Music: Mr. Insull’s Figures

Samuel Insull, to whom are the light, the power and the opera of Chicago, last week announced how much he and Mrs. Insull and their friends would have to pay out for the Chicago Civic Opera’s 1930 season—$588,528.26, greatest deficit in eight years, $30,192.26 more than last year. But Mr. Insull was not downhearted. The season, he said, had been “memorably and more than usually brilliant because the performances were given in the new Civic Opera House built especially for the company.”

The move from old quarters to new was the greatest cause of the deficit’s increase. That expense will not recur. And the new building has 21 floors of office space from which rentals are calculated to help defray the expenses of the big auditoriumdownstairs where, too, the increased number of seats means bigger takings at the box office. Last season 306,018 persons paid to see the curtain rise, compared to 272,006 in the old house the year before. Receipts totaled $1,230,224 as against $948,469 in 1928-29. Average price of tickets rose 53¢—from $3.49 to $4.02. “Unfortunately,” mused President Insull, “the financial advantage of this increase is nullified by the constantly increasing cost of producing grand opera.”

Looking to the coming season which opens Oct. 27, the report continued cheerily: Thirty-three singers have signed contracts. Mary McCormic, brought to stardom under Chicago’s “Our Mary” Garden, will return. New artists will be Sopranos Lotte Lehmann, Maria Rajdl, Contralto Sonia Sharnova, Tenor Oscar Colcaire, Baritones Rudolph Bockelman, Eduard Habich, John Charles Thomas.

Also confirmed was last year’s announcement of the world première of a new Camille, by Mary Garden’s protégé and Mr. Insull’s onetime office boy, Composer Hamilton Forrest (TIME, Nov. 4). Like Verdi’s La Traviata it is based on La Dame aux camélias by Alexandre Dumas, fils. Unlike Verdi, Composer Forrest has employed jazz songs and themes, changed the story to bring it “up-to-date,” employed dialog described as “stark in its reality.”

Twenty miles north of Chicago, at Ravinia, another music-loving tycoon faced another deficit: Louis Eckstein, whose summer opera avocation is almost vocation. Like Mr. Insull, Mr. Eckstein did not gloom. The summer’s $200,000 loss will be made up somehow. Last year he and Mrs. Eckstein went into their own pockets for $97,000 of a $217,000 deficit. Said he last week: “I merely consider it my contribution to summer culture.”