Music: In Chicago

(See front cover)

A naked girl with sleek black hair against a bright halo, riding one of three large white camels beneath a great swirl of checkered cloth and amid a riotous procession of companions, awaits the inspection, through lorgnette and opera glass, of the first families of Chicago.

The girl and her companions, painted on the steel curtain of the Chicago Civic Opera's new $20,000,000 opera house, compose an exciting pattern of "figures from familiar operas." Familiar though the operas may be, the figures are unfamiliar. They toss fruit, banners, lanterns, cymbals. Among them strut farm animals. All is barbaric, lyric, crowded, for carnival is being made or perhaps a victory celebrated; perhaps the victory of opera in Chicago.

Looking at their new opera curtain before it rises for the first time Monday night, Chicagoans may be reminded of another design, just as elaborate and colorful but more serious and a million times as big. To sketch this second design adequately requires a good-sized map of the U. S. The sketch can begin almost anywhere—on the coast of Maine, in Florida, or at the bottom tip of Texas. There is an irregular quadrilateral of it in North Carolina. A vast, nearly solid mass of it spreads east, west and south from Chicago. There are patches of it in Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri. It almost blots out New Jersey and New Hampshire, parts of Pennsylvania and Kentucky. It is the design of the fields of operation of the public utility companies over which Samuel Tnsull, financial father of the Chicago opera, rules as power primate.

Compared to this second design, the fantastic curtain revel—in fact the whole Chicago opera organization—becomes no more than Punch-&-Judy. Yet it is Punch-&-Judy on the very largest scale. To make the scale larger, the Chicago company is sent, in the Insull manner, all over the country on tours; not special engagements in a few big cultural capitals like Baltimore, Washington, Atlanta and Cleveland where Otto Hermann Kahn's Metropolitan goes; but country-wide expeditions—Boston, Buffalo, Columbus, Nashville, Birmingham, Jackson, Dallas. San Antonio, El Paso, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Fresno, Sacramento, Oakland. Amarillo, Tulsa, Lincoln.

Ever since he lifted the Chicago Opera and its million-a-year deficit from the grateful shoulders of Harold Fowler McCormick, Mr. Insull has made it his favorite plaything. And most things that Samuel Insull plays with are sooner or later made to pay. Thus, though Architects Graham, Anderson, Probst & White had orders to stint nothing in making Chicago's opera house second to none for luxury, they also had orders to surmount the edifice with a 21-story office building. In the auditorium are rose-velvet boxes, rose-brocade chairs, a gold and ivory proscenium arch, lush carpeting, amber lights, spacious cloak rooms, a rose-and-gold foyer with towering columns of Roman travertine. Around and over the auditorium are 739,000 square feet of office space, the entire income from which will be put to artistic account.