• U.S.

Music: Auditorium’s Revenge

3 minute read
TIME

If buildings shared humans’ love for revenge, the Chicago Auditorium last week would have been supremely, smugly satisfied. The old Auditorium, which President Benjamin Harrison and Adelina Patti helped dedicate 43 years ago, used to be headquarters for Chicago’s social and operatic splendor. Four months after Samuel Insull opened his $20,000,000 skyscraper opera house, the Auditorium went into receivership, grew dingier & dingier while its longtime patrons went to the new plush-lined theatre on Wacker Drive. Last week the Insull House was dark and the Auditorium, refurbished at a cost of $125,000, was open again. The Chicago Bohemians’ Club sponsored last week’s gala Auditorium concert to help jobless musicians. Sturdy Frederick Stock conducted the Chicago Symphony augmented by outside players to a mighty 200. Soprano Elsa Alsen and Baritone John Charles Thomas sang. Pianist Josef Hofmann left his inventing* long enough to solo in Rubinstein’s D Minor Concerto. But it was not the excellent concert which did most to restore the Auditorium’s oldtime pride, nor its own spick & span appearance, nor the announcement of the newly organized Chicago Friends of Music which will undertake to build an outdoor amphitheatre on the lake front for the 1933 World’s Fair. More important, the old patrons were back—old Mrs. William Chalmers and Mrs. Joseph G. Coleman, the Ryersons. Swifts and Meekers. People missed the late Edith Rockefeller McCormick who always sat majestically in Box No. 5. but many of the other old boxholders were in their regular places, rhapsodizing over the acoustics which seemed better than ever to Chicago’s ears after three years in the Insull House. In the Insull House the spirit of old-fashioned friendliness never got a foothold but it enveloped last week’s concert so thoroughly that during intermission hopeful talk of more Auditorium opera blended with sentimental reminiscences. It is an open secret that if Chicago can raise sufficient guarantee, Manhattan’s Metropolitan Opera will visit the Auditorium next spring. Boston, which was contemplating having the Metropolitan company, last week abandoned the idea.

*As a boy Josef Hofmann was so busy being a musical prodigy that he had little time for mechanical tinkering. Now, when his duties as iirector of the Curtis Institute of Music give lim time, he likes nothing better than to work in the laboratory of his Merion, Pa., home. By himself he has built three motor cars, three motor boats which he keeps at his summer lome in Camden, Maine. He has invented a combination gas & oil burner, folding skates, a system of pivoted reflections to vary the resonance of a piano, a shock absorber.

More Must-Reads from TIME

Contact us at letters@time.com