In Chicago

The Chicago Civic Opera Company competently negotiated the first week of its repertoire. Aida was the first to be taken out of storage, dusted and dressed in all its Egyptian splendor to do credit to the opening night. Claudia Muzio was the Ethiopian slave girl, Cyrena Van Gordon Pharoah's daughter and Arnoldo Lindi the suave-throated warrior loved by them both. Jewels of the Madonna came next with Rosa Raisa, as the Neapolitan slut, lavishing sumptuous tones on tunes as tawdry as the stage jewels that tempted her. Came Boheme with Edith Mason and then--Resurrection with Mary Garden. It mattered little to Chicagoans that her voice was some times cloudy, sometimes thin, that tones were tossed this way and that, sometimes too negligible to be tones at all. That evening she was no prima donna. She was Katiusha, loveliest of peasant girls, wrongly accused of the murder of a drunken patron; Katiusha, proud of her sordid conquests, begging money of the man who would reclaim her soul and then--a new Katiusha, who, renouncing him with three symbolic kisses of the Russian Easter, shouldered a pack to follow a fellow convict into Siberia. Tristan and Isolde, laid away for several seasons now, was brought out for the debut of Elsa Alsen, a very worthy Isolde. Rigoletto had its turn, Il Trovatore, a Sunday matinee of Carmen, the second week opening with Lucia. Chicagoans were well-pleased--with the first week list and the singers, with the able direction of Giorgio Polacco, with the fact that the subscription sale this year has been much greater than ever.

Arnoldo Lindi (see above) was once a breaker boy in a Swedish iron mine; he ran away, shipped before the mast, landed in Boston. There he moved furniture, went in for pugilism, sang in his spare lime with a Swedish choral society. True to tradition a rich man heard him, sent him abroad for a musical education, where he has since had successful engagements. Last week he had his Chicago debut.