Was Teacher, Lecturer and Conductor : Opera Devotee Jan Popper Dies at 79

Jan Popper, the dapper, enthusiastic opera devotee whose nearly 300 productions at the UCLA Opera Workshop ranged from the exquisiteness of the Baroque era to the realism of the 20th Century, died of cancer Wednesday at Stanford University Hospital.

He was 79, and since his retirement as professor emeritus of music at UCLA in 1975 had established himself as a presence for opera in the Orient. There, his productions in Japan, Taiwan, Thailand and Malaysia brought him additional honors late in his life.

He also had taken a leading role in the West Bay Opera Co. while continuing a lifelong fight for increased financial support for opera to limit the exodus of American singers to Europe, where artists frequently are subsidized.

Teacher, lecturer and conductor, Popper spread his fascination with singing theater into television, originating and performing a series of 16 half-hour films called “Spotlight on Opera.” First seen on KNXT in Los Angeles in 1955, the George Foster Peabody Award-winning series later was broadcast on public television stations across the country.

But to the thousands of opera cognoscenti who saw his productions over the years, Popper will best be remembered as the founder of opera workshops at both Stanford University and UCLA.

Said Times music critic Martin Bernheimer after learning of Popper’s death:

“In a time when Los Angeles was an operatic wasteland, Jan Popper kept the flame alive with his workshops. He not only discovered and nurtured worthy young talent but also explored a challenging, often esoteric, repertory.”

And what Popper found when he went to UCLA from Stanford in 1949 was indeed a very small flame. What he discovered was not a theater but a single, modest classroom and not an orchestra but a lone pianist.

“Our first stage director,” the maestro recalled in an interview on the eve of his retirement in 1975, “sat underneath the grand piano, highlighting the action by shining a baby spotlight onto the stage from his hiding place.”

By his departure there had been built a theater (Schoenberg Hall) and a faculty dominated semiprofessional orchestra that Popper conducted from a bona fide pit with what Bernheimer recalled as his “customary authority and flair.”

Popper was born in Liberec, Czechoslovakia, and attended the Conservatory of Music in Vienna, where he received a doctorate.

He emigrated to the United States in 1939 after serving as conductor at Prague’s German Opera House and for the Czech State Broadcasting Co.

He was offered a position at Stanford but at that time was facing deportation to Czechoslovakia because of quota limitations.

He went to Mexico to reapply for readmission to the United States and told immigration officials that he had been guaranteed a teaching job at Stanford. But border officers noted that there was no mention on his passport of teaching experience. Rather than lie, he recalled in a conversation with Mayor Tom Bradley on June 6, 1975, when the city declared “Jan Popper Day” in Los Angeles, he admitted that although he was a conductor, stage director and pianist, he had never presided over a classroom.

What he did not realize was that the officer had already telephoned to Stanford to establish the legitimacy of the offer.

And because Popper chose not to lie, the officer let him into the country. It was a lesson in veracity, he told Bradley, that he never forgot.

At Stanford, he met his wife, Beta, a mezzo-soprano and produced the West Coast premiere of Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes.”

It was to prove the first of what were to be several premieres of the works of Leonard Bernstein, Gian-Carlo Menotti, Virgil Thomson and Igor Stravinsky.

Those contemporary productions alternated over the years with such contrasting and elaborate romantic operas as Verdi’s “Falstaff” and Meyerbeer’s “Les Huguenots,” the latter a work not seen in America since a Metropolitan Opera performance with Enrico Caruso in 1914.

In 1963, Popper was named Music Department chairman at UCLA and expanded further his lectures to Los Angeles Philharmonic support groups, for which he provided background and tidbits about works soon to be performed.

He also conducted across the country at such varied spots as the Hollywood Bowl and the Berkshire Music Festival at Tanglewood in Massachusetts.

An advocate of opera in English, he had organized in 1945 the Intimate Opera Players and staged about 80 performances of Mozart’s “Cosi Fan Tutte” throughout California.

He had been a Fulbright lecturer at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts in 1960 and returned to rave over the creativity of Japanese musicians.

He received the Order of Merit from the Taiwan Ministry of Education in 1982, becoming the only foreigner to receive that honor and was so highly thought of in the UC system that he was named an “All-University Professor,” enabling him to teach at any of the nine university campuses.

Popper’s last public performance was with the West Bay Opera Company of Palo Alto in January.

His last foreign visit was a six-week engagement with the Singapore Symphony in October, 1986. He had been scheduled to begin a three-year contract with the Tokyo Symphony in March but had to cancel the trip due to failing health.

Contributions in his memory may be made to a Jan Popper Memorial Fund, care of the College of Fine Arts, UCLA.