As far as musical awards go, you could do a lot worse than one from the descendants of one of the San Francisco Opera (SFO)'s founders.

Three SFCM students have won a combined $18,000 in awards from the Lorenzo Foundation in its 2026 cycle: alum Jenna Toler ('23, Voice), Mallika Suryadevara (a current Voice student in Matthew Worth's studio), and Pre-College pianist Ryan Miller. Each was given a $6,000 prize to be awarded in two halves in 2026 and 2027.

While at SFCM, coloratura soprano Toler sung Le Rossignol in the Spring 2023 production of Maurice Ravel's L'enfant et les Sortilèges in 2023, as well as roles in Richard Strauss' Arabella, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro and The Impresario, and Giuseppi Verde's Rigoletto. Suryadevara, awarded for both vocals and composition, has a background in South Indian classical music, which she taught to children in her hometown of Frisco, Texas. Twelve-year-old Miller studies with Erna Gulabyan at SFCM.

Though absent from SFO's official history, Giuseppe Brucia, a Sicilian immigrant, was crucial to the foundation of the iconic house. According to his grandson Larry, Brucia was playing cards in the historically Italian SF neighborhood of North Beach in 1918 (or 1919) with a group that included Italian conductor Gaetano Merola.

Opera had long been popular in San Francisco: Enrico Caruso famously sung Don Jose in Carmen the night before the devastating 1906 earthquake reshaped the city, and Luisa Tetrazzini gave an open-air concert on Christmas Eve in 1910. Talk turned to founding an opera house of SF's own, after which Merola began planning, eventually pulling together a debut performance starring tenor Giovanni Martinelli for June 1922, at the Stanford University football stadium.

Martinelli, however, wanted to be paid his $16,000 fee ($297,446.45 in 2026 dollars) up front. The presenters went to the Bank of Italy, and, as the story goes, Brucia signed a personal guarantee for the loan in lieu of the collateral the bank asked for. "Without Giuseppe Brucia, there never may have been a San Francisco Opera," the organization's then-General Director David Gockley, told SFGATE in 2011.

Learn more about studying Voice at the collegiate level at SFCM, the Conservatory's Pre-College program, or the Lorenzo Foundation.