SFCM Remembers West Coast Opera Icon and Longtime Faculty Member Willene Gunn
Mezzo-soprano Gunn served as a member of the faculty for 30 years and was given an honorary Doctor of Music degree upon her retirement in 2005.
Willene Gunn (stage photo credit: Chris Bennion).
By Alex Heigl
Willene Gunn, longtime voice faculty at SFCM and the former Director of the Conservatory’s Opera program, died August 10 at 84, due to complications following heart surgery.
Born in Kalispell, Montana and raised in nearby Eureka, Gunn was the first woman from her hometown to go to college—double-majoring in theater and music at the University of Montana—and would go on to graduate from the San Francisco Opera’s Merola program.
Gunn directed over 90 major works by Mozart, Verdi, Puccini, Bernstein and other significant composers across the West Coast and Bay Area. She produced and directed over 35 productions at SFCM and over 100 scenes a year in the opera program’s workshops, which garnered her the Sarlo Award for Excellence in Teaching from the Conservatory in 2000.
“Willene Gunn has been a source of daily inspiration to me since I was 19,” SFCM Chair and Stage Director of Opera and Musical Theatre Heather Mathews said. “Truly, there is not a day that passes where I don’t think of her and invoke her name with a smile on my face, gratitude in my heart and reverence for her in my art.”
“Willene was everything you could ever ask for in a mentor,” Mathews continued. “She taught me to deliver excellence and expected it in return. She was impeccably organized and consistently prepared and asked for the same from me. She was beautifully kind and empathetic yet firm and determined… She brought a clear, inspired vision to every production she directed and simultaneously taught performers how to make a moment, role, production their own.”
Outside of SFCM, Gunn served as Artistic Director of Rogue Opera in southern Oregon from 2006-2009 and as Artistic Director for the Brava! Opera Theater and James Collier Young Artist Program in Ashland, Oregon from 2010-2016, in addition to her extensive CV as a performer. She also authored a textbook with Kathryn Cathcart, Teaching Opera—The Role of The Opera Workshop, published by Leyerle Press in 2008.
SFCM was “basically a string and piano school,” when Gunn arrived on faculty, she explained in a 2016 oral history for the school’s library, “and as we started to build the opera program we worked with the voice teachers. The two departments should complement each other: a singer wants to be in a place where they love the voice teacher, but also needs a place to perform.”
Gunn’s importance to the opera program cannot be overstated, nor can her dedication at its outset: Besides painting the sets, she did makeup and designed props for productions. “It really was a homegrown operation,” she recalled. Unsurprisingly, as a performer, she stressed the importance of getting students onstage as much as possible in her oral history: “You have to have them perform, you cannot learn to perform from a book. Their nervous system has to be on the stage, learning how to think into a character and how to work into a character physically. How to channel their energy and focus and think beyond their nervous system. You can’t do that without doing it!”
Donations in Gunn’s memory can be made to St. Jude's Research Hospital for Children or Doctors Without Borders.