By Laura Brown

When Lotfi Mansouri’s parents sent him from Iran to UCLA in the 1950s, they expected him to return as a physician. The young man, with little interest in medicine, had great difficulties with his premed class load and appealed to his academic advisor for help. The advisor suggested he take a voice class, which would not require homework but would earn credits.

“It was kismet,” Mansouri told the Morning Forum audience on Dec. 3. A natural tenor, Mansouri gradually reduced his medical studies to take more classes in music and theater. When the San Francisco Opera Company performed “Othello” at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, Mansouri got a part as a spear-carrier and “didn’t want to leave the stage.”

He developed an act with fellow student Carol Burnett, performing at ladies’ clubs and luncheons for $5 apiece. Last summer Burnett appeared at a gala honoring Mansouri, where she reminisced about going to their performances “by horse and buggy.”

Although his disappointed father disowned him, Mansouri embarked on a career that took him from associate professor of music at UCLA to directing jobs at opera companies throughout the world, including Zurich and Geneva. He was reunited with his father in 1971, when he was selected to be the artistic advisor to the Tehran Opera.

While general director of the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto, a post he held from 1976 to 1988, Mansouri wrote a book in which he stated that the San Francisco Opera was the dream company he had always tried to emulate. The “dream company” selected him as its general director in 1988, a post he held until his retirement in July.

Mansouri told the Morning Forum audience that he believes opera is becoming more and more popular because it encompasses music, theater, ideas and emotion - “the MTV of culture.” Regarding the staging of unpopular operas, he quoted Samuel Goldwyn: “If the people don’t want to see something, you can’t stop them.”

Of the notoriously harsh critics in San Francisco, Mansouri said, “The less they know, the harsher they are. They don’t travel, they don’t hear other productions. I don’t read them.” He noted that San Francisco audiences do not appear to be influenced by the critics, but admitted that visiting artists can be crushed by the criticism in local papers, so artists are given a welcome packet that includes a warning about the San Francisco critics. “Actually, (the reviews) get me a lot of sympathy,” Mansouri said.

The Morning Forum is a members-only lecture series held at the United Methodist Church of Los Altos. Membership is closed for this year. To get on a waiting list for membership, write to: Morning Forum, P.O. Box 274, Los Altos 94023-0274.