The Chicago Opera in New York

In a Five Weeks' Season the Campanini Company Will Present Many Novelties and Revivals

PITTS SANBORN

TRAILING clouds of glory from Chicago, the Campanini company—or, to give it its formal name, the Chicago Opera Association—opens on January 27 an opera season of five weeks at the Lexington Theatre.Last year the Campanini company gave four weeks at the Lexington, and New York remembers them vividly. They meant to us Muratore, who wears his artistic toga like a noble Roman, and Mary Garden; Galli-Curci, not yet thirty (by the managerial calendar) and already a legendary figure, and Dame Melba, a legendary figure, too; Rosa Raisa, of the torrid soprano thunders, and baritone Stracciari redivivus; Dalmores and Dufranne, old friends who are not back this year; Huberdeau, of the mellow bass; Baklanoff, baritone and actor, and a little host of waxing stars like Anna Fitziu, Carolina Lazzari, Cyrena van Gordon, Alfred Maguenat. They meant operas the Metropolitan declines to give us, and we love —"Louise," "Pelleas et Mélisande," "Le Jongleur.de Notre Dame." In fact, they meant many delightful and exhilarating operatic experiences for a space of four weeks. The return this year means still more of them, for five.

AS artistic leaders, the Campanini company • again boasts Muratore and Mary Garden. The cooperation of the pair in the "world premiere" of Henri Février's "Gismonda," after Sardou, supplements their earlier cooperation in the same composer's "Monna Vanna," after Maeterlinck. Then, Muratore, with his romantic presence, his big and glowing voice, his compelling power, both as singer and as actor, is here to vivify the great traditional French parts of Faust, Romeo, Don José, Werther, and Des Grieux. Just as his personality and his art assure him a special place of leadership among the men, so Miss Garden's assure her a similar position among the women, whether she elects to make them manifest in the scarlet and jet of Carmen or the ghostly white of Mélisande, whether she enacts Thais or Tosca, Monna Vanna or Louise. This season, besides a selection from her former repertory and the "creation" of "Gismonda," she is doing Cleopdtre, in Massenet's posthumous opera, and one of her old triumphs of the Paris Opera Comique (not shown here hitherto) Chrysis in Camille Erlanger's "Aphrodite," an opera based on the luxurious Alexandrian romance of Pierre Louys. Much of joy as these connote, they could not well hold more than the collaboration of Garden and Muratore in just the old beloved "Carmen" of Bizet! at the Opera in Paris, however, he sang without the prefacing O'.

Rosa Raisa, the young dramatic soprano of heroic race, in addition to her Vesuvian Aida and Santuzza of last year, enters on revived roles from the old repertory in which Pasta, Grisi, Malibran, Jenny Lind, Falcon, Cruvelli, Titiens, Lehmann trod to glory—the title role of "Norma" and Rachel, in "La Juive." Fran- cesca da Rimini, in young Zandonai's Dantesque opera of that name, and the heroines of "Il Trovatore," "La Gioconda," and "L'Africaine" are other festivals for the young Raisa. Amelita Galli-Curci will delight us again in "Dinorah," "Lucia di Lammermoor," "Rigoletto," "La Traviata," "The Barber of Seville," and "Linda di Chamounix," the last a revival, after long disuse, from Donizetti in which the popular soprano and the baritone Stracciari have greatly pleased Chicago.

THE new French soprano is Yvonne Gall, seeking the success here her countrywoman Vix missed last winter. Americans visiting Paris in recent years must recall Mlle. Gall as a frequent singer at the Opera. During the past summer she appeared in Buenos Aires, and from that southern capital reports of a favorable reception preceded her to North America. Marguerite, Juliette, Louise, Manon, Mathilde in "William Tell," and Anita in "La Navarraise" are among her roles.

Conspicuous in the company are four new tenors. In the Italian Dolci, Chicago believes it has found a younger Caruso. Because of his success the management has added Catalani's "Loreley" to its list of novelties, Guido Ciccolini, another Italian, has pleased as a lyric singer. Charles Fontaine, of Belgian birth, comes to us with the approval of the Paris Opera Comique, while John O'Sullivan is from the Opera.

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So reinforced, John O'Sullivan may be watching the laurels of John McCormack, for he too is a born Irishman, though to France he emigrated at the age of eight. Thus for the crowd his sentimental appeal is double, being Irishman and Frenchman at one and the same time! Chicago likes his trumpet high notes in the appallingly high and exacting music of Arnold in "William Tell." Other parts in his repertory are Samson, Otello, and Romeo.

AUGUSTE BOUILLEZ, the Belgian baritone, has been added this season to a division of the company that once more includes Stracciari, Baklanoff, Maguenat, and Rimini, though, after these many years, it has lost Hector Dufranne. Marcel Journet, the famous French basso, will sing in New York after an absence of more than a decade, with associate bassos of such distinction as Huberdeau, Arimondi, Nicolay, and Virgilio Lazzari, the last a new member of the company.

Other singers of more or less renown are Vira Amazar, Anna Fitziu, Dora Gibson, Dorothy Jardon, Florence Macbeth, Marguerite Namara, and Myrna Shadow, all sopranos; Louise Bérat, Cyrena van Gordon, Carolina Lazzari, Irene Pavloska, and Marguerite Sylva, among the mezzo-sopranos and contraltos, and Forrest Lamont end Warren Proctor, tenors. Tamaki Miura, the little Japanese soprano, has been added to the company especially for "Madame Butterfly," and the new premiere danseuse is Sylvia Tell, an iVtperican girl.

Mr. Campanini himself has returned to the conductor's desk this season, but to aid him he has no less than four associated conductors of stellar rank— Charlier and Sturani, who are always with him, and new this year Giorgio Polacco and Louis Hasselmans. Polacco, well known to New York through his years of capable service at the Metropolitan Opera House, has been received with acclaim by press and public of Chicago. Hasselmans, visiting America first with the Societe des Instruments Anciens, has a fine reputation as a conductor, acquired in Paris.

THE visit of the Chicago company brings to New York not only several standard operas that the Metropolitan does not give, but a truly imposing list of novelties and revivals. Of course, Fcvrier's "Gismonda," based on one of the typical Sardou concoctions of spectacle and tigerish emotion which the old necromancer so generously supplied to Sarah Bernhardt (Fanny Davenport played it all over this country), cannot but be the banner novelty of the Campanini offerings. In the first place, like the Metropolitan's three Puccini operas, it has all the peculiar distinction that comes of being a "world premiere," in the second place, the composer Fevrier himself crossed the Atlantic to superintend the production, and last, but by no means least, heading the cast are those two great singing actors, Mary Garden and Lucien Muratore.

"Le Chemineau" ("The Vagabond") of Xavier Leroux, based on Richepin's famous hobo play, is promised this year pursuant to a promise made last year, but not kept. A one-act opera by the same composer, "Le Cadeau de Noel," presenting an incident of the war just ended, is also on the Campanini list. When in addition the Metropolitan does Leroux's "La Reine Fiamette," with Geraldine Farrar in the part Mary Garden created in Paris, a composer previously known to our public at first hand through one song, "Le Nil," will enjoy something very like a run! "Cleopatre" and "Aphrodite," as already told, are down for Miss Garden in her function of operatic Bernhardt.

THE comedy opera "Le Maschere" by Mascagni, whom we know best as a tragic, presents a familiar composer in a new guise. The "world premiere" of "Le Maschere" is famous in that it was seven-fold, for on January 17, 1901, the new opera had simultaneous productions the same night in Milan, Venice, Verona, Naples, Turin, Genoa, and Rome. Some Mascagni-ites insist America has missed much in neglecting "Le Maschere."

"Le Vieil Aigle" of Gunsbourg again appears in the prospectus. As for Catalani's "Loreley," a novelty for the tenor Dolci, it is the work of a composer whom New York knows through his "La Wally," done to scant approval at the Metropolitan in 1908 with Destinn and Martin as the chief singers and no less a conductor than Arturo Toscanini.

Undismayed by that cool reception, the Metropolitan management has talked off and on of trying "Loreley" also. Originally produced in 1880 at Turin as "L'Elda," it was brought out in a revised version under its present name in the same city in 1890. London heard it a dozen years ago and, like New York with "La Wally," refused to be greatly impressed. But many Italians, among them Toscanini, profess to believe deeply in Catalani.

"La Juive" of Halvey, save for modest performances in or near the Bowery or in Harlem, New York has not heard since Oscar Hammerstein revived it in the original French during his "educational" season nine years ago. The Campanini revival for Rosa Raisa is in the Italian version. "Norma," save for similar Bowery or Harlem performances, has not been heard in New York since Lilli Lehmann sang in it in the early nineties. "Linda di Chamounix" and "Don Carlos" are absentees of even longer standing. In promising "Don Carlos," Mr. Campanini parallels Mr. Gatti-Casazza, who from the same neglected period of Verdi's composing has so successfully resuscitated "La Forza del Destino."

OTHER revivals named on the Campanini list for New York are "Werther" (with Muratore, of course), "La Navarraise," "William Tell," "Otello," "Falstaff," "L'Africaine," "Hamlet," "Fedora," and "Crispino e la Comare." No one supposes there will be time to give all of these, as well as the entirely new works and such necessary items from the established repertory as "Carmen," "Louise," "Pelleas et Melisande," "Monna Vanna," "Faust," "Romeo et Juliette," "Thai's," "Lucia di Lammermoor," "Rigoletto," "La Traviata," "The Barber of Seville," etc. Only too rich an embarrassment of riches is the Campanini prospectus. But the Campanini season, it makes quite clear, cannot escape being a varied, vivid, and stimulating affair.