San Francisco Opera raised the curtain on Verdi's Simon Boccanegra on Tuesday 22 September, ten days later than it meant to.
On 12 September, at 7:25pm and about half an hour before the scheduled curtain, the San Francisco Opera Orchestra went on strike. The company's 104th season-opening performance was cancelled, and so was the free Opera in the Park concert the following afternoon. On 15 September three more were cancelled, the performances of 16, 19 and 20 September, making four in all after the opening. The last two fell after the strike ended on 17 September; the company said it could not hold them because staging opera takes significant rehearsal, preparation and planning.
On 17 September the two sides announced a tentative four-year agreement running from 1 August 2026 to 31 July 2030, subject to ratification. The orchestra agreed to end the strike. Neither side had published what the new contract pays when Cadenza checked the company's economics and updates pages and the orchestra's website on 24 September.
Cadenza has followed this since the contract ran out. We reported on 14 August that the contract had expired on 31 July, and on 7 September, five days before the walkout, we set out the company's case and the musicians' answer to it, including what a twenty per cent cut would take out of a section player's pay.
This piece picks up where that one stopped, to test the arithmetic behind the musicians' claim that the last of management's three offers, a five-year wage freeze, amounted to a cut of roughly a fifth.
The three offers, in the musicians' own words
The orchestra's own strike statement of 12 September, on its website, sets out the sequence.
"Management instead initially proposed a 26% pay cut, which would have returned us to 2015 wages, and later 'improved' that offer to a 20% cut. Coming into today, their latest proposal was a five-year wage freeze, which, factoring in inflation, is equivalent to roughly a 20% cut over the life of the contract."
Three offers, then, on the musicians' account. A cut of just over a quarter. A cut of a fifth. And a freeze that the musicians say is a cut of a fifth by another route.
The previous contract had expired on 31 July. Negotiations had been running since the spring.
Is a five-year freeze really a twenty per cent cut?
This is the musicians' claim about management's latest offer before the strike, and it is checkable.
The company describes that offer differently. In its release of 12 September it said it was "very sensitive to the impact of salary reductions on our Musicians" and had proposed a multi-year contract "that phases in structural change at the same time as increasing wage rates, such that the Musicians' seasonal compensation does not reduce during the term." The orchestra's own negotiations page quotes management describing its five-year proposal in similar terms, as one that would "restructure the orchestra's compensation while keeping musicians' annual earnings at current levels during that period."
Start with what a wage freeze does. If your pay does not move for five years while prices rise, you lose ground at the rate of inflation. The size of the loss depends on which of two perfectly honest measures you use, and the difference between them is large enough to matter.
Take a five-year period in which consumer prices in the San Francisco area rise by about nineteen and a half per cent, which is the Bay Area's rise from June 2021 to June 2026 and is the figure the musicians' own argument rests on.
Under the contract that expired on 31 July, the San Francisco Chronicle reported the guaranteed minimum for a section musician as $118,326.75 for a 24-week season. Put that salary through both measures.
| Measure | What it asks | Result | On $118,326.75 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shortfall against inflation-matched pay | How far behind a colleague whose pay tracked prices would you finish? | 19.5 per cent | about $23,100 a year by the fifth year |
| Loss of purchasing power | How much less can your unchanged salary actually buy? | 16.3 per cent | about $19,300 a year in 2026 dollars |
Both numbers describe the same freeze. The first divides the gap by the salary you started on. The second divides it by the salary you would have needed, which is a larger denominator and so a smaller percentage.
The musicians' figure matches the first measure, and on that measure "roughly a 20% cut" is not rhetoric. It is 19.5 per cent, which rounds to twenty. Their claim stands up.
That is the finding, and the dollars make it sharper. Cadenza reported on 7 September that a twenty per cent cut on that minimum is roughly $23,700 a year. The five-year freeze works out at about $23,100 a year by its fifth year. On that measure the two offers land within about $600 of each other.
On that measure, a five-year freeze takes about as much from a player's pay by its fifth year as the twenty per cent cut would have taken in its first. The musicians had already said that management's offers, the twenty per cent cut among them, were insufficient. The freeze was management's latest proposal when they struck.
The company's case, and the number that supports it
None of that means the company invented its problem.
San Francisco Opera has said throughout that it faces a structural deficit, which it puts at $15 million a year, and that the orchestra's contract "was designed for a volume of work that has not been economically feasible for many years." General Director Matthew Shilvock, announcing the cancellation of the opening, said he was "very disappointed" and that the company "cannot sustain a compensation structure that originated 45 years ago without bringing it into alignment with current reality."
The association's returns are public through the year ending July 2025, as ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer listed them on 24 September. In the year ending July 2023, San Francisco Opera Association reported total revenue of $85.3 million against total functional expenses of $98.4 million. That is a shortfall of $13.1 million in a single year, and expenses that year were some $29.8 million higher than the year before. In the year ending July 2025, the most recent return listed there, revenue was $82.8 million against expenses of $89.1 million, a shortfall of $6.3 million. The year between, to July 2024, showed revenue of $103.9 million against expenses of $93.4 million.
Those are not the company's own framing; they are the filed figures. Two of the three years to July 2025 show a gap, which is consistent with the deficit management says it is trying to close; the year to July 2024 does not. What they do not settle is who should close it, which is what the dispute was about.
Cadenza's 7 September piece set that question against thirteen years of the company's returns and its audited accounts, and found that for a twenty per cent orchestra cut to close a fifteen million dollar gap on its own, the orchestra's payroll would have to be seventy-five million dollars, which is more than the company's entire artistic budget. That arithmetic has not changed, and the company's audited financial statements for the year ending July 2024 bear out the comparison: they put production, music and artistic expenses at $67,548,515 that year and $71,979,378 the year before, both below seventy-five million dollars.
What is not known, and will not be guessed
Three things are worth stating plainly.
The wage terms of the agreement had not been published by either side when Cadenza checked those same pages on 24 September. Neither had said what the musicians will be paid from 1 August 2026. Until that is disclosed, nobody outside the room can say whether the orchestra protected its pay, conceded some of it, or traded it for something else.
The agreement was tentative, and subject to ratification, when this piece was first published on 19 September. The San Francisco Chronicle reported on 23 September that the new contract had been ratified the weekend before, and the company's economics page, read on 24 September, calls it an official agreement.
And the settlement's own architects have been careful. Gabe Young, speaking for the orchestra's negotiating committee, said the musicians were "heartened to have reached a tentative deal that provides a fair contract and stability for the members of the orchestra," and thanked the mayor and his team. Shilvock said he was "deeply grateful" that a tentative agreement had been reached, "one that addresses important structural changes while providing a fair agreement for our Musicians." The company, on social media, said the agreement puts it "on a path toward long-term fiscal stability." None of these statements contains a number.
One claim Cadenza checked against the filings
The orchestra's strike statement of 12 September carries a further argument: that the general director's salary rose 72 per cent between the 2022 and 2025 financial years, from $424,000 to $729,000, according to the company's public filings.
The filings bear out the two numbers. ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer, which extracts the association's Form 990 returns, lists compensation for Matthew Shilvock, as chief executive and general director, of $423,796 for the year ending July 2022 and $729,130 for the year ending July 2025, a rise of 72.0 per cent. The returns call the figure compensation; the word salary is the musicians'. The San Francisco Chronicle reported on 16 September that, according to the company, its board had reviewed executive pay at comparable arts organisations and regarded Shilvock's compensation as appropriate for the scope of his job.
The conductor who did not resign
One story attached itself to this dispute and deserves closing off.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported, sourced to two musicians who said they were present, that the company's music director Eun Sun Kim told players at a rehearsal she would resign in solidarity if they struck. Kim had not confirmed it directly, and the paper said on 16 September that she had not responded to its requests for comment. A company spokesperson described her as expressing solidarity with the orchestra, which confirms a conversation without confirming a threat.
She did not resign. San Francisco Opera's own production page for Simon Boccanegra lists Eun Sun Kim as conductor and, when Cadenza read it on 24 September, carried her title as Caroline H. Hume Music Director and scheduled her for a post-performance talkback after the matinee of 27 September. A conditional remark reported at second hand is not a resignation.
In 2025 it was a contract with an expiry date on it
Every element of this began as a date in a document. The previous agreement ran out on 31 July. Talks opened months before that. The strike came six weeks after expiry, and the settlement five days after the strike, with the mayor's office helping to broker it.
Cadenza carries auditions, vacancies and schemes with open deadlines, free to musicians, on its jobs board and competitions board. It has spent September counting what institutions actually pay the people who play for them, from a four-year cello loan in Brussels to $1.3 million shared among sixteen jazz veterans.
If you go. Simon Boccanegra opened at the War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness Avenue, on Tuesday 22 September, conducted by Eun Sun Kim, with further performances listed for 25 and 27 September. Ticket holders for the cancelled performances were offered a credit, a donation option or a full refund. The free Opera in the Park concert that was lost on 13 September is an annual fixture.
The question both sides will be asked next is the one their own statements avoided. The company says the settlement puts it on a path to fiscal stability and the musicians say it delivers a fair contract, and those two claims can only both be true if the numbers are known. Will either side publish what the orchestra will actually be paid from 1 August?
Sources: San Francisco Opera's own press release of 12 September 2026, which records the 7:25pm cancellation of the 104th season-opening Simon Boccanegra and of Opera in the Park, and carries the company's description of its offer; its press release of 15 September 2026, which cancelled the performances of 16, 19 and 20 September; the company's own economics page, carrying its letter on the agreement and the end of the strike; and the San Francisco Opera Orchestra's own website, whose strike statement of 12 September is the source for the sequence of the three offers in the musicians' own words, for the claim that a five-year freeze equals roughly a 20 per cent cut, for the 2015-wages comparison and for the assertion about the general director's compensation, and which also carries the joint statement of 17 September with the terms and dates of the tentative four-year agreement and the quotations from Matthew Shilvock and Gabe Young. The curtain time, Eun Sun Kim's reported remark, the Chronicle's requests for comment and the company's answer on executive pay are from the San Francisco Chronicle's reports of 12 September and its strike explainer; the start of negotiations in May is from the first of those; the ratification and the opening performance are from its review of 23 September; the company's social-media wording is as reported by KTVU.
The financial figures for the year ending July 2023 are from San Francisco Opera Association's public return, EIN 94-0836240, as published in ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer: total revenue $85,335,694 and total functional expenses $98,402,775, against total expenses of $68,630,368 in the year ending July 2022; for the years ending July 2024 and July 2025, revenue of $103,898,267 and $82,803,363 against expenses of $93,360,982 and $89,075,957. The compensation figures for Matthew Shilvock are from the same ProPublica page, read on 24 September 2026. The inflation arithmetic is Cadenza's own, worked from a five-year price rise of about 19.5 per cent and shown both ways in the table above. That figure is the orchestra's, on its negotiations updates page, which also quotes management's description of its five-year proposal, and it matches the Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer price index for San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward (series CUURS49BSA0), which rose from 309.497 in June 2021 to 369.913 in June 2026, or 19.5 per cent. The production, music and artistic expenses are from San Francisco Opera Association's audited financial statements for the year ended 31 July 2024, linked above. Eun Sun Kim's continuing engagement is from San Francisco Opera's own Simon Boccanegra production page, read on 19 September 2026 and again on 24 September 2026.
The $118,326.75 guaranteed section minimum under the expired contract is as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle on 12 September, and was used in Cadenza's 7 September piece, which credited it to San Francisco Classical Voice and also carried the thirteen-year review of the company's Form 990 filings.
Correction, 24 September 2026: this piece originally said the association's tax returns were public only to 2023, carried only aggregate officer pay, and could not confirm the musicians' figures for the general director's pay. The returns are public to the year ending July 2025 and list Matthew Shilvock's compensation as $423,796 for the year ending July 2022 and $729,130 for the year ending July 2025, matching the musicians' figures. It also attributed to him the phrase "on a path toward long-term fiscal stability", which was the company's, and shortened his remark about the 45-year-old compensation structure; the first is now attributed to the company and the second is given in full. The freeze's shortfall is now given as about $23,100 by its fifth year, not $23,074 by 2030. It also said that all four further cancelled performances went before the strike ended; two of them, on 19 and 20 September, were dates after it ended. And it placed the musicians' claim about the general director's pay on their negotiations page; it is in their strike statement of 12 September.
Cover photograph: The War Memorial Opera House on Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco, home of San Francisco Opera, photographed in March 2008. Sanfranman59, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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