Joshua Kosman February 9, 2021Updated: February 9, 2021, 1:23 pm Cast members perform in the opening act of the San Francisco Opera’s production of Puccini’s “The Girl of the Golden West” in San Francisco in 2010. Photo: Paul Chinn , The Chronicle 2010 California and opera go back a long way together — practically to the founding of the one, though not the other. No sooner had the masses of Forty-Niners poured into the region in search of gold than an entire industry sprang up to keep them entertained with performances of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” and Verdi’s “Ernani.” As the author George Martin lays it out in superlative detail in his 1993 history “Verdi at the Golden Gate,” opera was central to San Francisco’s cultural economy during the Gold Rush. The divas were imported from Europe, but the entrepreneurs and patrons were decidedly homegrown.