Donald Pippin
8 December 1925 – 7 July 2021
It is with deep and profound sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved Founder, Donald Pippin, at age 95, on Wednesday 7 July 2021, at his home in San Francisco.
Donald leaves behind a rich legacy as an artist, mentor, and impresario, whose contributions to the Bay Area arts scene are unparalleled. The entire Pocket Opera family will spend the coming weeks reflecting on all he has meant to us.
We will find an appropriate place and time to celebrate his life, so that his friends, his fans, and his family alike can come together to honor this great man. For now, as we all process this loss, we are deeply grateful that his passing was painless and peaceful. His last days were spent listening to music, his constant companion in life.
READ DONALD PIPPIN’S OBITUARY
A Celebration of A Life: Donald Pippin
was held at the location of “The Old Spaghetti Factory Café & Excelsior Coffee House”, where it all began! The event was a moving and nostalgic afternoon or reminiscences, hilarious stories, great food and drink, and of course MUSIC!
WATCH the video STREAM OF “CELEBRATING A LIFE: DONALD PIPPIN”
Click here to read the printed program
The musical career of Donald Pippin, Artistic Director Emeritus and founder of Pocket Opera, has spanned over six decades and as many time zones. Born in Zebulon, North Carolina and educated at Harvard University, Donald began his career as a pianist/accompanist at Balanchine’s School for American Ballet in New York City. He moved to San Francisco in 1952 and has been an integral part of that city’s artistic life since then. Audiences have followed him loyally from his start at the ‘hungry i’ and Opus One in North Beach, through nearly two decades of presenting a weekly chamber music series at the Old Spaghetti Factory, to his present-day fame as the genius behind one of San Francisco’s most popular operatic institutions.
Donald’s first translation came in 1968, in the course of preparing Mozart’s one-act opera Bastien und Bastienne for performance as part of his chamber music series. The opera, and his singing translation of it, were immediate successes with San Francisco audiences. From that point on, Donald dedicated himself to the task of producing singable, intelligible, and literate English versions of both well-loved classics and lesser-known gems of operatic literature. His repertoire has grown to include over eighty translations, many of which have been used by the Washington Opera at the Kennedy Center, the San Francisco Opera Center, the San Diego Opera, the Juilliard School of Music, and the Aspen Music Festival, to name a few.
