Gale in Chicago

A thin, middle-aged woman stood in the darkened pit at the Chicago Opera House last week, waving a baton as if she believed it possessed some superhuman power. Her eyes blazed. She tossed her bushy head this way & that, pointed vigorous commands to the singers on the stage. Ethel Leginska had good reason to make much of the music, because she had written it. Hers was the distinction of being the world's first woman to conduct her own opera in an important opera house.

One Mrs. C. A. Dawson-Scott supplied the ghoulish plot in a novel named The Haunting. Scene is a village in Cornwall where Gale and his young sailor brother Pascoe quarrel over a hoard of gold hidden in an ancient chest. The beginning is gay with folk tunes. Villagers dance in the market place. Thereafter gloom prevails. Gale, for whom Leginska named her opera, murders his brother, hides the body in a cave near the sea, never succeeds in escaping its ghost.

Although Composer Leginska's music is sometimes turgidly slow, it is on the whole superior to the story she chose and to the Chicago City Opera's blundering production. Well-knit and melodious, the music often gives a real feeling of the sea as it beats against the chalk cliffs of the Cornwall coast. Leginska worked like a fury at rehearsals, got telling results from orchestramen. It was not her fault that the performance began a half hour late, that Morwenna, supposedly a middle-aged character, was mistaken for the youthful heroine or that Baritone John Charles Thomas (Gale) will never be an actor.

Hit-or-miss productions have been frequent in Chicago this season. Manager Paul Longone has felt obliged to economize on rehearsals. He has let his ensembles suffer for the sake of hiring a few big names. Backstage sensation occurred last week when Conductor Gennaro Papi resigned a week before he was to have conducted the U. S. premiere of Respighi's La Fiamma. Manager Longone issued a blazing statement to the effect that Papi had found it impossible to memorize the relatively difficult score. Papi railed against artistic conditions in general, implied that it was all too easy for mediocre performers to buy their way into Longone's opera.

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