Chicago Civic Opera - History

History

The Civic Opera was actually formed by reorganizing the bankrupt of the Chicago Opera Association in 1921. Opera Association general manager Harold F. McCormick resigned and was replaced by utilities magnate Samuel Insull, while sixteen of the eighteen directors were carried over from the old company. The new Civic Opera also fell heir to Mary Garden 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. 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 Aïda. 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, 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 Godunov, were performed in French.