Music to the Ears: Opera
and Base Ball Come to Old Chicago
Baseball has been played in Chicago for a long time, a lot
of it at Wrigley Field. Before Wrigley Field, there was Comiskey Park, and
before Comiskey, there was West Side Grounds.
Before that, there was Washington Park, and before that, there was
Lincoln Park, and before Lincoln Park, there was…Opera.
Postcard. Wrigley Field, c. 1956. The Cubs host the Milwaukee Braves.
Postcard. West
Side Grounds, c. 1913. A play at the
plate.
Postcard.
Spectators crowd the field during a match played in Lincoln Park,
Chicago, c. 1908.
One day in the spring of 1863, an opera impresario by the
name of Jacob Grau brought a touring troupe of tenors and sopranos to
Chicago. The city batted its eyes at the
elegant company and swooned in delightful anticipation. Booking a three-week run at McVicker’s
theater, Grau opened a box office at a downtown music store on Monday, June 8,
and was mobbed by customers. The
impresario pocketed $4,000 in subscriptions during his first day in business
and was deluged again the next. On
Wednesday, the last of the subscriptions was sold and speculators immediately
launched a vigorous scalping trade.
A few days later, Grau inaugurated his musical festival with
a production of Donizetti’s popular Lucrezia Borgia. The divas and their
masculine counterparts on stage earned an enthusiastic round of applause from
the Chicago Tribune, and the paper was equally impressed with the
opening night parade of fashion. “The Belles
of the avenue breathe free once more,” the Tribune’s review
exclaimed. “New bonnets and head
dresses, opera cloaks, and what you call ‘ems, have all been exhibited and
admired, and Chicago upper ten is in ecstasies.”
For the first two weeks of the lyrical gala, the cream of
Windy City society rewarded the melodies of Verdi and the arias of Rossini with
packed houses. A heat wave and the
rigorous performance schedule dented the attendance figures for the final
quartet of shows but did little to mar the season’s overall success. Grau staged the twelfth and last of his
glittering sensations on the Fourth of July and then issued well-deserved
furloughs to his retinue. As the
musicians decamped for cooler climes, the city turned its attention to a more
familiar pastime—picnics.
Chicagoans in 1863 deserved a carefree day in the
countryside. With the American Civil War
passing into its third and grimmest year, the pages of the city newspapers were
blotted with dense, long lists of the dead and wounded from Illinois
regiments. Picnics offered residents an
escape from the bleak news and the busy press of urban life. Encouraging a particular excursion to a rural
spot west of Chicago on the Rock Island Line, the Tribune urged its
readers to take advantage of the chance “to breathe the pure country air, free
from the dust of the city, and the effluvia of the Chicago river.”
Resorts competed for patrons with advertisements of deep
ravines, cool springs and romantic paths in the woods. There was also plenty of room for athletic
exercise. Women and girls practiced
grace hoops, both sexes competed in foot races and archery contests, and “staid
old gentlemen” pitched quoits. Younger
men played a sport just beginning to take shape in Chicago that summer—Base
Ball.
Postcard. A family
enjoys a picnic in Washington Park while a baseball game is played in the background,
c. 1910.
The Opera House— Opera had been sung in Chicago
before 1863, and games of bat and ball had been played in Chicago before
1863. But there was something different
in the air that spring and summer, a yearning to make a bigger and better
future for the city. Both opera and base
ball gave the city something it wanted, and so the city permanently inscribed a
new season for each on its calendar that year, finding a voice in the world
with the art and flexing some muscle with the sport.
Chicago embraced the opera first. In return for its affections, Chicago
demanded a quality product from the touring companies. “We have been humbugged and victimized over
and over again, but those days are over,” the Tribune announced in one
oration. Insisting on “legitimate opera,
legitimately performed,” the paper then served notice that the city expected
all future productions to measure up to the same standards prevailing in New
York. Later, the construction of
Chicago’s first opera house prompted the paper to declare the city’s musical independence
from Gotham’s influence. “Westward the
star of Opera takes its way,” the Tribune sang in the fall of 1864. “We are at length free of New York opera, New
York artists and New York music hashed over for Western consumption.”
The New York Herald ridiculed the notion and jeered
Chicago’s opera goers:
The Chicago gentlemen are greatly troubled about the full
dress regulations. They say that dress
coats are very dear, and can be used on no other occasion than opera nights,
and they hold that frock coats, with white gloves and neckties, ought to be
allowable. The ladies are in a terrible
flutter, and every dressmaker is engaged ten deep. These rural ideas of fashionable manners and
customs are very amusing. By their very
attempts to rival New York the Chicago people admit it to be the only
metropolis of the country. We wish them
joy of Grau and their opera, and shall try to keep them posted upon all the
latest styles here.
In journalistic terms, the Tribune politely invited
the Herald to either shut up or step outside. The mudslinging between the papers had no
effect on Chicago’s carpenters and the city’s Opera House opened more or less
on schedule in April of 1865. As far as
the Tribune was concerned, the triumphal event concluded all debate: the opening of the doors granted Chicago
entry among the great cities of the world, and that was that.
Opera House Stereograph, c. 1870. Chicago’s Opera House
was a palace, and the opulent construction financially ruined its builder,
Uranus H. Crosby, an ardent city booster and generous patron of the arts who
had made a fortune distilling liquor during the Civil War years.
Opera House Lottery Ticker, 1865. On the day after Christmas of 1865, Crosby
put the Opera House up for auction, every nickel of his fortune gone and unable
to pay the bills. Concocting a bizarre
lottery, Crosby somehow regained his property from his creditors, only to later
lose it again, forever, in the Great Chicago Fire. Crosby never regained his business touch and
he died in 1903, poor and forgotten.
Squeeze Play—The 1865-66 opera season nearly ruined
Crosby, and it nearly ruined Grau, too. Fast talking with the bankers saved
Crosby. Fancy footwork in Louisville
saved Grau.
Marooned in St. Louis one day and desperate for cash, Grau
shared his financial woes with Diego De Vivo, a fellow impresario. De Vivo pondered the problem a few minutes
and then remembered a recent newspaper article.
There was a theater manager named Munday in Louisville, De Vivo told
Grau, who was fast losing money on a certain prima donna whose expenses were
exceeding ticket sales. De Vivo wondered
if a week in Louisville could get everyone’s accounts back into black ink. Grau calculated he could rescue himself and
Munday for a $5,000 fee, $3,000 to be paid in advance.
De Vivo pulled on his hat and made a beeline to the
telegraph office, informing Munday that Grau’s opera troupe was available for
six performances but omitting the price.
Munday wired back, bidding the needed $5,000 for six
performances, and De Vivo, figuring there was more to be gained, tendered the
proposal to Grau, recommending a rejection.
“Accept his offer,” Grau said, “before he changes his mind.”
“Leave all that to me,” De Vivo said.
De Vivo took a train east that night and met Munday the next
morning in Louisville. Inflating the
expenses of the opera troupe, De Vivo calmly stated that Grau needed $7,000 to
set up shop in Louisville. Munday
countered with $5,500.
“Am offered $5,500,” De Vivo wired Grau. “Telegraph me you cannot accept.”
“For God’s sake, sell,” Grau quickly answered, “and send me
$3,000.”
De Vivo ambled back to Munday’s office and breezily waved
the telegram before the theater manager, artistically concealing the contents
of the wire.
“It is as I expected,” De Vivo gravely explained. “Grau cannot sell at that price. He must have $7,000.”
“I’ll give you $6,000, and that is all I will give,” Munday
replied. “Take that or leave that.”
De Vivo lit up a Havana cigar and walked back to the
telegraph office. “I am offered $6,000,”
De Vivo wired Grau. “Telegraph me you
cannot accept.”
“You are crazy,” came the reply from St. Louis. “Sell and send me $3,000.”
De Vivo returned to Munday’s office and gave the telegram
waving routine an encore. With a shrug
of his shoulders, De Vivo told Munday that Grau was firm. The price was $7,000. Munday conceded another
$500 to the pot. With time running out
on the business day and an evening train to catch, De Vivo finally
compromised. “I will accept the
responsibility and the risk,” De Vivo grandly offered, “and split the
difference. I will close the contract
for $6,750.”
Munday signed, and Grau pocketed his $3,000 advance the next
day, back in business.
Sized slightly larger than Bowman baseball cards, Liebig
advertising cards circulated in Europe during the late 1800s and early 1900s
and often featured operatic themes. The
cards have been collected for more than a century. Top: Fidelio Beethoven (1893). Middle:
Don Juan Mozart (1893). Bottom:
La Traviata Verdi (1913).
The Italian composers Gioachino Rossini and Giuseppe Verdi
were subjects of British Imperial Tobacco cards.
Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868), pictured above on Wills's
Cigarettes Musical Celebrities No 8 1912, composed 39 operas including The
Barber of Seville, William Tell, and Le Comte Ory.
Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901), pictured above on Ogden's
'Guinea Gold' Cigarettes No 63 c 1901, composed Rigoletto, La Forza Del Destino
and Otello among his 25 operas. The back
of the card is blank.
Early Innings—Chicago’s affair with base ball took a
little longer to blossom. Schoolboys had
played barehanded games of bat and ball in America from colonial times. A still gloveless but more mature and
regulated brand of the recreation emerged in New York City during the
1840s. Partisans gave it the two-word
name, Base Ball, and wrote a rulebook.
The entertainment soon spread from the boroughs to other Eastern cities
but was slow making its way west. In
1863, the number of diamonds in Illinois could probably be counted on one
hand. A small scattering of amateur
clubs practiced the game in Chicago and only the Empire Base Ball Club in
Freeport tended to the sport outside the city.
That summer, the Empires challenged any of the big city clubs to play
for an Illinois championship. Chicago’s
Garden City club accepted the invitation and fell to the Empires in a
politely-disputed three-game series.
Base Ball was wildly popular across the upper Midwest in
the years following the end of the Civil War.
This handbill is an example of the new game’s enthusiasm. It advertises an 1867 match between the
doctors and lawyers of Beloit, Wisconsin, describing the sport as The Best
Thing Yet, and confidently promotes an admission fee of 10 cents for the event.
Excelsiors—The end of the Civil War allowed the game
to flourish in Chicago. Hailing the
exercise as a superior refreshment for mind, body and soul, the Tribune
stamped its approval on base ball’s local growth:
In this city at least 500 young men, many of them members of
the “first families,” and all of the respectable class, are members of
different clubs whose headquarters and batting grounds dot the city in all
directions…Everywhere the game is a decided institution.
There was also the city’s reputation to consider, and the
nagging matter of the state crown, still jealously held.by the stubborn Empires
of Freeport.
In 1866, the Chicago Excelsiors rose to the top of that
city’s base ball rankings, based in in part on its wealthy pedigree,
maintaining a fashionable office downtown and a practice field on Lake and
May. But the team proved its worth on
the diamonds that season, knocking the Freeports off their perch to start the
year and then defeating a Detroit ball club in a memorable match that concluded
a tournament for the Midwestern championship in June. Detroit complained about its loss for
decades. In a 1903 interview, Detroit
right fielder David Barry said:
The umpire beat us.
He allowed the Chicago pitcher to ‘bowl’—use a slight overhand motion in
delivering the ball. Everybody knows we
had to deliver the ball underhand those days.
The advantage their pitcher had over us was enough to win the game.
That old grudge rankles deeply in our hearts yet.
The Excelsiors ended the year by winning the first-place
prize in a September tournament, besting a brace of well-respected St. Louis
clubs along the way and then dispatching the rival Chicago Atlantics in a
hard-fought showdown.
Dodging insistent invitations from Detroit for a rematch,
the Excelsiors finished their campaign without a loss, kings of the game from
the banks of the Mississippi River to the shores of Lake Erie, and the
unblemished record had a certain ring to it, and it made a certain noise. It sounded like music.
And thank you Russell!
NEXT FRIDAY: 1981: Part 1.....things are gonna get sticky around here. That's right, I'm talking the 1981 Topps Baseball Stickers...and album.
