On this day in 1850, Chicago had its first (sort-of) professional opera performance. It wasn't exactly up to the Lyric's standards:
In New York, P.T. Barnum was paying Jenny Lind—“The Swedish Nightingale”—$1,000 a night to perform. Chicago’s first opera didn’t have Jenny Lind. But the local promoters were crafty enough to choose one of her biggest hits for their first show, at Rice’s Theatre. The opera was Bellini’s La Sonnambula.
Four singers are not enough for an opera. So the Chicago cast was filled out with local amateurs. A few of them had good voices, most of them didn’t. Rehearsals were—I think “confused” is a good word to describe them.
Just like in one of those bad old Hollywood movies, the show had problems. The audience kept applauding at the wrong time—whenever one of the hometown amateurs showed up on stage, his friends in the audience would stand up and cheer. Meanwhile, one of the extras named J.H. McVicker sang so loudly he drowned out everybody else.
It helps to remember that 18 years after the city's founding, it more resembled a frontier town than the international metropolis it became in the 20th century. Still, it sounds like a fun show.
And then the theater burned down the next day...
The Washington Post enumerates them:
MYTH NO. 1
The Beatles objected to trading leather outfits for suits and ties.
“In the beginning,” John Lennon told Melody Maker, the British music magazine, in 1970, Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, “. . . put us in neat suits and shirts, and Paul was right behind him. I didn’t dig that, and I used to try to get George to rebel with me.” Lennon later complained to Rolling Stone that by giving up leather for suits, “we sold out.” Soon, the story of the Beatles chafing against Epstein’s directives was part of the lore.
The other Beatles — and sometimes, Lennon himself — remembered things differently. “It was later put around that I betrayed our leather image,” Paul McCartney said in “The Beatles Anthology,” “but, as I recall, I didn’t actually have to drag anyone to the tailors.” George Harrison said that “with black T-shirts, black leather gear and sweaty, we did look like hooligans. . . . We gladly switched into suits to get some more money and some more gigs.” Lennon put it this way to Hit Parader in 1975: “Outside of Liverpool, when we went down South in our leather outfits, the dance hall promoters didn’t really like us. . . . We liked the leather and the jeans but we wanted a good suit, even to wear offstage.” To which he added, “I’ll wear a fucking balloon if somebody’s going to pay me.”
Yeah, that sounds like John.
I believed a couple of the other myths, too.
The Apollo Chorus is joining Northwestern University's Bienen School of Music this weekend in two performances of Rachmaninov's The Bells. Thus, no real blog post today.
But if you're in Chicago, swing by the Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park at 6:30pm for our free concert.
No, this isn't one of the two Daily Parker milestones we'll see this month. It's trivial and personal.
On this day in 1988, 30 years ago, I bought my first CD. It was an almost-new technology—the first CDs were commercially available in 1981—and it sounded a lot better than scratchy old vinyl records.
Just looking back at what I posted 10 years ago confirms I haven't bought that many CDs lately. I don't have the number in front of me, but I believe I've now got 940 of them, meaning I've bought an average of 12 a year since 2008. That's slightly fewer than the 12 a month I bought in 1990.
For historical context, when I bought my first CD, Ronald Reagan was president, it looked like (but wasn't certain) that Michael Dukakis and George H.W. Bush would be the candidates to replace him, and our arch-rival for world domination was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. A Toyota Corolla cost $10,000, a gallon of gas or a gallon of milk cost 96c, and you could buy a 3-bedroom house in my home town for $200,000. (The same house is now close to $750,000.)
Late afternoon on Tuesday, with so much to do before the end of the week, I can only hope actually to read these articles that have passed through my inbox today:
And now for something completely different tonight: Improv and Arias. Which is why I wonder whether I'll actually get to read all of the articles I just posted about.
The Apollo Chorus of Chicago are performing Verdi's Requiem at the Holy Family Church, 1080 W. Roosevelt Rd., tonight at 7:30.
Tickets are $40 at the door, and well worth it.
I'm getting ready for my annual Prez Day Bash, which I inherited from a very talented and very funny Andy Ball back in 2004.
This is the 13th Bash—the Fillmore—so I hope less goes wrong than in previous years. The first ten ran from 1995 to 2004, then the 11th came back in 2015. (I suppose that means the 21st will be in 2035?)
I'll post more if I get a lull in preparations.
Things will be a little low-key today owing to the snow falling on London right now, even though the temperature is rising as a warm front pushes through. The forecast calls for rising temperatures and rain all day, which I guess isn't all bad.
So I'm taking some time to do long-overdue chores for the Apollo Chorus (de-duping our master database, setting up ticketing for our next two concerts), and I've started yet another book (Harold Nicolson's beautifully-written 1939 polemic Why Britain is at War). Yesterday I read John Le Carré's The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, cover to cover.
My plan today really was not much more than to read, walk around if the weather permitted, check out two pubs I've never seen, and—oh yes—see Richard Strauss' Salome at the Royal Opera tonight.
Back home tomorrow.
As a choir nerd, I encounter all kinds of interesting arrangements of music. Take this, for example: "Hide and Seek" by British songwriter and experimental musician Imogen Heap:
It turns out, she made a choral arrangement. Here she is with the London Contemporary Voices:
This makes me and my fellow choir nerds so happy.
A meme is going around Facebook: change one letter of a musical's name to ruin it.
Some of my favorites so far:
- On A Clear Day You Can Pee Forever
- Oklahomo
- Big Liver
- Legally Blande
- The Wound of Music
- Babes in Farms
- Sweeney Toad
One musician friend posted this on his wall and got over 200 responses.