learn the language and understand what they're singing. So again, it just takes you to that completely different level of trust and as a result, I think, aesthetic beauty that comes out of the performance.

And Maestro, I've heard you stress that opera is an interaction with the audience. The audience is part of it? It is. Because as Elena said, it's all about storytelling. Of course, I...

I pursue for like the perfection of the music or the sound but it really is about storytelling and you can actually feel although I can't see you in the performance you can't really feel the energy of the audience and the musicians and I we also or music staff we talk behind the

stage during the intermission like oh today's audience is so focused or today's audience is so we know you we feel you we get a sense of the

each night's audience as well. So that's not just we're performing and you're listening and sitting back, but you are a part of that storytelling. And, you know, once the music or the sounds really leaves from my hand and from our musicians' hands, I think it becomes all yours. And I always love...

listening to audience members at the backstage door when I come out. Each one has so much story to tell to me. Like, "Oh, in that act one, I don't know that moment, it was so this and that, and did you intend to do it?" It's not just how I intend,

probably all of you have some feelings and understanding of this story. So that kind of difficulty to get into the building is because

they're also not familiar and they don't know what's going to happen inside the door or the etiquette, how you have to behave or dress. And I think that's all that we can probably approach towards the audience. So once you're in, and I think it'll all be not that...

difficult. There is no barrier for music. Thank you, Maestro Eun Sun Kim, filmmaker Eleanor Park, and general director of the San Francisco Opera, Matthew Schimple. And thank you, Mina. Thank you.

Thank you.

Our interns are Brian Vo and Jesse Fisher. Katie Springer is the operations manager of KQED Podcasts. Our vice president of news is Ethan Tobin-Lindsey. And our chief content officer is Holly Kernan. I'm Mina Kim. Thanks for listening. Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Generosity Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Support for KQED Podcasts comes from Star One Credit Union, now offering real-time money movement with instant pay. Make transfers and payments instantly between financial institutions, online or through Star One's mobile app. Star One Credit Union, in your best interest.

Support for KQED podcasts comes from Sutter Health. From prenatal guidance to postmenopausal support, Sutter's team of doctors and nurses never stop being there through every stage of a woman's life.