Kip Cranna
Dramaturg Emeritus, San Francisco Opera · Ph.D., Musicology, Stanford University
For more than four decades, one name has quietly shaped nearly every new opera, every supertitle, and every pre-performance talk to cross the stage at San Francisco Opera: Kip Cranna.
From Devils Lake to the War Memorial
Clifford “Kip” Cranna grew up in Devils Lake, North Dakota, in a musical family, and first imagined a life as a high school music teacher. At the University of North Dakota, he tried out for the opera workshop hoping to become a singer. He was cast in mute roles, a sign, he now jokes, of where his talents actually pointed.
After earning his degree in choral conducting, Cranna served as a communications officer in the U.S. Navy, including duty off the coast of Vietnam. A posting to Naples, Italy gave him two years of near-nightly opera-going, an education that would quietly steer the rest of his career. He returned to the United States for graduate work at Stanford University, where he earned his Ph.D. in musicology, writing his dissertation on Cartella musicale, a 17th-century Italian treatise on ornamentation and continuo by composer-theorist Adriano Banchieri. It was at Stanford, too, that he met his husband, choral conductor and musicologist Bruce Lamott. They have now been together for more than 50 years.
Forty Years, Six General Directors
Cranna joined San Francisco Opera in 1979 as assistant business manager, a job he found through a referral from tenor and philanthropist James Schwabacher. He is the only administrator in company history to have worked under every General Director since founder Gaetano Merola — Kurt Herbert Adler, Terence McEwen, Lotfi Mansouri, Pamela Rosenberg, David Gockley, and Matthew Shilvock — each with a strikingly different style: Adler exacting and hands-on, McEwen a self-described “bon vivant,” Mansouri focused on new commissions like Dangerous Liaisons, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Dead Man Walking, and Rosenberg pushing the company toward the modern era with works like John Adams’s Doctor Atomic.
In 1982, McEwen promoted him to Director of Music Administration. It was a role he would hold for more than thirty years, overseeing union negotiations, the company’s intricate season and rehearsal schedules, and its relationships with conductors, composers, and musicians.
“I was fortunate in that I enjoyed working with every single one” of the company’s general directors.
— Kip Cranna“Midwifing” New Opera
Ask Cranna what a dramaturg actually does, and he’ll tell you it’s a kind of midwifing; helping a new work find its final shape. Over his career he has shepherded more than 30 new opera commissions from first sketch to opening night, working directly with composers and librettists including John Adams, Philip Glass, and Jake Heggie.
His work on Heggie and Terrence McNally’s Dead Man Walking (1999–2000) is a case study in what that midwifing looks like in practice: organizing the piano workshop that first tested the score, coordinating a famously difficult dress rehearsal with director Joe Mantello, and managing Heggie’s own transition from the company’s PR department to composer-in-residence. The opera was scheduled for seven performances and expanded to nine on ticket demand alone, a rare feat for a world premiere, and one Cranna helped make possible from well before opening night.
He also served as SFO’s editor-in-chief of supertitles from their introduction in the mid-1980s, writing and timing text for more than a dozen productions, and chose which edition of a score to use whenever multiple versions of an opera existed.
Still on the Podium
Cranna stepped back from full-time administration in 2014, in part because he’d grown weary of a duty the role required — easing out artists whose performances had declined. General Director David Gockley responded by inventing a new, part-time position built entirely around Cranna’s favorite parts of the job: commissions, supertitles, and program notes. Cranna retired formally in 2019 and now holds the title Dramaturg Emeritus, continuing to consult for the company he shaped for four decades.
Today his week might include leading “Aficionado,” a Sunday-afternoon Zoom gathering for opera enthusiasts; teaching “Operas and Novels” at Dominican University or opera-appreciation courses through Stanford Continuing Studies, the Fromm Institute at USF, and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State; or judging young voices as a vocal adjudicator for the Metropolitan Opera’s Laffont National Council Auditions. With SFO archivist Barbara Rominski, he also interviews company veterans for the Memories Project, and in 2018 he sat for his own oral history with UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, Clifford Cranna: Music and Administration at the San Francisco Opera, 1979–2019. It is a record he says makes a memoir unnecessary. “If I did a tell-all,” he jokes, “I’d have to go into the Witness Protection Program.”
Honors
2006
Il Cenacolo “Man of the Year”
2008
San Francisco Opera Medal
2012
Bernard Osher Cultural Award
2014
SF Opera Guild Star of Excellence
Kip is a unicorn. There has never been a Kip. There will never be another Kip.
— Barbara Rominski, San Francisco Opera Archivist