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Not long after Aida premiered in Cairo on Christmas Eve of 1871, Verdi’s opera was playing in Chicago, first in April 0f 1885 and then in December 0f 1886.

The first Chicago Grand Opera Festival under the sponsorship of the Chicago Opera Festival Organization, J.H. Mapleson manager, was billed as “Music for the People! The Greatest Musical Event in the History of Chicago.” Two weeks of performances were held in the Interstate and Industrial Exposition Building, a large and imposing structure, inspired by London’s Crystal Palace, built in 1872 as a temporary structure in Grant Park at the corner of Michigan Avenue and Adams Street. In 1877 Theodore Thomas had constructed a beer garden at one end of the building for his summer concerts of the Chicago Symphony.

The impresario James Henry Mapleson (1820-1901) arrived to personally supervise the construction of an opera house inside the Exposition Hall. Dankmar Adler (1844-1900) and Louis Sullivan (1856-1924), were the architects who would go on to build the Auditoriums Theatre for the inspired group of local businessmen led by philanthropist Ferdinand W. Peck (1848-1924),

The new opera house’s proscenium was sixty feet high and seventy feet wide… The stage featured an apron twenty feet deep and an orchestra pit which could hold 155 musicians. Six thousand seats in two tiers of proscenium boxes, two balconies, and fifty feet of depth for standing room. Every inch was needed.

More than $50,000 was taken in during the first week of ticket sales.

For two weeks Mapleson presented Verdi’s Aida on a scale probably never equaled in Chicago since. The world’s most famous opera star, Adelina Patti (1843- 1919), in another of her famous farewell performances, sang the title role with her husband Ernesto Nicolini (1834-1898) as Radames, and mezzo-soprano Sofia Scalchi (1850-1922) as Amneris. The Triumphal March used 500 supernumeraries as Ethiopian prisoners of war, a military band, a supplementals chorus of 350, and 600 members of the Illinois State militia as the Egyptian army.

The New American Opera Company, under the directorship of Theodore Thomas (1835-1905), presented the French soprano Emma Fusch-Madi (1847-189), the “greatest lyric soprano of her day” in an Aida. The Dutch mezzo-soprano Cornelie Van Zanten (1855 – 1946), whose book   Bel Canto des Wortes: Lehre der Stimmbeherschung durch das Wort (1911) was considered a standard work for the teaching of classical singing, appeared as Amneris and William Candius (1840-1910) as Radames. The production occurred at the new Columbia Theater, on the south side of Monroe Street between Dearborn and Clark, which had a seating capacity of 2,000 and was known for its architectural combination of French Renaissance and Queen Anne styles. The great actress Ellen Terry (1847-1928) was on hand to christen the theater, and its first production was Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.  The Columbia opened to the public in 1880 just eighty-eight days after ground was broken and burned to the ground in March 1900 in just thirty minutes.

The Chicago Grand Opera Company, the city’s first resident opera company, was organized in December of 1909 when fifty city business leaders contributed $5,000, (over $50,000 in today’s dollars). Each to a guaranty fund. Harold F. McC0rmick, the head of the International Harvester Company, led the organization which announced its first season to begin in the fall 0f 1910. The first conductor and general musical director was Cleofante Campanini (1860-1919). Some of the singers on that first season’s roster include Geraldine Farrar, Mary Garden, Nellie Melba, Enrico Caruso (1873-1921), Charles Dalmores (1871-1939), John McCormack (1884-1945), and Antonio Scotti (1866-1936).

On the evening of November 3, 1910, the Auditorium Theatre’s curtain went up and Chicago had its very own opera company. Presenting, what else, but Aida with Jeanne Korolowicz (1875-1955) as Aida, Eleonora de Cisneros (1878-1934) as Amneris, and Amadeo Bassi (1872-1949) as Radames. Cleofante Campanini (1860-1919) conducted.

Edward C, Moore, the Chicago Tribune’s opera critic reported the historic event:

“Talk about the event of the season! Never was there such an event or such a season. Chicago took its opera and took it hard. The newspapers fairly turned over their whole editions to the opening: the critics evolved adjectives by the thousand, special writers searched their souls for descriptions of the glory of the occasion, pictures of the artists were printed all over the place, and society editors wrote descriptions of costumes by the running foot. It was a grand and uplifting time, and no one with the least charity in his heart grudged any of the participants the good time that they had. As memory goes back nearly a score of years, it was a pretty good performance at that. “Aida” is the best festival opera ever written, and recollections are still vivid of the way Campanini used to lift the roof with soloists, chorus, orchestra, and stage band in the triumph scene. This one was a real triumph, and the applause that went up at its end made any services of a claque entirely unnecessary. Of course, no American opera company ever had a claque—officially: any opera manager will tell you that. But this was a time when it was absent in reality. The curtain was raised and raised again, and the singers bowed until every one lost count of the calls. Campanini was greeted with approving shouts, but speech-making in English was never in his line. He merely waved his arms in the directions of the vocal and instrumental participants. The single speech of the evening was made by Andreas Dippel, and he dove into the recesses of an opera hat to find his notes. It was polite, tactful and brief, concluding, “I am not alone in speaking for myself, but in the name of our general musical director, Cleofonte Campanini, and on behalf of our artists and staff, in stating to you who are present and to those who in the future may lend their support to the Chicago Grand Opera Company that we all promise our most sincere and earnest efforts to make its success as great as possible.” Then every one in the audience settled back to take an admiring look around and answer the questions of reporters, for every one with the least degree of artistic or social prominence was interviewed that night. “It’s splendid—I never saw the opulence of the East better staged than right here,” said Arthur Meeker. “Not one feature is lacking. The artists are splendid, the costumes and scenery brilliant and magnificent,” said Philip M. Lydig. “There is no question of the entire success of the Chicago Grand Opera Company, especially from an artistic standpoint,” said Max Pam. Some of the reporters, for want of anything better to do, interviewed as many artists as they could get hold of, though in this case the interviewees were even more unanimous than all the rest. One might imagine in their remarks a not wholly unworthy desire to retain recently acquired jobs. And just about this time the newspapers began to talk about the desirability of having opera in English, a durable and undying topic, shared by every one except those whose function it is to buy tickets and make opera in English commercially possible. In the foreword this account has already gone back to the opening of the Auditorium. That in many ways was even more picturesque. One reads in ancient newspaper files of how on December 9, 1889, “the orator of the evening in eloquent language sized up the Parthenon, the Pyramids, and the Acropolis with the Auditorium and found them shy.” Some of the remarks on that historic occasion really deserved to be made permanent, as when Governor Fifer stated that “we have passed in half a century from the warwhoop of the savage to the ravishing strains of a Patti.” Or when Mayor Cregier delivered himself of this: “Permit the eye, that masterpiece of nature’s work, to survey the outlines of this grand structure, and we shall see everywhere in trained symmetry and art the children of that noble and ancient science—Geometry!” Chicago undoubtedly considered itself a bit too sophisticated by 1910 to permit any one to get away with such empyrean-assaulting oratory as clogged the air at the dedication of the Auditorium. But the dedication of the opera company was sufficient of an event for it to seem desirable for a little time to allow the dust to settle. Not much time was allowed, however. The Auditorium was dark on the next—Friday—night, but on Saturday afternoon a new page of operatic history went onto the presses.[i]

By the end of the Great War the theories of Adolph Appia (1862-1928) and Gordon Craig (1872-1966) were having a dramatic impact on opera. No longer were the traditional wing and drops sufficient for every opera. Rather, designers insisted on three-dimensional platforming. The shift way from two-dimensional scenery had a serious effect on most theaters: they had no room to store the new scenery.

The Grand Opera Company of Chicago needed to act quickly to preserve the city’s enthusiasm for opera. On January 26, 1929 the company gave its final performance in the Auditorium. A new structure was awaiting them on South Wacker Drive – The Civic Opera House, the brainchild of the tsar of Midwest electricity Samuel Insull (1859-11938).

The day before the opening the city’s newspapers were inundated with detailed instruction telling the public how to get to the remote and destitute building’s location. On opening night patrons arrived while over two thousand people gathered just to observe the occasion from the street. Patrolling the area were eight detective bureau squads sent to protect patrons from possible robberies. It was a time when gangsters and mobs just about ruled the city.

In the grand foyer Samuel Insull personally greeted as many of the audience as he could. Tickets for the main floor had sold for $6.00 a piece (about $180.00 by today’s calculations). Insull had kept the plans for the new 3471 seat opera house top secret until this night. So, all the patrons saw the new wonder together for the first time. The theater began to fill a full hour before maestro Giorgio Polanco (1875-1960) lifted his baton and the orchestra struck up “The Star Spangled Banner.” The reviews were generally excellent though Music News felt the need to report,

“Through great good fortune nobody fell into the river on last Monday night, opening of the new Chicago Civic Opera House, although the building stretches along that salubrious stream for one block and the lighting in the neighborhood is none the best…. It would have been hard to find an uglier environment.”[ii]

The all-star production, selected by Samuel Insull himself, was staged by director Charles Moor and starred the thrilling actress and dramatic soprano Rosa Raisa (1893-1963), of Bialystok, Russia, known as “Raisa da Roofa,” due to her monumental voice. Arthur Meeker appreciated Raisa’s voice:

“I call her the greatest because there was something invincibly noble about her that shone in everything she did; she was our queen and, modest as she was, looked the part grandly.”[iii]

Charles Marshall of Waterville, Maine, (1857-1951) as Radames and Cyrena van Gorden of Camden, Ohio, (1892-1964) as Amneris. All that remains of that production, (and still visible twenty minutes before curtain time) is the famous painted fire curtain (depicting the parade scene from Aida by American artist Jules Guerin (1866-1946). The event was broadcast live on WGN radio for an hour beginning at 10:00 pm. Musical America gave the following account:

“For aside from the suitability of the music, it permitted the casting of a group of singers whose rise to glory has been coincident with that of the Chicago Opera. Chief of these was Rosa Raisa, who literally grew up with the company and had endeared herself to this public as, but few singers ever have or ever will. Raisa is distinctly Chicago’s own. Triumphs elsewhere on the globe can never erase Chicago’s proprietary attitude toward her. Of course, as the Ethiopian slave girl, she was in her element/ The powerful voice, with its depth and richness of color, soared to the heights of Verdi’s melodic line with all its accustomed thrill, and with perhaps an added emotional impulse redolent of the occasion.”[iv]

The current Lyric Opera  production of AIDA is  the latest in the long tradition of Chicago Aidas.

We had already seen this particular staging of Aida in 2017. Francesca Zambello directed the Washington National Opera version at the Kennedy Center, which boasted the “designs” of RENTA, a young and “fashionable” graffiti artist. But graffiti is just that – graffiti, the bane of the world’s urban environments, identical chaotic anarchistic expressions of rage. It certainly is not a modern equivalent of Egyptian cuneiform, a highly precise and coherent iconographic vocabulary. Used as stage scenery it is an in-your-face menace of distraction which adds nothing to the plot ‘s situation or character developments.

The production illustrates a problem posed by the distinguished British theater historian A.M. Nagler

“Monumental or intimate? Removed from time or close to it? The fate of this opera is in the balance. I see no reason for neglecting the Egyptian components.  After all, the libretto speaks of pharaohs, and at moments the music has a delicate, exotic flavor. Therefore, the exotic element needs only be hinted at by the designer. We have long outgrown the didactic museums-tour approach. However, a valid AIDA model for our times is still lacking[i].

It is still lacking after Zambello’s rehashed production in Chicago. The scenery and costumes give no hint of time and place. Even the supertitles have been mistranslated to eliminate all references to Egypt.

Despite all the acclaim, RENTA’s graffiti designs prove to be throwbacks to the nineteenth century’s flat drops, without the artistry. And cheesy ones at that. Though they are, in this production, cut into pieces, they remained essentially two-dimensional. As a result, they animated neither the opera’s dramatic arc nor the characters’ evolving relationships. They were static and uninvolved in the action.

The production illustrated the difficulty of integrating acting with singing, setting with costume, and a dynamic visual environment with evolving character development, especially during the crowd scenes where a director’s hand is most needed and was, in the case of Zamballo, most lacking. Absent composition, picturization, meaningful movement, purposeful rhythms, and evocative pantomimic dramatication. the actors seemed left o fend for themselves. Chaos reigned, matching the scenery. Director Zambello evidenced what might be called the “anti-magic touch”.  (This is a puzzlement since her recent West Side Story was electrifying.) Wherever her direction was evident any hope of coherence or excitement was quickly dissipated.

The Lyric Opera’s two Verdi compatriots, Michelle Bradly as Aida and Russell as Radames, brought the same chemistry and intelligence which characterized their past performances, especially recently in Puccini’s Tosca. But it was Bradley’s Aida which stole the show. Her vocal presentation, psychologically astute acting, intelligence, and innate dignity made her Aida one of the best I have ever seen. I hope other theaters sign her up for the role. She may just be the Aida of our generation. Of the three principals in the plot’s love triangle, Thomas succeeded most next to Bradley. Strong when necessary, passionate despite the circumstances, honorable throughout, his singing and acting revealed why he is a Lyric Opera favorite.

They were joined by Jamie Barton as Amneris, whose performances seem to fall into two categories: wooden and even more wooded. This outing we were treated to some of each. She seemed to refuse to sing during the first half of the opera, perhaps saving her voice for the second half. But the void she had created and nurtured was unshakable by the time the second half rolled around, leaving Braadley and Thomas  deprived of an essential colleague’s presence off of whose performance they could find creative stimulation. However, The secondary characters especially the wondrous Reginald Smith, Jr.’s Amonosro, Onay Kose’s Ramfis, Wm. Clay Thompson’s King, and Kathryn Henry’s Priestess,  sang well.

The highlight of any Aida is the triumphal march. The joyous and spirited  conductor Enrique Mazzola gave it the appropriate martial spirit, but Ms. Zambello as the stage director,  the choreographer (Jessica Lang) and costume designer (Anita Yavich) failed to catch that spirit of Raw Power on Parade. Verdi’s march is the Egyptian equivalent of the Communist May DAy extravaganzas which shook j Red Square with terror. Verdi and his Cairo representative Camille Du Locle exchanged copious letters regarding the staging of the grand march. [vi] Apparently none of it was consulted for this  production. Instead we witnessed the March of the Precious Modern Dancers. “March” is too descriptive a word. They merely gathered about the stage, absent of any clear coordination. The settings by Michael Yeargan, a designer who can usually be counted on to deliver a dynamic and imaginative visual environment, seemed to succumb to the general malaise infecting all of the non-musical elements of the production. Dancer Marian Faustino brought the only semblence of elegance to the slapdash proceeding during her dance to the Preistess’ Hymn to Isis.

Thank God for Conductor Enrique Mazzola, his orchestra, and Michael Black and his chorus. They proved that the Lyric stage body still had a pulse, even if the other artists seemed determined to provide this Aida was in hibernation.

[i] A.M. Nagler. Misdirection. Opera Direction in the Twentieth Century. Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1981, p

[ii] Edward C. Moore. Forty Years of Opera in Chicago. New York: Horace Liveright,1930. Pp. 60-63.

[iii] Ronald L. Davis. Opera in Chicago. New York: Appleton Century, 1966, p. 183.

[iv] Arthur Meeker. Chicago, with Love. A Polite and Personal History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955. P.228.

[v] Charles Mintzer. Rosa Raisa. A Biography of a Diva with Selections from Her Memoirs. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 201, p.151-152.

[vi] Hans Busch. Verdi’s Aida: The History of an Opera in Letters and Documents. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978.