Music: In Chicago

• Share

(2 of 2)

After they have decided what they think about the curtain, and inspected the broad shallow horseshoe of boxes to see how many and which Insulls, McCormicks, Ryersons, Fairbankses, Fieldses, Cranes. Swifts, Thornes and family jewels are present, Chicago first-nighters will see the black-haired girl and her white camels vanish upward (the stage ceiling is supported by a 73½ foot steel truss, the largest ever used, capable of carrying more than 11,000,000 pounds). After Conductor Giorgio Polacco has become a shadow in a bowl of shadow, his shirtfront and the tip of his nose touched with golden light from the page in front of him, the familiar strains of Aïda will begin (Rosa Raisa and Charles Marshall in the leading parts).

After the curtain has come down again, talk will be of the season's ensuing events and prospects. Outstanding Chicago opera talk will or should be:

¶Mary Garden, Chicago's "Our Mary," got off a boat in Manhattan last week. She said: "I weigh 120 pounds when I'm before the public and when I'm not it's nobody's business." She did not hurry out to Chicago for the great opening night, having contracted to sing in Philadelphia and Manhattan first. Her latest enthusiasm is one of Mr. Insull's "office boys," a young man named Hamilton Forrest who, unbeknownst to Mr. Insull, composed an opera and threw himself, as many other youths have done but without his languid charm, upon Miss Garden's bounty. "He is di-vine!" she says, kissing her fingertips as she has seen the French do. "And 7 discovered him! I have done as much for French composers, for Italians. That at last I should have discovered an American! . . ."

Composer Forrest's La Dame aux Camélias will be the only First-Performance of the Chicago season, with Mary Garden and Charles Kackett in the leads.

¶Other operas new to the Chicago repertoire will be Mascagni's Iris with Edith Mason, Antonio Cortis, Giacomo Rimini. Virgilio Lazzari; Riccardo Zandonai's Conchita with Rosa Raisa; Massenet's Don Quichotte with Vanni-Marcoux, Hallie Stiles and Desire Defrere.

¶Hallie Stiles is a not unlovely young woman from Syracuse who sings soprano and has made herself a name at the Opera Comique (Paris). Her banker-husband has modified his life to suit hers.

¶Other new singers will be Sopranos Florence Macbeth and Thelma Votipha. Tenor Theodore Strack (Hungarian) and Basso Carl Bitterl. Conductor Frank St. Leger and Tenor Theodore Ritch have been re-engaged. Naurent Novikoff, onetime partner of Anna Pavlowa, will direct the ballet school.

¶Two European conductors will make Chicago debuts—the Russian Emil Cooper, leader of the first Diaghileff ballet, since the Russian Revolution a resident of Paris; and Egon Pollak of the Hamburg Staatsoper.