Music: Boston’s Final Curtain

When it opened its doors in 1909, the Boston Opera House boasted that it had the most spacious stage, the handsomest appointments, the most advanced stage machinery in the business. The curtain rose on a magnificent performance of Ponchielli’s La Gioconda. “In the future,” said one visiting New York critic, “Bostonians will no longer come to New York for opera; instead, New Yorkers will be coming to Boston.” But Impresario Oscar Hammerstein, then staging grand opera at his Manhattan Opera House in successful competition with the Metropolitan, made another kind of prophecy. He noted that the hulking red brick and terra-cotta pile at the corner of Huntington Avenue and Opera Place was next door to the Boston Storage Warehouse and suggested blandly that “perhaps some day the two can be combined.”

Boston Merchant Prince Eben D. Jordan put up $700,000 for the building, agreed to support a company for three years if other nabobs bought $150,000 worth of stock. London Impresario Henry Russell became managing director, hired some of the top singers of the day. In its first 15-week season, the Boston Opera House staged 21 works, and the Transcript commented: “In Boston, grand opera is now endorsed by all the churches, and attendance at the opera places no one’s morals under suspicion.”

Impresario Russell was never again so well off. The public was provincial: once, after a performance of Pelleas et Melisande, a crowd demanded refunds because it had expected a double feature such as Pagliacci and Cavalleria Rusticana. The company had its share of low-comedy disasters : one performance of an extravaganza titled The Garden of Allah was broken up by the terrified screech of a diva whose bare back was being licked by a camel imported for the production. Most important, Impresario Russell had a way of juggling his bookkeeping and pressing his stars for salary kickbacks. After its fifth season, the company collapsed.

In time, the opera house became part of the Shubert chain of theaters, accommodated the touring Metropolitan and Chicago Civic companies, ballet, big musical comedies, even prizefights. But the 3,000-seat house, with its huge maintenance costs, did not pay its way, and last week it seemed as though Impresario Hammerstein’s prediction would at last come true. Sold by the Shuberts, the Boston Opera would be stripped for probable use as a parking lot or storage warehouse.