Chicago in Boston

A story about a courtesan written by Alphonse Daudet, for his sons "when they are twenty," supplied Jules Massenet with a frail clothes line upon which to peg his watery songs. Chiefly because Mary Garden ("Our Mary") must every season have a new role, this Sapho was presented last week in Boston, first stop on the Chicago Civic Opera Company's annual midwinter tour.

Boston is cautious about its entertainment, but its inhabitants came in fashionable crowds to see the whites of Miss Garden's eyes rolling about with passion, pleasure or dismay. As Fanny Legrand, in a devil-red gown, they saw her gobble up the heart of innocent Jean Gaussin. With ill-disguised delight, they saw her track this peasant boy to his lodgings and take up residence therein.

It annoyed them when Sculptor Caoudal spread a true scandal about Fanny, saying that she was the nakedest and not the least contaminated of all the artists' models in Paris; but they were delighted when Fanny leaped upon this villain and clawed the collar off his neck. At the end, when Fanny slipped off to the country with her pure but honest well-beloved, interest waned. Bostonians had come to see Mary Garden do great and voluptuous acts of rage and excitement; satisfied in this desire, they decided that she had tilted a cracked mirror so that its faulty images could be forgotten as it caught and reflected her own glory. They came again to hear other singers sing better.

Seventeen operas in two weeks made up the Boston run. Then the Chicago Civic Opera Company packed up its costumes and picked up its skirts for a pilgrimage through the south to the Pacific. Reviewing the home season, Chicago operaddicts agreed that it had been in no way notable for novelties and revivals. Monna Vanna, Sapho, Linda Di Chamounix, doubtful additions to the repertoire, had apparently displaced proved productions of Der Rosenkavalier, Don Giovanni, Pelleas. The new ballet had cavorted around in better style than the old one; but there had been an orchestral slump, in part produced by the new sunken pit. In the business offices, there was no waiting for esthetic failures. President Samuel Insull shook the box-office records together and discovered that the 107 performances on the home stage would cost the guarantors some $450,000. This would not deprive the Chicago Com-pany of its new twenty-million, forty-two-story opera house, to be ready season after next.