With its Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts due to open in fall 2006, Toronto is heading toward a richer operatic future, more like that of another opera-mad North American city. “What made San Franciscans so susceptible to the plight of consumptive sopranos and murdered tenors? Sheer exposure has had a great deal to do with it. Since the War Memorial Opera House threw open its many doors in 1932, the city of the Golden Gate has possessed what most cities on this continent still lack, a house specifically designed to accommodate the stage works of Mozart, Verdi and Wagner.”