If an opera buff had a time machine available for just two consecutive nights, he might very well pick Chicago on October 31 and November 1, 1955, where he could experience an electrifying I Puritani with Maria Callas and a distinguished group of colleagues on opening night and then wallow in the gorgeous voice and handsome persona of Renata Tebaldi at her peak as "Aida" the next night.O) What is perhaps even more astounding than being able to hear and see the two reigning sopranos of the era in immediate succession is that the company presenting them was only in its second season.
As the United States' second city) Chicago had a long operatic history; unfortunately, no company survived for more than a decade in the past. The city had no resident company in the late 1940s and early 1950s.(2) At that point) two young Chicagoans with money and taste, Carol Fox and Lawrence V. Kelly, along with conductor Nicola Rcscigno, formed a new opera company for the city called Lyric Theatre of Chicago, later Lyric Opera of Chicago. It took two years to raise the money for its "calling card" production, two performances of Don Giovanni in February, 1954. The response proved that Chicago was eager for opera, and Lyric began its first season of five weeks in November, 1954, with Callas as Norma and Giuletta Simionato as Adalgisa.(3) This stellar casting was typical of Lyric's operation over much of the next quarter century. Carol Fox, the dominant force in Lyric after a power struggle in 1956 in which she bested Kelly and Rcscigno until her resignation in 1981, described her style of managementthusly: "We work frankly on the star system and believe in ensembles of stars .... We wiLl make our plans around the available dates of our big singers, then design the repertory around their best tales."(4) Like the San Francisco company under Kurt Herbert Adier, Lyric routinely garnered the most important European singers before the Metropolitan. The atmosphere and the backstage language at Lyric was Italian (Fox had studied singing in Italy and was fluent in the langnage), so