Pocket Opera North Beach, through nearly two decades of presenting a weekly chamber music series (1960-1978) at the Old Spaghetti Factory, to his present-day fame as the creator of one of San Francisco's most popular operatic institutions. Pippin'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, Pippin has dedicated himself to the task of producing literate English versions of both well-loved classics and lesser-known gems of
Jacobowsky und der Oberst (opera) Jacobowsky und der Oberst (opera) Jacobowsky und der Oberst, Op. 49, ("Jacobovsky and the Colonel") is an opera in four acts by Giselher Klebe who also wrote the libretto based on the 1944 play of the by Franz Werfel. It premiered on 2 November 1965 at the Hamburg State Opera which had commissioned the work. Klebe dedicated it to the then director of the Staatsoper, Rolf Liebermann. Time and place: 1940, Paris, St. Cyrill, Bayonne and Saint-Jean-de-Luz The first American performance was on 27 June 1967 at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, using the same cast, conducted by Matthias Kuntzsch.