NEW YORK — For 63 years, opera fans have kept a regular Saturday afternoon date with their radio.
Texaco-sponsored Metropolitan Opera broadcasts filled homes and cars from Maine to California with their arias, celebrity-studded intermissions and whimsical trivia quizzes.
The fans' pleasure turned to operatic-pitch lament two weeks ago, when ChevronTexaco Corp. announced it would stop financing the broadcasts after next season. While the Met is confident it will find a new sponsor, fans wrung their hands and waxed nostalgic over a show that has changed their lives.
"Boy, I can remember riding around in the car in the '50s looking for a Texaco station to gas up at, because they sponsored the opera!" Avise Nissen, of Mount Rainier, Md., wrote in an e-mail to Opera News magazine.
Nissen first heard opera on the Texaco program, when she was in her early teens in Arkansas.
"It's a democratic thing that Texaco did," Nissen said later in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. "Opera has this snobby, snotty mystique and people thought, 'Oh, opera — ugh!' But the Texaco thing . . . created fans all over the country."
The Saturday afternoon broadcasts have been a staple on classical music stations since 1931, with Texaco beginning sole sponsorship nine years later. The broadcasts now reach about 10 million people in 42 countries, through 360h6S. public and commercial stations as well others around the world.
For David Scally, a retired doctor in Chevy Chase, Md., the broadcasts provided a music education. He was one of the hundreds of worried fans who wrote letters and e-mails to the Met this week.
"I still have fond memories of moving my aunt's old portable Philco to where I would not disturb the rest of the household and listening to my first Met broadcast — Wagner's 'Lohengrin' on Jan. 25, 1947," Scally wrote.
Sponsorship of the broadcasts, live from Lincoln Center, changed after Chevron acquired Texaco two years ago in a $39 billion deal. The more cumbersome corporate name was inserted, but the show otherwise remained intact.
ChevronTexaco's withdrawal from the opera, the company said, was a marketing decision.
Thus ended the longest continuous sponsorship in the history of American radio — one that began with the Dec. 7, 1940, broadcast of Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro."
Met General Manager Joseph Volpe said he's "determined to have these broadcasts continue." He expects a new company or private donor to pledge the $7 million a year needed so the Met performances can be aired live each Saturday, from December to the spring.
The intermission features are set in a small hall behind the Met's main theater where the Met chorus rehearses.
Fans send letters and e-mails to "Opera Quiz," getting prizes of recordings or books if their questions are answered in laughter-filled chatter among each week's changing panelists.
After hearing about the oil giant's decision to drop sponsorship, Pati Wolfgang of Felton, Pa., wrote a letter to ChevronTexaco, saying she felt "deeply saddened."
"There were many times that I sat and listened with tears in my eyes, feeling such gratitude to your company," Wolfgang wrote. "I remember dancing in my living room, with my oldest son as a baby, to the 'Flower Duet' (from Leo Delibes' opera 'Lakme'). I'll never forget looking into his eyes and seeing that he 'got it,' he heard the profound beauty. . . . You have changed people's lives."