The Industrial Evolution of the Arts: Chicago’s Auditorium Building (1889–) as Cultural Machine Mark Clague The Opera Quarterly, Volume 22, Number 3-4, Summer-Autumn 2006, pp. 477-511 (Article) Published by Oxford University Press For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/opq/summary/v022/22.3-4.clague.html Access Provided by University of Michigan @ Ann Arbor at 11/02/12 3:58PM GMT The Industrial Evolution of the Arts: Chicago’s Auditorium Building (1889–) as Cultural Machine {mark clague} Chicago had had the biggest conflagration “in the world.” It was the biggest grain and lumber market “in the world.” It was the greatest railroad center, the greatest this, and the greatest that. The shouters could not well be classed with the prover- bial liars of Ecclesiastes, because what they said was true; and had they said, in the din, we are the crudest, rawest, most savagely ambitious dreamers and would-be doers in the world, that also might be true. ... These men had vision. What they saw was real, they saw it as destiny. —Auditorium architect Louis Sullivan1 American Opera as Institute: Engaging Society, Finance, and Art In his closing remarks at the First Chicago Opera Festival on April 18, 1885, real estate mogul Ferdinand Peck introduced the public to his idea of building a per- manent home for grand opera in Chicago—what four years later would become the Auditorium Building (fig. 1). Addressing the audience in his role as festival president, Peck proclaimed the extraordinary success of the two-week, fourteen- performance gala, which had included works by Bellini (I puritani and La son- nambula), Donizetti (Lucia di Lammermoor and Linda di Chamounix), Gounod (Faust and Mireilla), Meyerbeer (L’Africaine), Rossini (Semiramide), Verdi (Aida and Il trovatore), Wagner (Lohengrin), and Weber (Der Freischu¨tz), plus stars such as sopranos Adelina Patti and Emma Nevada and contralto Sofia Scalchi.2 He highlighted what was believed to be world-record attendance (possibly over ninety to one hundred thousand people)3 and revenues ($132,000)4 for such a festival by suggesting that these results justified the construction of a permanent opera house. With effusive pride the Chicago Tribune reported that [Peck] desired to thank the people of this city for their generous attendance upon Chicago’s first opera festival. It had been a success in every respect, and the man- agement had done its best to accommodate and please the public. Their motto had been “Music for the people”—splendid music, interpreted by the first artists The Opera Quarterly Vol. 22, No. 3–4, pp. 477–511; doi: 10.1093/oq/kbn007 Advance Access publication on June 26, 2008 # The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]. 478 mark clague Figure 1 Chicago’s Auditorium Building, c. 1889. The tower marks the entrance to the theater, while the three arches facing the park offer entry to the hotel. Photo from America from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico, Series 1, ed. G. R. Cromwell (New York: James Clarke, 1894). of the world. The management had accomplished a task that could have been accomplished in no other city in the world—that of constructing this great auditor- ium in six weeks and producing upon its stage thirteen different operas. This had shown what Chicago would and could do, and he hoped that people would look upon this as a stepping-stone to a great permanent hall where similar enterprises would have a home. [Applause.]5 Peck rode the tide of applause to assert Chicago’s needs for a large public auditor- ium and preached the advantages of such a hall. He saw in music, and opera in particular, a means for the city and its people to fulfill their pioneering destiny— a way to provide for the continuing refinement of the civic enterprise. The Tribune continued, quoting from Peck’s speech: The continuation of this annual festival, with magnificent music, at prices within the reach of all, would have a tendency to diminish crime and Socialism in our city by educating the masses to higher things. [Applause ...] In conclusion, [Peck] desired to express his thanks to the directors who had assisted him so materially, to the men in the employ of the association, to the industrial evolution of the arts 479 Mr. Milward Adams, who had so ably cared for the public in the auditorium, and to the press of the Northwest, which had been so magnanimous in its treatment of the enterprise. The festival had been given with no regard to monetary gain, and it had been a great success socially, financially, and artistically. [Applause.]6 This tripartite combination of social, financial, and artistic components generated, along with civic pride, the impulse behind Chicago’s Auditorium Building (1889– ). Architects Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan typically are credited by historians with its design, which would be true if the building could be considered as distinct from its social and artistic context. In this sense, however, Ferdinand Peck (fig. 2) should be considered one of the principal designers of the Auditorium Building as social project. The structural ingenuity necessary to create this building required not just new strategies of integrating iron and masonry, balancing enormous loads on floating foundations, and enhancing space with allegorical art nouveau decora- tion; it also required the engineering of cultural production—the adaptation of European musical practice to a Gilded Age American industrial city. Figure 2 Ferdinand Wythe Peck (1848–1924), the social entrepreneur driving the Auditorium project. From W. S. B. Mathews, A Hundred Years of Music in America (Chicago: G. L. Howe, 1889), 321. 480 mark clague Figure 3 Conceptual mechanism of Chicago’s Auditorium Theater as expressed by Peck. Presented as three interlocking gears (figure created by author). Peck’s innovation was the creation of a mechanism for producing opera—a cul- tural machine—that envisioned the work of culture as the mutual interdependence of social, financial, and artistic components. The Chicago Opera Festival, which used a temporary wooden theater designed by Adler and Sullivan to Peck’s require- ments, served as the test case—the prototype—to demonstrate the practical utility of his design.7 Figure 3 illustrates the fundamental conception of Peck’s invention by showing each of these three components as gears, in which the motion of one requires the motion of all and the movement of any propels the system as a whole. Thus an artistic triumph would drive ticket sales and bring the community together in a shared experience. A huge donation would pay the fees for increas- ingly famous artists, who in turn would attract audiences and sell more tickets. The hosting of a charity concert would bring in money for a social cause and thus provide for yet more performances. Similarly, impedance in any part would detract from the whole: artistic failure, social scandal, or financial distress would each add friction, reducing the musical productivity of such a cultural engine. In sum, this multigeared mechanism, integrating the financial, artistic, and social resources of an institutional system, may be seen as guiding the production of culture in Chicago explicitly in terms of the Auditorium but also as an intriguing analytical approach for understanding cultural institutions in other contexts. The Auditorium Building: Balancing the Social, Financial, and Artistic In western European musical parlance, “opera house” refers to a theater built for the presentation of drama in which the actors generally sing throughout. Yet nineteenth-century America, in an essentially postcolonial context with its attendant anxieties over cultural legitimacy, incorporated the notion of an “opera” house or house for opera differently, ironically connecting more to its Latin etymological roots than to European usage. The word opera came through Latin into Italian, where it developed into a specific musical term from its the industrial evolution of the arts 481 origins as the plural of opus, meaning “work.” The American opera house like- wise has been a plural conception: a multiuse civic space performing a variety of cultural work: economic, social, and artistic. This fusing of civic, business, and artistic functions was increasingly true in the late nineteenth century and outside the major urban centers, when the desire for the prestige of an opera house encouraged smaller and less affluent communities to build their own. By combining functions, the cost of an opera house could be spread across a number of civic initiatives, making the house for musical works into a home for many and varied uses. For example, the “opera house” (1890–) in Woodstock, Illinois, outside of Chicago also houses the public library, council chambers, justice court, and fire station, while the city hall and theater are combined in the opera house of Rochester, New Hampshire (1908–).8 Even New York’s [Old] Metropolitan Opera House (opened 1883) included street-level commercial spaces, a second floor with ballrooms and a restaurant, and apartments for bachelors in the corner blocks.9 As the realization of Peck’s vision in 1889, Chicago’s Auditorium represents the ascendancy and possibly the early apex of this many-faceted notion of the opera house as civic center. Rather than offering a home for music drama alone, it housed a consortium of private and public enterprise to invite the broadest range of patrons and their purposes through its doors. It comprised not only a state-of-the-art theater plus a smaller recital/lecture hall, but also a hotel, office and retail rental spaces, three restaurants, a bar, a music conserva- tory, a public observation deck, an artesian well, and even a Coast Guard signal station on its roof.