...With the Voice

of Angels

A Musical Drama

The heart’s immortal thirst is to be

completely known and all forgiven

-Henry van Dyke-

Il Prologo

            “OPERA IS DEAD.”  Chicago’s leading newspaper, The Herald, rang the death knell to the nation and the world’s performing arts communities.  Like an icy slash from the infamous Chicago wind, the cut was deep and chilling, but not unexpected.   Opera was now a thing of the past in the nation’s heartland, yet only ten years earlier its future in the Windy City had seemed brighter than the very stage lights that had gleamed on many a famous soprano’s face.

            The Chicago Grande Opera was conceived in the ashes of the Great Chicago Fire of 1872.  The people of Chicago were left exhausted but undaunted by the destruction that ravaged their city. 

            “Tonight our city lay in a twisted heap of ash and soot,” bellowed the mayor of the time: Thomas Stanton.  “The destruction rained from heaven is beyond that of comprehension.

            “Fire has brought many fine and eloquent societies to an end, blazing and engulfing without regret or remorse.  Our city has now felt the molten rain that showered from Vesuvius, destroying the classic beauty and nobility of Pompeii.  We have been singed by the self-same demon that brought the great Roman Empire to its knees, as the great and awful Nero watched with contempt.  We have been visited by the unquenchable tongue that devoured Sodom and Gomorra ages ago.  We are charred and choked, we are battered and bruised, but we, the Great City of Chicago, shall press on. 

            “For, my friend, we shall blaze a new trail.  History shall not repeat itself.  Discouragement shall not prevail.  Comrade, we shall not succumb to the tragic fate that vanquished those of yore. 

            “For in this city, fire will no longer be seen as destroyer, but—for we proud few by this great lake—it shall be known as purifier.  The earth below our feet has been cleansed.  The ground upon which we stand has been dedicated, and once again is prepared for our use.

            “To those who have lost tonight, this fire is no longer consumer, but redeemer.  We are changed in the sight of the world.  We are liberated from the weight and filth of the past.  We are set free to reinvent these environs.

            “And finally, to myself, fire has become ‘Resolve.’  Yes, my brother, Resolve!  From tonight and forward I resolve, let us resolve to honor those we have lost, rebuilding this vast heartland, and making for ourselves a home of virtue, blessed by God, built of His wisdom and upon our backs, and seen by the world as the lifeblood of our vast Nation.  Fire has now purified us, fire has redeemed us from our mediocrity, and fire has resolved our intentions. 

            “The ashes around us mourn for what is gone, but let us take these ashes of despair, douse them in our lake’s glory, and set to work to build our new...great...home.” 

After the fire, the reconstruction of the city began. Chicago would not be built of wood and nails this time; it would be a city of stone and brick.  It would be built as a lasting monument to man’s indomitable spirit, and as a city that would rival the most beautiful in the world. It would become the working man’s home.

            In a groundswell of public gratitude, city leaders introduced a series of community restoration projects that included the formation of Grant Park, Symphony Hall, the Lincoln Park Zoo and Harbor area, and a vast museum complex, including the Art Institute, the Field Museum of Natural History, and the John G. Shedd Aquarium, the largest non-oceanic aquarium in the world.

            But the Chicago Grande Opera was to be the city’s artistic center.  It would fill this great city, this great home, with song. It would be where the greatest voices of all time would come to sing the soaring, cresting melodies that give opera its life.  The Chicago Grande Opera was to be the eye around which the city’s performing arts community revolved, and the musical soul of the Midwest.

            This mission—the Chicago Grande Opera’s mission—went undiminished for over one hundred years.

            In 1982, the Chicago Grande Opera, after two decades of little growth, took a major step.  Borrowing from Mayor Stanton’s famous speech, the CGO announced an ambitious expansion program: “Resolve 2001: Chicago Grande Opera, Now to the Millennium.”  This enormous project would amplify the company’s season from twenty weeks, mid-September to mid-January, to thirty-two weeks, ending in April.  This undertaking would create a theatre complex to rival the best in the world.  The Metropolitan Opera, The Vienna Staatsoper, La Scala, Covent Garden—these great opera houses would no longer have a poor brother in the Chicago Grande Opera.

            Patron and corporate sponsorship was plentiful.  The best firms in theatrical construction were hired and the expansion began.  Rolling wagons were installed to accommodate grandiose sets.  A stage turntable was installed to accommodate complex circular stagings and scenery shifts.  Supertitles, projected simultaneous translations, were employed to bring the great words of Shakespeare, sung through the music of Verdi, to the steelworker from Calumet City.

            The artistic community was enthralled.  Both singer and musician were exuberant about the work at the world’s new great opera house.

            For five years, critical acclaim was matched only by financial success. The opera world began noticing the young upstart Chicago Grande Opera with its ambitious directors, artists, and schedule of contemporary opera.  American directors found a sympathetic home at the CGO. Gifted young opera composers were granted major projects, ranging from subjects on the Holocaust to lighter works that would have had Rossini chuckling.  Lost gloves, broken hearts and tragic death are milk to be suckled by the ardent fan, and the CGO was supplying them in abundance.

            Mayor Stanton’s speech had come to be seen as prophecy at the Illinois State Theatre, the Chicago Grande Opera’s home.  “Resolve 2001” was met with unmitigated praise and seen the world round as a classical music triumph and model for opera companies the world over.

             But just as Richard Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen spins a tale of destruction through jealousy and greed, the Chicago Grande Opera fell prey to these same hideous sins.

            The late 1980’s crash of the Stock Market had squeezed Chicago’s corporate charity, but the CGO would still be financially sound with its myriad private donors and strong public support, along with the bit of governmental “encouragement” it received.

            However, a reactionary trend arose throughout the nation in response to some very disturbing government-funded arts projects.  A government bandwagon of anti-art sentiment was aroused to seek out and destroy any art not deemed acceptable by certain elected officials.  This threat was carried out through the restriction of public funds.  Financial assistance was contingent upon the ignorant artistic attitudes of several obese congressmen.

            The Chicago Grande Opera found itself at the center of this controversy when it produced and performed a new opera by a young composer named Marian Thomas.  Her opera, Awakening Constance, was a biographical piece that centered around the love affair between a teenage girl and a married woman. 

            Awakening Constance was indeed a disturbing story, no matter in what guise it was realized.  The use of a teenage girl as the title character, her explicit rape scene by an uncle, and consequent rape by an older woman, brought immediate and universal condemnation.  The art community, critics, and even gay and lesbian activists spoke out against the opera.  Several United States’ senators moved to suspend National Endowment of the Arts funding to the CGO, pending an assessment of its grant guidelines.  Valhalla, Wagner’s great and glorious heaven, had begun to crumble.

            The government “assessment” of the CGO found several disturbing items.  First, Ms. Thomas had received the outlandish sum of two million dollars for her opera, with total production costs at 10.1 million dollars.  The CGO also paid the librettist, the opera’s wordsmith, two million dollars.  This amount was completely absurd.  The sheer dollar amount for the libretto was completely preposterous, and this fee was made more suspect by the fact that the librettist, Penelope Ambrose, also happened to be Ms. Thomas’s lover.  The CGO had made the two women quite rich.

            Then there was a final question:  What happened to the remaining 6.1 million dollars in production costs?  There were special lighting effects and a second full orchestra, accounting for about two million dollars, but the opera’s sets were small and intimate.  The money had seemed to vanish.

            Investigators discovered that three million dollars was marked as “overtime” expenses—overtime Ms. Thomas used to orchestrate her opera, and later, to fund night-long orgies with cast and crew.  Operatic decadence is well documented, but these drunken and drug-enhanced escapades turned scornful eyes towards the hiring practices of the CGO.

            The crack in Valhalla’s foundation then became a chasm. Although the National Endowment of the Arts had contributed less than five percent of the annual operating budget for the CGO, the significance of the government’s disapproval rang through corporate halls as well.

            In the fall of 1990, the Tri-Cor Oil Corporation, the opera’s biggest donor, lost billions of dollars in the Middle East with the onset of the Persian Gulf War and had to end its financial support of the opera, the finale to a fifty-three year relationship. 

            Government funding had ceased, artists were canceling contracts, the Opera’s largest donor had fully withdrawn support due to catastrophe, and ticket sales, the smallest portion of the CGO’s budget, were in the midst of a decrescendo. 

            The fire of January 17, 1992 that destroyed the company’s warehouse of sets, props, and costumes blazed brighter in the eyes of the city’s art community than the Great Fire had some 120 years earlier.  With nothing left to salvage but an under-financed insurance check, the CGO Board Meeting of February 19, 1992 was anti-climactic.  All operations at the Chicago Grande Opera, artistic and financial, would be suspended indefinitely.

            The Chicago Grande Opera had become the Challenger disaster of the entire opera—yea, performing arts world.  The Herald’s proclamation was correct; opera in Chicago was indeed dead.

March 23, 1992

Lobby, Illinois State Theatre, 4:00 p.m.

            “We are just as astounded as you gentlemen are,” announced the Metropolitan Chicago Arts Council Chairman Jon Bishop.  “An anonymous donor has earmarked the Chicago Grande Opera as the sole recipient of their will and estate, and I have been authorized by the Council to grant permission for these funds to be transferred to the Opera.  All continued transactions with the estate will take place solely between the estate and the CGO Board.”

            The Metropolitan Chicago Arts Council had received 100 million dollars to be donated to the Chicago Grande Opera.

            Lightning—sudden, unexpected, and blazing—had struck.  Fire from heaven had been ignited in Chicago’s operatic wasteland.  The passionate and engulfing love of song had seared the heart of an anonymous donor.  Opera’s torch, ignited in the embers of the city’s tragedy a century ago, had been reignited by the public, who now refused to let their operatic inferno be quenched.

            The donation, rumored to be the will of a famous Chicago patron, was the largest ever to be granted by a single individual to a Chicago arts organization.  One hundred million dollars would stoke the furnace at the CGO for several seasons, with the total amount of the donor’s estate believed to be four or five times that size. 

            “I am happy to announce the end of the CGO’s ‘suspended operations.’  Ladies and gentlemen,” stuttered the chairman, “The Chicago Grande Opera will begin preparations for its new and revised season immediately.”  A cheer from the depths of the art community erupted in the conference room.

            “If you woulda asked me a month ago if dis day would ever occur, I woulda slugged ya,” said the chairman in true Chicago-ese.  With relief in his voice, Mr. Bishop continued. “In fact, I honestly believed dat the Opera would never open again.  I would just like to thank our anonymous donor, who wishes her, or, um, uh, rather their estate to remain anonymous.”  Mr. Bishop recovered and removed his foot from his mouth.

            “I have contacted William Burrows, the general manager of the CGO.  He believes that the opera will be able to open this fall, as originally scheduled.  Mr. Burrows has been talking to the newly formed Mexico City Opera Theatre in hopes of collaborating on future projects so as to defray expenses, and as of noon today, their Board of Directors, led by Señor Umberto Juarez, is making plans to send their new, widely acclaimed productions of Puccini’s Tosca, Wagner’s Der Fliegende Höllander, and Verdi’s  La Traviata  to us as soon as possible.”  A roar of approval filtered throughout the State Theatre’s lobby. 

            “So the Chicago Grande Opera season will begin on Saturday, September 24, with Puccini’s masterpiece, Tosca, and, Mr. Burrows and the CGO Board are proud to announce the engagement of the world famous tenor Enzo Santi, who will sing the role of Mario Cavaradossi.”

            Once again fire, ignited in the heart of one devoted patron, had brought new operatic life to Chicago.  The stage where Maria Callas received a twenty minute standing ovation before singing a note, where Jon Vickers tore apart the set as Peter Grimes, where Pavarotti and Sutherland charmed the world with their Daughter of the Regiment, where the likes of Caruso, Melchior, Albanese, and Flagstad reigned as supreme opera gods, this stage would once again be lit ablaze with the consuming passionate fire of lost love, of treacherous villains, and of supreme tragedy.  Opera in Chicago was back, and the man to fuel the flame was himself a torrent of passion, Enzo Santi.

            “Ladies and gentlemen,” the chairman bubbled with enthusiasm, “the Chicago Grande Opera is back!”