About the Author

     Kenneth Jakobs has been privileged to be a part of many San Francisco Bay Area opera and musical theater productions and concerts: as a performer of principal baritone roles, actor, soloist, chorister, stage director, producer and translator.    

     He studied music, theater, languages and voice at UCSB and SFSU, and also learned a great deal about performance and production from his participation in opera workshops at the San Francisco Community Music Center, and from his experience as a supernumerary in 23 San Francisco Opera productions.

     As a performer, Ken quickly became aware of how much more enthusiastically his audiences responded to opera in English versus those in foreign languages, and became an ardent advocate of the former. He devoutly believes English provides a much more immersive and profound operatic experience for American audiences. 

     Disappointed by the poor quality of available English performing translations, he decided he could do better himself.  To date he has created complete performing translations of thirteen operas by Puccini, Mozart, Rossini, Massenet, Bizet, Mascagni, and Leoncavallo.  There have been many productions of these locally, nationally and internationally, and producers and audiences have praised their power to entertain and move them.