The
Civic Opera Company (1922-1931) was a
ChicagoChicago is the largest city in the U.S. state of Illinois, and with more than 2.8 million people, the 3rd largest city in the United States...
company that produced seven seasons of
grand operaOpera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score. Opera is part of the Western classical music tradition. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
in the Auditorium Theater from 1922 to 1928, and three seasons at its own Civic Opera House from 1929 to 1931 before falling victim to financial difficulties brought on in part by the
Great DepressionThe Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
.
The Civic Opera was actually formed by reorganizing the bankrupt of the
Chicago Opera AssociationThe Chicago Opera Association was a company that produced seven seasons of grand opera in Chicago’s Auditorium Theater from 1915 to 1921. The founding artistic director and principal conductor was Cleofonte Campanini, while the general manager and chief underwriter was Harold F. McCormick...
in 1921. Opera Association general manager
Harold F. McCormickHarold Fowler McCormick, Sr. was chairman of the board of International Harvester Company. McCormick was the youngest son of Cyrus McCormick and Nancy “Nettie” Fowler McCormick, inventor and manufacturer of the mechanical reaper.-Biography:...
resigned and was replaced by utilities magnate
Samuel InsullSamuel Insull was an Anglo-American investor based in Chicago who was known for purchasing utilities and railroads. He contributed to creating an integrated electrical infrastructure in the United States...
, while sixteen of the eighteen directors were carried over from the old company.
The
Civic Opera Company (1922-1931) was a
ChicagoChicago is the largest city in the U.S. state of Illinois, and with more than 2.8 million people, the 3rd largest city in the United States...
company that produced seven seasons of
grand operaOpera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score. Opera is part of the Western classical music tradition. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
in the Auditorium Theater from 1922 to 1928, and three seasons at its own Civic Opera House from 1929 to 1931 before falling victim to financial difficulties brought on in part by the
Great DepressionThe Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
.
History
The Civic Opera was actually formed by reorganizing the bankrupt of the
Chicago Opera AssociationThe Chicago Opera Association was a company that produced seven seasons of grand opera in Chicago’s Auditorium Theater from 1915 to 1921. The founding artistic director and principal conductor was Cleofonte Campanini, while the general manager and chief underwriter was Harold F. McCormick...
in 1921. Opera Association general manager
Harold F. McCormickHarold Fowler McCormick, Sr. was chairman of the board of International Harvester Company. McCormick was the youngest son of Cyrus McCormick and Nancy “Nettie” Fowler McCormick, inventor and manufacturer of the mechanical reaper.-Biography:...
resigned and was replaced by utilities magnate
Samuel InsullSamuel Insull was an Anglo-American investor based in Chicago who was known for purchasing utilities and railroads. He contributed to creating an integrated electrical infrastructure in the United States...
, while sixteen of the eighteen directors were carried over from the old company. The new Civic Opera also fell heir to
Mary Garden' Mary Garden , was a Scottish operatic soprano with a substantial career in France and America in the first third of the 20th century...
as musical director as well as all of the costumes, scenery, and other resources of the defunct Opera Association. The Civic Opera Company was Chicago’s first real world class Opera Company, it was also a “democratic” opera company, aiming for a popular audience. While productions were supposed to based upon what the people wanted, though they actually turned out to be the Italian repertory that the sponsors and the executives favored and the modern French operas beloved of reigning diva Mary Garden, while German works and operetta were sadly neglected.
The Civic Opera Company opened on November 13, 1922 with a stunning performance of
AïdaAida is an opera in four acts by Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto by Antonio Ghislanzoni, based on a scenario written by French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette...
. This was a traditional opera to start with and was obviously the choice of Insull and not Mary Garden, who was the champion of French opera and had a more modern taste in music. Typical of what she would have chosen would have been
Pelléas et Mélisande,Pelléas et Mélisande is an opera in five acts with music by Claude Debussy. It was first performed at the Opéra-Comique, Paris on 30 April 1902. The French libretto was adapted from the Symbolist play of the same name by Maurice Maeterlinck...
a role Debussy had actually written for her. This is almost the opposite of Insull’s taste in opera, he preferred older pieces in Italian, such as works by Verdi, Puccini, and Rossini. This tension was resolved by having an almost equal number of Italian and French operas a year, contrary to practice at virtually any other opera house outside of France, with other languages wildly under represented. Sometimes even Russian operas, such as
Boris GodunovBoris Fyodorovich Godunov was de facto regent of Russia from 1584 to 1598 and then the first non-Rurikid tsar from 1598 to 1605...
, were performed in French.
New Opera House
Originally, like Chicago Opera Association, the Civic Opera Company, was housed in the Auditorium theater. This theater was superlative for singing, the acoustics were and are second to none, but there was no back stage to speak of. This limits the productions possible to put on and that can be housed at one point in time, a limit that both Insull and Garden chafed under, so very early on, Insull decided that there would be a new opera house. The new Civic Opera House would be marginally smaller in seat capacity than the auditorium, but this was out-weighed by the back stage space which was to be larger than any other back stage space at that time, and the acoustics were not quite as good as that of the auditorium, but they are still very good. The building of the new opera house was to be semi-financed by Insull, and the rest would be leveraged in with bonds to be held by the
Metropolitan Life Insurance CompanyMetLife, Inc. is the holding corporation for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company or MetLife for short. The firm was founded on March 24, 1868. For most of its life the company was a mutual organization, but it went public in 2000...
. The original plan was that the Civic Opera would retire these bonds over the next eighty years with rents from a 28 story office tower above the theatre. Thus they would completely own the building and rentals from the office space would subsidize the Civic Opera Company.
Bankruptcy
This was a magnificent plan and would have worked wonderfully, except that opening night ironically fell on November 4, 1929 (again with a delightful performance of Adia) less than a month after the
Black TuesdayBlack Tuesday is a term used to refer to certain events which occur on a Tuesday. It has been used in the following cases:*Wall Street Crash of 1929, an American stock market crash...
stock crash. This catastrophe, coupled with the extravagance of the new house, were body blows at the financial health of the civic Opera, starting a chain reaction. Soon Insull, the financial mainstay, lost control of his utilities and transportation companies and became unable to under-write Civic Opera. Mary Garden, the star-power and resident genius of Civic, never happy with the new opera house, retired abruptly after a performance of
Massenet’sJules Massenet was a French composer best known for his operas. His compositions were very popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and he ranks as one of the greatest melodists of his era. Soon after his death, his style went out of fashion, and many of his operas fell into almost...
Le jongleur de Notre-DameLe jongleur de Notre-Dame is an opera in three acts by Jules Massenet to a French libretto by Maurice Léna. It was first performed in Monte Carlo on 18 February 1902.-History:...
at the end of the 1931/2 season. Finally, on June 23, 1932, Civic Opera declared bankruptcy and was forced to liquidate.
Sources
- Davis, Ronald L., Opera in Chicago, Appleton, New York City, 1966.
- McDonald. Forrest, Insull, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. 1962.
- Marsh, Robert C. and Norman Pellegrini, 150 Years of Opera in Chicago, Northern Illinois University Press, Chicago 2006.