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
Comic opera aiming to establish an English school of family-friendly light opera by composers such as Frederic Clay and Edward Solomon as a countermeasure to the continental operettas, commissioned Clay's collaborator, W. S. Gilbert, and the promising young composer, Arthur Sullivan, to write a short one-act opera that would serve as an afterpiece to Offenbach's "La Périchole". The result was "Trial by Jury"; its success launched the Gilbert and Sullivan partnership. "Mr. R. D'Oyly Carte's Opera Bouffe Company" took "Trial" on tour, playing it alongside French works by Offenbach and Alexandre Charles Lecocq. Eager to liberate the English stage from risqué French