Cincinnati Opera at Music Hall

(first published in The Cincinnati Post May 2, 2003)

Cincinnati Opera came in from the heat 31 years ago.

On June 24, 1972 the opera took up residence in air conditioned Music Hall, announcing its arrival with a spectacular Corbett Foundation production of Arrigo Boito's "Mefistofele."

The nation's second oldest opera company (after the Metropolitan Opera in New York) had spent half a century at the Cincinnati Zoo, where according to official records, the onstage temperature once reached 127 degrees.

"The was the night the tenor in ‘Turandot’ answered the three riddles wrong," said opera historian Charles Parsons. "You could hear people going ‘Off with his head’ (the penalty for a wrong answer in the opera)."

Cincinnati Opera, which began familiarly as the "Zoo Opera," is the fulfillment of a tradition of vocal and operatic music going back to the 19th century. The May Festival, founded in 1873, had lots of opera on its programs. Touring companies brought opera to Cincinnati during the winter.

"In those days, they were heavy on German opera," said Parsons, who is writing a history of Cincinnati Opera, "Downwind of the Elephants," for Toronto's Edwin Mellen Press. "They had a German opera festival at Music Hall."

It was inevitable that sooner, rather than later, Cincinnati would have its own opera company.

Founding father was conductor Ralph Lyford, head of the opera department at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music (forerunner with the Cincinnati College of Music of today's University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music). In June 1920, with the backing of Mary Emery, Anna Sinton Taft and Conservatory head Bertha Bauer, Lyford announced an opera season at the Zoo. It opened June 27 with Friedrich Flotow's "Martha." The experiment took off. The original four weeks expanded to seven (10 operas). In 1921, 4,000 people showed up for the opening night of Wagner's "Lohengrin."

Why the Zoo? Parsons, an information management specialist at the University of Cincinnati Law Library, explained. "The Zoo was the place to go in the summer. There was no air conditioning, so everybody went to the hills. The Zoo in particular was like the Catskills. There was all kinds of stuff going on, and it was all free, part of your Zoo admission. They had band concerts, marionette shows and ice skating exhibits. There was a fancy restaurant if you wanted to eat big, or you could just get concessions."

The opera was hatched in the Zoo bandshell, said Parsons. "When they tore down the opera house in 1972, it was like peeling an onion. They took off the most recent additions and, so help me, when they got to the last layer, there was the original bandshell."

Lyford's initiative was furthered by Isaac van Grove of the Chicago Civic Opera and from 1934-62, by conductor Fausto Cleva. High caliber singers started coming to Cincinnati "In those days, there was no place else to go during the summer except Europe. There was no Santa Fe Opera, no St. Louis," said Parsons. "It really snowballed during World War II. They couldn't even go to Europe. That's why there were all those phenomenal big names at the Zoo." The 1940s brought Rise Stevens, Grace Moore, Rose Bampton, Gladys Swarthout, Licia Albanese, Zinka Milanov, Astrid Varnay, Lawrence Tibbet, Ezio Pinza, Richard Tucker, Jan Peerce, Alexander Kipnis and Giovanni Martinelli, among others. This was the opera's "first golden age," said Parsons. "They were doing 48 performances a season, six performances a week for eight weeks. They claimed they didn't perform on Sunday night because they had to wash the costumes sometime."

Parsons, who has only missed five Cincinnati Opera performances since 1956 (he was in Europe), calls 1959-61 a "mini-golden age."

Dino Yannopoulos, a stage director from the Met, was artistic director. "For those three years they decided we needed new production values. We got real abstract sets and unusual repertoire. ("Peter Grimes," "Ariadne auf Naxos"). They lost their shirts and Yannopoulos got fired, but there was an incredible expansion of the repertoire and an emphasis on visual values."

Cincinnati continued to be a prime venue for singers. "Many wanted to try out a role for the first time because the circumstances were very relaxing here." Soprano Roberta Peters did her first "Lucia" at the Zoo in 1952. The 1960s saw debuts by Beverly Sills, Placido Domingo and Sherrill Milnes. In 1959 came legendary bass Norman Treigle. Vocally, another golden age beckoned, but better facilities, especially air conditioning, had become a necessity (Sills, wrapped in netting as the doll in Offenbach's "Tales of Hoffmann" nearly collapsed from the heat one night). Philanthropists J. Ralph and Patricia Corbett's first gift to the opera was air-conditioned dressing rooms during the 60s.

The Corbett Foundation's $6 million renovation of Music Hall, begun in 1969, finally made the indoor move possible.

Sweltering nights aside, there is still plenty of nostalgia for the Zoo, Parsons said. "It was a very warm, friendly, family feeling. Now it's professional, so to speak." And who can forget the animals? Tales are legion of arias accompanied by lions, elephants and seals (Beverly "Seals," quipped one headline), moths sucked into windpipes and unexpected visitors (a chinchilla mistaken for a rat, a baby llama that followed a patron in a white sweater into the pavilion thinking she was its mother).

Parsons' favorites are the peacock that cackled after Madame Flora asked "Who's there?" in Menotti's "The Medium" and the duck that waddled up the aisle during the very last performance at the Zoo, "left his calling card" and waddled out.

Many Cincinnatians remember the lavish productions (many funded by the Corbetts) that replaced the simple backdrops and timeworn costumes of the Zoo era: Mussorgsky's "Boris Godunov" (with Treigle), Sills as Queen Elizabeth in Donizetti's "Roberto Devereux," the first Verdi "Aidas" to have elephants in the triumphal procession. Under general director James de Blasis, fall and spring productions were added and Cincinnati Opera became a favorite venue for stars like Barbara Daniels, James Morris and Richard Leech. But there were negatives. Some controversial premieres flopped (notably, Franco Alfano's "Resurrection" in 1983). Costs rose. Attendance began to drop.

Productions were cut from six to four in the mid-80s, all in the summer. There was a moratorium on new productions and a retrenchment into "safe" repertoire, using only house owned sets. About that time, technology came to the rescue, also. Supertitles, English captions projected over the stage, made opera more user-friendly. Attendance climbed throughout the industry.

Artistic director Nicholas Muni, who succeeded de Blasis in 1996, came at a peak of popularity for Cincinnati Opera and opera in general. His mandate was to innovate keeping in mind the local audience's love of tradition. He began by ""optimizing'' Music Hall, adding new lighting, extending the stage forward and installing video monitors for supertitles out in the hall.

Muni has taken risks, too, introducing new repertoire (Janacek's "Jenufa," Debussy's "Pelleas and Melisande") and edgy productions ("Pelleas," "Faust"). There have been grumbles, but attendance is at an all-time high and sales are up going into the new season. Two of this season's four operas are new to the company, Strauss' "Elektra" and Jake Heggie's "Dead Man Walking." And for the first time in its 82-year history, there are no Italian operas at all.

In February, Cincinnati Opera announced yet another milestone, establishment of the Corbett Opera Center in the north wing of Music Hall. The center will house a four-story headquarters for the opera, with its own box office and reception area on Elm Street. Opera administrative offices will move from their cramped quarters in the south wing (shared with the Cincinnati Symphony) and there will be additional space for meetings, rehearsals and special events. Construction, originally scheduled to begin in March, has been put off until August, said opera managing director Patricia Beggs.

Lead gift for the $3.3 million center was $1.5 million from the Corbett Foundation.

Said Inelda Tajo, widow of famed bass Italo Tajo, at the February announcement: Grazie, Patricia.