Patrick Bade
Opera in Chicago

Patrick Bade - Opera in Chicago

- Thank you. I’m talking today about the golden age of opera in Chicago, from 1910 to 1932. Now, Chicago might seem a strange place to have a great opera house. It is, of course, the hub of the North American transport system, connecting the two coasts and also connecting the Great Lakes with the river system of the Mississippi. And it grew in a spectacular way. At the end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century, it was the most dynamic, the fastest-growing city in the world. But, of course, it has a terrible climate for singers ‘cause it’s either very, very hot or it’s very, very cold. And the the temperatures can change by up to 30 degrees in one day. That is not good for singers’ vocal cords. And, of course, another problem was that if a singer did fall ill, before the days of air travel, it wasn’t easy to find substitutes.

Visuals and audio are displayed throughout this presentation.

The nearest opera houses were great distances away. So this is the house that was opened in 1929. You can see Chicago Civic Opera Company. And this, brits listening in may well remember, a wonderful production of “Rigoletto,” Jonathan Miller’s production. It was a huge success at the English National Opera, and it was set in Chicago, in gangster land. So the Duke of Rigoletto becomes the duke. And had a production, brilliant production. I saw it many times, absolutely loved it. That was inspired by a famous scene in Billy Wilder’s movie, “Some Like it Hot,” where there’s a gangsters convention in Florida. And this is George Raft, just the wonderfully smooth and sinister Spats Colombo. And there, the gangsters convention is raided by the police. And he’s questioned, where was he, what’s his alibi for the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago? So he turns to his henchman on the left and he says, “We was at Rigoletto.” And the henchman says, “Sure, boss. We was at Rigoletto’s.” And that memorable moment in Billy Wilder’s film “Some Like it Hot,” was inspired by real events in Chicago. I mean, the period I’m talking about covers exactly, of course, the period of prohibition and bootlegged liquor and gangsterism.

This is Al Capone. Of course, he was the most notorious of all the Chicago mobsters. He grew up around gangsterism in Chicago. Famous movies like “Little Caesar” in 1931, Edward G. Robinson on the right-hand side, Paul Mooney on the left, they made a career out of playing mobsters. And so, as I said, the production in London was inspired by the movie. And the line in the movie was inspired by a real event, when a Chicago mobster was gunned down by the police on the way to the opera. When they searched the body, in his tux, they found tickets to Verdi’s “Rigoletto,” which was the most performed opera in Chicago throughout this period. It was done every single year from 1918 to 1929, with the most mouth-watering cast. The elegant Tito Schipa, the heartbreakingly beautiful Galli Curci, wonderful baritones like Tito Ruffo, , you know, legendary performances you would love to have heard. I always think with a certain sadness of that poor gangster, you know, that couldn’t the police wait ‘til after the performance so that at least he could have died happy. But I’m going to give you a little taste of what that poor man missed, one of these legendary casts from Chicago of “Rigoletto.”

Here is the super elegant Tito Schipa, trying to seduce the lovely, innocent Amelita Galli Curci as Gilda.

• I hate to cut off Amelita, but we’ll hear more of her later. So as in New York, opera in Chicago was a very social thing. And you can see that all the programmes had printed the names of the board of trustees. And again, as in New York, you get the box holders. And they had the most fabulous cast in Chicago. They really gave The Met a run for their money. In fact, I can only think of one other company in the whole world, really, that had quite such wonderful casts in this period. And that was actually not The Met. It was the Colón in Buenos Aires. In fact, the two companies really worked in tandem with one another because Buenos Aires, being the only major company in the Southern Hemisphere, their opera season was at the opposite time of the year. So a lot of singers would appear in our winter in Chicago. And then they’d take the trains down through United States to South America and land up in Buenos Aires. But just have a look at the names of 1928 to 1929. You know, Mary Garden, Frida Lidar, Edith Mason, Claudia Muzio, Rosa Raisa, Eva Turner. Wonderful cast, Galli Curci, Dufranme and Dufrere And yes, it really makes the mouth water, all these terrific casts.

How did they get them? Well, they paid for them. The fees at Chicago were much higher than they were at The Met. The top fees in the world were actually in Buenos Aires and Chicago. So that, obviously, attracted a lot of top talent. But they also made extraordinary demands on the singers. And I’ll talk a little bit more about that later. This is from the beginning, up until 1929, this is the old Auditorium Building in Chicago, an architectural masterpiece by the greatest architect of the late-19th century in America, Louis Sullivan. This was opened in 1889, with a guest performance from the world’s most famous soprano of the time, Adelina Patti. And all the greats would come, from Melba to Manu, Tetricini. They all came here as guest performers, but there wasn’t really a high-standard company until the collapse of the, oh, here’s the interior, very beautiful interior of the old Auditorium Building. This is Claire Fonte Campanini. And if you remember, he was the chief conductor of Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera Company. When that collapsed in 1910, Chicago very happily gathered up the talent that was now available. And Campanini, he was the chief conductor until his death in 1919 and, of course, many of Hammerstein’s singers, most notably, Mary Garden.

The gentleman on the left is called Samuel Insole. He was the utilities king of Chicago. And until his financial empire crashed in 1932, as a result of the Great Depression, he was one of the most rich and powerful people in America. And Frida Lidar, I’m going to quote her several times, her memoirs, she wrote very vividly about Chicago. She says of Mr. Insole, “He was a real opera lover and a great friend of artists.” Well, he was a great friend of one artist in particular, a soprano called Mary McCormick. He was, of course, a married man, so this was an affair on the side, and slightly scandalous. But his interest, his financial support of the company was, obviously, linked to promoting her career. She is actually one of the models for the singer in “Citizen Kane.” There are several different stories that feed into the film, the great Orson Welles’ film “Citizen Kane.” But unlike the singer in that film, she was talented. She had a very nice voice and she sings very well. And she was very much appreciated in Paris as well because she was a pretty woman. That always went down well in Paris. So just to prove that she wasn’t a non-entity, she didn’t make many records, only a couple, really. This is a record she made in the late 1920s in Paris of an excerpt from Massenet’s “Manon.”

Audio plays.

• Not the most convincing French accent I’ve ever heard, but, actually, the French never seemed to care about that. They didn’t mind that, for instance, Mary Garden had quite a strong Scottish-accented French. So here, this building was conceived and largely financed by Samuel Insole, but it was also a bit of a financial vice. It’s on Wacker Drive, 46 story building. And so by investing in this building, he also hoped to raise property prices on Wacker Drive, where he owned much of the land and many of the buildings. And here is the interior. Very unusually, of course, it’s high up the building. It’s not on the ground floor. Splendid art decor, looking a bit more like an upmarket cinema than a traditional opera house. So here, some of the singers who came to Chicago, enormous journey in these days. This is pre-travel, so they had to come on boats. There’s lots of layman and on the left, Telle del Monte, Rosa Raisa in the middle. And Carlo Galeffi, who sang a lot of those Rigolettos on the right hand side.

This is the very elegant Italian liner, the Conte di Savoia. And Frida Lida in her memoir, the first time she went to Chicago, she travelled on the British ship Aquitania, which she said smelt of disinfectant, was not very elegant. So she was very happy to switch to this super elegant art decor ocean liner. And in this picture we’ve got singers who are destined for The Met as well, ‘cause you can see Lauritz Melchior in the back row. He was a Met singer, not a Chicago singer, but in the middle seated is Frida Lidar. And towards the right is Lotte Lehmann, going to Chicago. They stayed in the early years anyway, up 'til 1929, they stayed in the Congress hotel, which was right next to the auditorium. The auditorium is on the right in the photograph you see at the top here. And this was very convenient because it was connected to the Opera House by tunnels. So the many of the singers who came to Chicago in the winter, they never stepped outside. They lived in the Congress Hotel. They had the management of the Opera House, delivered bootleg liquor to their rooms.

And they could go backwards and forwards to performances and rehearsals through tunnels underneath the street. So as I said, everybody who went there, everybody who went to Chicago in these periods was impressed by it. It was amazing, more amazing even than New York. I mean, if you read the memoirs of the period, of course everybody talks about the thrill of arriving in Manhattan, seeing the Statue of Liberty, seeing the Manhattan skyline. They all talk about going to Niagara Falls and how wonderful that was. But Chicago was really something else, if a bit scary. This is what Frida Lidar says about it. She says, “In the heart of the city, the roar of traffic was the same, night and day. Often at night, we’ll be startled by an explosion. Next morning will be huge headlines in the papers, describing a dynamite attack by gangsters. Terrible things happened at night on Lake Michigan, not far from our hotel.”

So here is indeed the shore of Lake Michigan where those terrible things happened during the night. And another thing that was very strange and actually unsettling to European singers was the American thirst for publicity that when Lotte Lehmann arrived in 1929, she was told, well, you have to get an agent to put stories about you in the newspapers. Initially Lehmann thought, you know, she was shocked. She said, “Why do I need this? I’m just a singer. I don’t need all of that.” But she soon discovered that she did. And so all sorts of stunts were thought up. This is Maggie Teyte, top right, meeting a Native American princess. You can see Emmy Destinn. Of course, she was actually not in Chicago. She was in New York. But posing with I hope a heavily drugged lion. Nellie Melba being entertained by Douglas Fairbanks JR. Frida Lidar in her autobiography, she says she was constantly being bothered to come up with gimmicks and stories. And she’s photographed wielding a golf club, although she’d never played golf in her life.

And certainly a singer who had a hyperactive agent was the Spanish tenor, Antonio Cortes. There were constant stories. His name was before the fab public. Could see, hailed as a rival to Caruso. Well, a very good tenor, but I think hardly a rival to Caruso. His work as an amateur artist and so on. So any excuse to get your name and your picture into the popular press. And another thing that the singers had to do was to take part in these very gruelling tours around the country, giving performances in a wide range of cities. This is Mary Garden, who was the big star of the Manhattan Opera. And she was queen of Chicago, what can I say? She was so famous that the newspapers would have a daily Mary Garden column, what Mary Garden ate for breakfast this morning, what she did this afternoon. And she was very good at all of this. She always had a memorable, striking, provocative quote that was taken up by the press. So she was very much the dominant figure through much of this period. And actually, she was actually a director, or she called herself directa’, with an A, of the company for a year from 1920 to 21 and with her extravagance, nearly bankrupted it.

So she didn’t stay in that role for very long, but nevertheless, you know, she was queen bee of Chicago. Glamorous woman, as you can see. And she did a very wide range of roles. I talked about her before in connection with Hammerstein. She was the original Melisande, of course, adored by Debussy. There on the left hand side as Salamat. She only sang in French, except for one aria, which was in “Toska.” Again, you wouldn’t have thought she had the voice for “Toska,” but she certainly had the temperament for it. So she sang, it must have been a little bit bizarre ‘cause her Scarpia was the great French bass baritone, Rammi Marcous, who you see on the right hand side. And despite being French, he sang the whole thing in Italian. And she just, as I said, switched to Italian for the aria episode. There was some quite bizarre interchanges between them. For instance, when she thinks he’s trying to get money out of her, in Italian, of course, she says, “Guanto,” but Garden says it in French. And he answers, “Guanto?” Questioning it. And then she says in Italian, she’s supposed to say, “Il prezzo,” but she said “Lazan.”

So it was a very weird bilingual conversation that they had just before she sings. And incidentally, their acting was so realistic in act two, when Scarpia sexually attacks Toska on a sofa that he got arrested at the end of the performance for public indecency. You would’ve thought the Chicago police had more on their minds in the age of Al Capone than a bit of over the top acting on a sofa in act two of “Toska.” But here is Mary Garden after her retirement. And I want to play you this little interview. It was actually made during the second World War. She’d retired back to her native Scotland and she gives this interview for her old fans in Chicago. And I find her whole interview very charming. Well, she sings a Scottish folk song. And I find this very appealing. I mean, even though clearly, you know, she’s not been singing opera for years, the voice still has a very appealing, very lovely quality to it.

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• [Mary] Hello Chicago. This is Mary Garden, speaking to you from my charming city of Aberdeen where I was born. I am many thousands of miles from you tonight, but my heart is ever with you, just as it was in the splendour of our operatic days. I’m sometimes amused by people over here who get an idea, perhaps from the films that Chicago is full of gangsters. Then with great pride, I love to tell them of the beautiful city on the low shores of Lake Michigan. And not only a beautiful city, but also one of America’s greatest musical centres.

• [Interviewer] Tell us about your days there, Miss Garden.

• Oh, you should have seen us then at the height of our operatic splendour. They were great days, full of emotion and excitement. They were the happiest days of my career. So to all my friends and admirers, I send my love.

• [Interviewer] Miss Garden, there’s one way of sending your love that I know would be welcome to all your friends, and that is to let them hear you sing again.

• [Mary] Now when I retired from the operatic stage, Mister , 1931, I made up my mind that my audience would remember me at the height of my career.

• [Interviewer] Oh they’ll always do that, miss Garden. But this is a rather special occasion. We don’t want you to sing us grand opera, but come on and sing us a little Scottish song.

• [Mary] Well, I’ll sing you one of Robbie Burn’s loveliest songs.

• Chicago had a plethora of wonderful sopranos. Once again, as in the days of Caruso, The Met probably had the edge as far as the tenants was concerned, 'cause through the 1920s, the Met had G Lee and Larry Volpe, and they were considered the top two Italian tenors in the world, and of course they had Melchior, who was the greatest Bulgarian tenor of all. But the Chicago had this wonderful roster of sopranos, Mary Garden, Rosa Raisa, Claudia Muzio. Just an amazing group of talented sopranos. This is Rosa Raisa. She was Polish. She was born in Bialystok and she was trained in Italy. And she briefly started her career in Italy, but she spent the great bulk of her career based in Chicago. And her real name was Raitza Burchstein. But I’m going to let her tell you the story of how she acquired the name Rosa Raisa. Audio plays.

• [Rosa] My audition, yes, well when I made my audition for him, he asked me my name. So I told him, my name is Raitza Burchstein, or I said Raitza, Burchstein, Burchstein, like that. He said, “Well, you’ll never become famous in America. That’s too long a name for you to have in America. In America, they like short names.” So I said, “Maestro, what do you think you want to call me?” And she said, “Well, what does it mean, Raitza?” I said, “Well, it’s like rose in Italian.” “Well then we’ll call you Rosa Raisa.” And that was really euphonic and quick.

• [Interviewer] That was it.

• [Rosa] And that was.

• [Interviewer] What was was your father’s reactions?

• [Rosa] Oh my father, my goodness. When he heard Rosa Raisa, he said, “Oh Raitza, why did you take off that beautiful name Burchstein? It’s such a beautiful name.” I said, papa, and explained to him, I said, “You know, it was too long a name for America.” Well, he said, “But still, I’m very sorry that you should not have kept it Burchstein.”

• Well of course, what her dad had understood was, it was nothing to do with the length. I mean, Burchstein is not longer than Raisa. It was that it was too Jewish. And I suppose in America, either at The Met or even in Chicago in this period, you couldn’t really have a great career with an obviously Jewish name. This is a photograph, you know, at the height of her career and she was obviously a very wealthy woman. She went back to Bialystok to raise this monument to her mother, which you can see on the right-hand side. I wonder very much if that survived the second World War and if it still exists. She had, as I said, very largely an American career, north and south. She was at Chicago in the winter and she was in Buenos Aires in the summer. But she did come back to Europe, particularly for two major premiers. Very prestigious Boito Nerone, conducted by Toscanini on the left hand side. And then she was chosen a couple of years later for the world premier of Puccini’s “Turandot.”

Sadly, no nothing exists of her performance of “Turandot” on record. But she had a very big range of roles, like Mary Garden. Jules Madonna on the left hand side and Suor Angelica, those are two very, very, very different characters with very different vocal demands. A role that she very strongly identified with was Rachel in “La Juive” and she actually torches that role for her farewell performance in Chicago in 1937. Now, the changing of her name from Burchstein to Raisa, it worked a treat, actually. Extraordinarily in 1937, the last year of her career, she sang “Tosca” in Berlin at the height of the Nazi regime. Obviously when they hired her, they hadn’t done their homework and they saw the name Raisa and thought she must be Italian and didn’t realise that she was Jewish. But I do rather wonder that she was actually willing to go to Berlin and sing there in 1937. Here she is with her husband, very fine Verian Baritone, Giacomo Rimini.

He made more records than she did actually, and they made a couple of records together. And here they are in front of their villa in Italy. And she’s another one of those singers, like Mary Garden, where the records tell a different story from the critical reaction at the time. But Mary Garden was this tempestuous singing actress. We don’t really hear that on records. We hear some very beautiful singing, very sensitive singing. We don’t hear the temperament coming through. Raisa was also a very emotional singer in the house. And what all the critics and everybody commented on was the size of the voice, that it sounded absolutely enormous, even in the huge space of the old auditorium in Chicago. It must have been, I think more to do with projection that gave the impression of it being a big voice. On record, it doesn’t sound like a huge voice. It doesn’t sound like Rosa Ponselle, for instance, where you can tell straight away that it was a huge voice, or Eva Turner that I’m going to play you in a minute. But it’s a beautiful voice and very well trained and very flexible, as you’ll hear in the from Norma’s Aria Casta Diva.

This is Claudia Muzio who’s dubbed the Divine Claudia. And there are also mysteries about her records and the mystery in her case is that she made a lot of records by the acoustic process at the beginning of her career. And she made a handful of records right at the very end of her career when she was already ill and shortly before her death. But for the decade, when she was really at her vocal peak, she made no records at all. But what you can say about the records is, yes, they do tell the same story as the critics. Everything people said about her, you can hear in the records, it is a very beautiful voice, a very individual voice. She’s an extremely emotional and passionate performer. And she was the singer’s singer. All the other singers praised her and adored her. Frida Lidar says how moved she was. Rose Ponselle was a singer called Mafalda Favero who went to a performance of Traviata. She went backstage and she felt her knees and kissed the hem of the divine Claudius dress.

The tenor Laurie Volpe, he said her voice was made of size and tears and restrained in a fire. I think it’s a wonderful description. There is this incredibly emotional, emotive quality to the sound of her voice, despite the fact that, oh, here she is singing “Toska,” “Nedda,” “Butterfly,” and in on the right hand side. But we’re going to hear her in a bit of an aria from Boito’s “Mephistopheles,” where the emotional quality of her singing comes through very strongly. Now there are singers who can emote on stage before the public, but not in the studio in front of a microphone, but she clearly could. Now it’s a measure of the importance of an opera house, whether they can make a singer into a star or whether they have to import their stars. Nellie Melba was made into a star in London, the Royal Opera House. And there, Mary Garden was made into a superstar in Paris. Kirsten Flagstad was made into a superstar in New York at The Met. The house has to have a certain prestige before this can happen.

And was made into a major star by Chicago. She started off her career in Italy. She was from Milan, without having a huge success. And she then went to Buenos Aires and she had a moderate success in Buenos Aires. She was liked, but she wasn’t on the top level of stars like Rosa Raisa or Claudia Muzio was. During the first World War, she was supposed to come back to Europe but because of the German New Boat campaign, it may cross the Atlantic, extremely dangerous. And she decided not to do that. So she decided to try and audition for other houses in America, so she went North New York, she auditioned at The Met, they said thank you, but no thank you. The biggest mistake they ever made. And she went up to Chicago and she was taken on for the role of Gilda in “Rigoletto.” And for once, there was no advanced publicity. Nobody knew anything about her at all. There were no expectations. But she sang in a matinee performance in November, 1918 during the First World War, and the audience went absolutely berserk. They couldn’t get enough of her. At the end, there were incredible wild scenes of enthusiasm. And at the end of the performance, the manager would rush backstage and immediately signed her up for many more performances.

And she was based in Chicago then for the next few years, the best years of her career. Later in the 20s, her later years of her career, she moved to New York to The Met. But I want to play you a recording. This is one of the first recordings she made just after her sensational debut in Chicago here, singing the role of Gilda. And there’s something so appealing about her, it just makes me melt. It’s such a distinctive tone. People compared her with Patti. I’m not sure that she was a vocalist on the level of Patti, but I do understand the comparison. What people said about Patti was that it all sounded so completely natural. And there was this wonderful combination of great purity of tone, instrumental purity of tone with a wonderful sensuality and lusciousness. And you’ll hear all of this in this next one I’m going to play you.

Audio plays.

• Now suddenly I’m going to have to move on because I’m not going to get through everything otherwise. This is Edith Mason and she’s the only one of the singers I’m playing you today who was American born. She was born in St. Louis. Again, it’s rather like The Met. It was very difficult for an American born singer, really, to make their mark. But she had an important career in Chicago. It’s a very, very lovely voice. And I’m playing you this record because it seems to me a marvellous example of how a great artist can make magic out of a very simple tune. It’s a tune you all know. It’s “The Last Rose of Summer” used by Flotow in his opera, “Martha.” And she turns into something extraordinarily poetic with the use of rubato. Rubato is robbed time. So she’s not keeping to a strict tempo. The tempo is very, very elastic. She lingers over certain notes, but she does it in a way that you’re not aware of the artifice of this. It sounds completely natural. It’s like she’s singing to herself and making it up as she goes along.

Audio plays.

• I love the way she floats and holds onto that high note towards the end. Now this is another singer who’s one of my absolute idols and who never sang at The Met. This is Conchita Supervia. She actually only appeared there for one season, 1915, again I think I suspect probably because of the first World War, not wanting to cross the Atlantic. And she made her debut there as Chalot in “Vertes.” And if we believe the inscription on her tomb, which is in the Liberal Jewish Cemetery of Wilston Green in London, she would’ve been 15 when she made her debut in Chicago as Chalot. I think that’s really not possible. But she probably was only 19. Very distinctive voice, which may or may not appeal to you, with a very marked, rapid vibrato.

Audio plays.

• Move on there. Lovely annunciation, French language. She actually has lovely annunciation of any language she sings in. Her English is absolutely exquisite. I mentioned that The Met had the really big star tenors Julie La Revolpi, but Chicago had very good tenors too. Wonderfully elegant Tito Schipa was there throughout this period. But their most useful tenor was the Spanish Antonio Cortes. This is the latter, engaging him to sing for the company, which is absolutely mind boggling. He was required to sing, to have ready to sing at the drop of a hat, 22 different roles, some of them in more than one language. He was expected to be able to sing them in French or Italian. And you can see the variety just in this. Travatore, that’s a really heavy role. Samson, that’s a huge role. Chenier, Jacandre, very lyrical roles, like Traviata, and Boem. And he could do it. He could do it all. And here, we see him as Calaf in Turandot on the left. That must be Travatore I think, on the right, Duke of Mantua. So he did some Rigolettos. And Cavaradossi in “Tosca,” Degrier in “Manon.”

I think that must be, yeah, that Egyptian costume. That’s got to be Radames in “Aida.” And he also sang in the local premiere of an opera by Giordano, “La Cena Delle Beffe.” I love this opera. I was so happy to get an opportunity to go and see it in Milan a few years ago. It’s not done very often. It’s an absolutely crazy insane opera. Literally insane 'cause all the characters, the two main characters, are either really insane or feigning insanity. It’s a very dark opera. And the hero of the opera, sung by Cortes here, Gianetto, he really belongs in a straight jacket. And he conveys this manic character, wonderful, the great bursts of manic laughter at the end of this excerpt. Another very great singing actor, he was really, you could say the French . This is Vanni Marcoux. He was a real stalwart of the Chicago company and a favourite partner of Mary Garden in “Tosca” and various other operas.

I think obviously, you’ll hear in this excerpt from Boris Garnov that he has clearly studied the interpretation of Shelly Apin in this famous clock scene, where he goes mad and he hallucinates as he thinks he sees the ghost of a murdered child. You can see the announcement that he was going to sing it. He certainly never sang it in Russian. He was going to sing it in Italian. But in the recording I’m going to play you, he sings it in French. We had a little discussion a week or so ago about this singing, which is halfway between speaking and singing, where you have to go backwards and forwards between speech and song. And this is what he has to do in this scene.

Audio plays.

• In the opera period, relatively few British singers of international reputation. Probably only two sopranos really made it outside of Britain: Maggie Teyte, who was quite a star in France at the beginning of her career, and Eva Turner, who was much appreciated in Italy. They both sang in Chicago. Here is the very lovely Maggie Teyte. Again, it’s actually the same excerpt from “Manon” that we heard earlier with Mary McCormick.

• Here is the redoubtable Eva Turner, who I met on many occasions towards the end of her life. You know, in England, she was an adored character, a real national treasure. And this was one hell of a voice. And I’m going to let her speak to you first before you hear her sing.

Audio plays.

• [Eva] My life, I remember very little about my first recordings in Italy in 1926, but I do have a vivid recollection of the making of the very first of them, the finale of Act II of “Aida” and . The had great difficulty in matching my voice with that of the other soloists. And eventually, they placed me right at the back, behind the chorus. Even then, I am happy to say I don’t think that you will have any difficulty in hearing me.

• As you’ll notice in the opening of Aida’s first big aria, there’s a huge, very focused, very metallic sound.

• The repertoire in Chicago was, up 'til the late 20s, it very French dominated. That was the influence of Mary Garden, I suppose, and to some extent, Italian. Of course, Chicago has a very large German population. And at the end of the 20s, there was a shift towards German opera. And there was a very mini golden age, really, from 1928 to 1932, where they got a lot of the best German singers. This is Frida Lida, , Lotte Lehmann. So Chicago got these singers before The Met got them. I’m running out of time. And, of course, I’m going to talk about Wagner at The Met for my next talk after Christmas. So I’m going to finish with just one Wagner excerpt. This is the great Alexander Kipnis, in my opinion, the greatest Wagnerian bass. That’s what he was famous for, the bass roles, like King Mark and Hargan and Gunamunt. But he had a tremendous range, and he could encompass the bass baritone roles. And I think Chicago is the only place where he sang them.

That’s Han Sacks in Maister Singer and Votan. And that’s another thing I’d like to say about Chicago, in comparison with New York. In New York, constricted singers, I mean, singers who in Europe or elsewhere, sang a very wide range of roles, sang a tiny, narrow range of roles in New York. Well that was true, for instance, of Lotte Lehmann. But where Chicago was more willing to let singers spread their wings and experiment with other roles, and that was the case with Kipnus singing, as I said, Voltan and Maister Singer. And in this excerpt, Voltan’s whole world, you’ll see, he certainly doesn’t sound strained at the top. He’s quite easily able to encompass this somewhat higher role than he was accustomed to sing.

Q&A and Comments:

Stop here, and this is Susanna. Sounds like you are of Czech origin from the spelling of your name. Hello from Chicago.

This is Carol, the tavern where Al Capone hung up the jacket is still on Warbash Avenue. Lots of newspaper picks decorate the food. Food is good too. I’ll bear that in mind next time I go to Chicago. Wonderful city. I’ve only been there once and I found that, as all those singers did who went there in the 20s, I found that a completely amazing and thrilling experience.

The sound quality of that “Rigoletto,” well that’s a recording, it’s a good transfer that makes a difference, and it’s also an electric recording. A lot of recordings I’ve been playing in recent lectures have been acoustic ones. So an electric recording has a lot more frequency, sound frequency.

And Herbert, I’m glad you liked Rosa Raisa. Yes. Well, it’s a good transfer actually. That is not a particularly good recording, I would say for the period. But it’s as good as you can get because of the transfer.

Thank you, Barbara. Well, of course it’s such a glorious history, the Chicago Opera in this period. I’d love to meet. Yes.

That’s why I so agree with you, Nanette, about singers. That’s why I am absolutely against ever, ever booing a singer. It should not be done, however badly they sing. They’re putting themselves out there. Everything depends on those little vocal cords. I think singers should always be treated with respect.

Q: Do you think that rubato is the source of the technique that classically trained jazz singers use now?

A: Well of course, yes, as I said about that singer, Edith Mason, she sounds like she’s improvising. And that is of course, a key element in jazz that in jazz course very often, also, you are making it up as you go along.

Yes, of course Chicago is the only place where Callas sang “Madam Butterfly,” those famous pictures of Maria Callas backstage in the costume of Madam Butterfly. No, it’s not all about the money. You know, you have to have a city. I mean, Chicago in many ways, it was a brutal city, of course. It was really capitalism read in tooth and claw, but you had very cultivated audiences there. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have got these performances.

Oh, that wonderful recording of the “Rigoletto” quartet with Galli Curci also, absolutely one of my absolute desert island picks. I love that record. I recommend it to you. And let me see, thank you, Annette. I’ll be better lit next time I talk to you because I will be talking from Paris, the city of light. Thank you, all. Have a very, very happy holiday season, whichever festivities you are celebrating, and I’ll see you again on December the 27th.