![]() Raisa, of radiant beauty, queenly graciousness and glorious voice. All that we dream about in a prima donna is Mme. Vocal splendor broke over the Auditorium in great waves at the New Year’s Eve performance when Rosa Raisa rejoined the opera company and proved in a magnificent display of Bellini pyrotechnics that she is one of the great artists of all time. The Tribune’s Claudia Cassidy led the “Bravas”: She has no rivals.”įor the Chicago Civic Opera Company’s final season at the Auditorium Theatre before moving to the new Civic Opera House in 1929, President Samuel Insull arranged a gala New Year’s Eve production of Norma featuring Rosa Raisa. Raisa “is the greatest opera singer of the day next to Caruso. Henry Theopholis Finck of the New York Post went even further: She is a striking looking, stately Norma… She is voice and nothing but voice. James Gibbons Huneker, the dean of New York music critics: Raisa’s Norma knocked the New Yorkers out: That singer was Rosa Raisa (1893-1963), on the 1920 tour with the Chicago company in New York City, preparing to sing for the usual savage reviews the New York newspapers saved for all Chicago operas. ![]() Written when Bellini (1801-1835) was just thirty years old, Norma had played in Chicago since the mid-nineteenth century by various visiting opera companies.īut not until Chicago had its own company – the Chicago Opera Association – would a singer bring the great role to international prominence. ![]() ![]() As late as 1920, American musicologists considered Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma “an improbably old-fashioned, almost hurdy-gurdy work.”īut thanks to Chicago sopranos, that opera has become a standard of the American operatic canon.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |