GENERAL

1. Background
   
2. Founding of the Choir
   
3. Vienna Choir Boys
   
4. Lyric Opera
   
5. Urban Gateways
   
6. School Programs
   
7. Staff
   
8. Transportation
   
9. Singers
   
10. Composers
    
11. Spring Tours
    
12. Visitors and Friends
    
13. Fall Camp
    
14. Red Jackets
    
    PROGRAM HIGHLIGHTS
    
15. Talent Development
    
16. Music Fundamentals
    
17. School Concerts
    
18. 1958
    
19. 1959
    
20. 1961 - 1963
    
21. 1973 - 1974
    
22. Joffrey Ballet
    
23. 1975 - 1978
    
24. 1979
    
    NOTABLE EVENTS
    
25. Stevenson Funeral - 1965
    
26. Montreal Expo - 1967
    
27. Dr. King's Death - 1968
    
28. Boston - 1969
    
29. Europe - 1970
    
30. Washington - 1970
31. Financial Crisis (1)
32. Financial Crisis (2)
    

4 - Lyric Opera

WTH: We were talking about the Lyric Opera, and you had just described how in the fall of 1959 when you returned from your visit to the Vienna Boys Choir in Austria you wrote to the Lyric Opera.

CM: When I got back to Chicago, I sent a letter to Carol Fox asking what they were doing for singing children...and whether there were any possibilities of looking at that scene. It was the turn of the year after Lyric had gotten through that current season that Carol got in touch with me, but our conferring down at the opera house led to working out a schedule for our first year with the Lyric that followed one full year after that visit of mine to Vienna. And for a period of years, we were then THE children's choir at the Lyric Opera.

WTH: Now Lyric had a children's choir already?

CM: Lyric had been working with a group that could do some of what they wanted, but it was a mark of -- it was a bellwether of what we represented the Lyric at the point that they picked up our membership on the team that after the first year, a year after our first conference, Carol Fox called me in again to discuss the next season and said, in effect, "We at this point, if you can get it ready...if you're willing...we at this point are ready to program something that we have not done in our seven years because we did not have the children's voices with which to do it -- namely, the Boito Mefistofele that requires this fantastic children's singing in the prologue. You can reprise it in the epilogue." By mutual agreement, we did not. We would have had the kids around for hours and hours and hours for an assignment.

I think the conversations with Carol Fox took place at the end of that fall's Lyric season, looking ahead for the following year. But Lyric was intrigued. I think they had been working with a parochial school, but they didn't have what they needed for an up and coming opera company as far as children's voices went. So they did get into working with us. They had a modest budget for this purpose because they'd been paying the kids that they worked with for each rehearsal and each performance. It was a pittance -- a hot dog and ice cream money kind of thing, but when you added it all up, it was enough to make a difference in our budget. It was enough to allow modest fees for each rehearsal and performance, and at that time, when we got into it, because most of the lists were smaller -- a dozen kids for this, 8 or 10 kids for that -- the largest list in the first year was 20 voices.

We roped in our parents and we operated with a car pool so we didn't have transportation headaches, or rather, we didn't have transportation costs that we would have to pay. We had the headaches. And my curiosity here was what the experience of the kids would be in working with some of the leading professional voices of the time, which Lyric brought in at a steady stream to headline their casts. And the whole experience of being on stage -- of the acting and the motion and the singing and being caught up in this whole milieu -- and for a series of years it was a very intriguing experience. Now the first year, they had three operas going -- La Boheme, Tosca and Carmen.

WTH: Now, did those come before this Mefistofele?

CM: Mefistofele opened, if I recall correctly, our second season at the Lyric. That's kind of a story in itself. The first season we were at Lyric for a host of performances. Each opera had an on-stage-with-piano rehearsal. At the start, each opera had a straight musical rehearsal for the kids. Then, a rehearsal on-stage -- but with their stage.

WTH: Now, would you have rehearsed the kids beforehand?

CM: Yes. I would have them prepared so that the first rehearsal was a check-out, and the transition to working with their staff, and then we would move into a series of three rehearsals -- stage rehearsal, orchestra rehearsal, dress rehearsal. And then on into however many performances each opera got -- 3, 4 or 5.

WTH: So it was quite an expenditure of time for these operas?

CM: That first year, we were at the opera house a couple of dozen times for the three operas laid end to end. And there was some intertwining -- that is, you might open La Boheme and, before the Boheme performance was finished, you had Tosca going into rehearsal or Carmen going into rehearsal. I forgot the order in which they came that first year -- it doesn't really matter. But, it was -- yes -- a busy, busy time. My time, particularly, had to be generously invested in this operation. Lyric wasn't really paying for that.

WTH: So now, then you had a different group for each opera?

CM: We might have some overlap, but if we were doing three operas, it would be extraordinary for a kid to be in all three. Some of them had peculiar demands - La Boheme was a small number of kids, and it could be boys and girls. Tosca had to be boys because they were playing boy choir members and acolytes in a Catholic setting, so there is no possibility of a girl doing that unless the girl looked particularly indistinguishable from a boy.

But what Lyric wanted on that was boys, so we went with that in Tosca. Carmen needed to be larger -- could be larger -- could be both, but it needed to be kids who were young enough so that it didn't look ridiculous that they were playing soldier in that changing-of-the-guard routine. That had eliminated a number of older girls or younger girls who looked older, because a girl that looked like a young woman -- that looked like an understudy for Carmen, if you will -- wasn't the kind of person who would visually look right in that setting.

So that kind of thing went into the decisions, but within that we tried to share the roles available as broadly as we could within the choir, and yet there also had to be the understanding that what was of first importance was not that everybody in reasonable standing in the choir got a chance. But that the strength of the list we gave Lyric had to be as high as we could make it with reasonable human fairness. So somebody could get to do two operas, rather than somebody else getting the second shot. And that would be the strength of the voice and the workmanship with that voice so that we could get the most power, the most vocal, melodic presence per body that was possible.

When we landed up in a later year doing Carmen with the Lyric and then turning around and being available to do Carmen with the New York City Opera Company...we encountered a wonderful community feeling with the New York Company when we worked with them for a rehearsal and two performances at McCormick Place. The attitude of New York in that setting was, for instance, with Julius Ruddell, who was then the man, was not conducting Carmen himself, but at a certain point we were in the Green Room, we'd been fitted for our costumes, we'd gone through some of the preliminaries...we'd had a rehearsal with the young conductor who was doing the performance, and then the conductor had gone out to do some things for the orchestra.

And, here this rather imposing gentleman sails into the room and says, "Hello boys and girls. I wanted to come in and greet you myself," and started talking with the kids about what it is like to do opera, what experience they'd had before.

And then in the course of this, he said, "Well, I'm Julius Ruddell. I'm the Director of the Opera. I'm sorry I'm not getting to conduct your performances of Carmen. You're working with...." and told us a little bit about the guy who had just been in, putting the group through paces.

But there was this familial feel to the whole thing, and he saw to it -- or his staff taking cues from that spirit saw to it -- that the kids saw the make-up people at work, that some of them got to help the wardrobe people with the chores they needed to do while the kids had nothing to do. You know, if you want to see how this is done, maybe help us a little, you could. There was that inclusiveness.

At Lyric, there were individual people who included the kids. I remember a few years down the track, for instance, a scene in which, I believe, in Tosca that was being prepared, and a scrap, a disagreement on point of view and whatnot developed between a stage director and somebody else and, in the midst of this chaos, nobody knew what anyone was doing and the rehearsal had come to a standstill minutes before, and all of a sudden our little choirboy acolytes piped up with "Hooray, it's National Jello Week. Tell everybody you know."

Well, that cracked people up. There were a couple of people offended, but the key personalities just loved it. It was kids being kids, and it gave a message of "Hey, let's pull ourselves together and get back to work."

But there were key members of the crew who couldn't deal with this. There was a pecking order. There was a hierarchy. There was a whole stance that was very different, and the kids were kind of playing it: Well, if everything's unravelling, this is our moment to contribute our own little bit of spice.

WTH: When was this that you did this with the New York City Opera?

CM: Well, that was toward the end of our period with the Lyric. And I'm trying to remember -- it was along about 1965 somewhere on towards that.

WTH: You worked with the Lyric, then, for approximately five years?

CM: Something like 5-6 years.

WTH: And you did about how many operas a year usually?

CM: Anywhere between one or two and four or so. The experience that led to our parting company involved the scheduling of the famous trio -- Carmen, Boheme plus Carmina Burana and Wozzeck -- and I tried to get Lyric to help us with this before I said no to Wozzeck. The problem that season presented us was that Carmen and Carmina would both take large lists. Boheme needed a small, strong list, and Wozzeck was of indeterminate size. But it had a part that was demanding not because of what the kids sing, but of the way it had to be fitted into the opera and the fact that it comes in the last moments of the opera.

It was the double whammy of when it would come in the evening -- the fact that the kids would be there all night for their little moment -- that it would come on top of Thanksgiving and getting ready for Christmas. It was going to come at that part of the season when we were under other pressures. It would take some of our best kids. It didn't need our best kids in a common-like sense for the sheer joy of the role. We were going to have to give tremendous emotional support.

After all, the kids are singing hip hop and little inanities when there is a rushing in to report that they'd found the body of the mother of one of the kids. Now, to have to explain this and do this night after night about the time that you should already be asleep was not a pleasure that I looked forward to. And so I figured that we had to have more kids to share some of the roles. We had to expand program at that point. And we gave Lyric a proposal the January before, which was right about the time we were becoming involved with Urban Gateways. We gave them a proposal to fund for the equivalent of a significant but part-time junior salary an expansion of our program.

In other words, we needed staff to reach out further. To take the Raymond and other programs that were then going with Urban Gateways. We were into the group of schools, not just Raymond, at that point, but to work intensively with that talent and possibly look more broadly at the City to see who belonged with us, and our problem was not that the talent wasn't there, that we couldn't reach out, but we couldn't afford to do the work that to reach out required. Lyric didn't choose to do this. It started its own program which handled Carmina Burana and Wozzeck.

WTH: It started its own children's choir?

CM: It started its own children's choir program. And I was bemused at this, but I wasn't surprised.

WTH: Just one note on this -- the timing here -- I saw in the book a memo of yours of June 6, 1960 to the choir kids mentioning rehearsals taking place for a Boheme squad, a Tosca squad and a Carmen squad. Now this is apparently the rehearsals for the first operas in the fall 1960 season that you participated in. And.…

CM: We were going to have to appear at Lyric for the first of those -- and I forget whether it was Boheme or Carmen...it doesn't matter, Tosca usually came last -- but we were going to have to appear maybe the end of September or early October, so we had to get going the year before.

WTH: I can see on this memo that things other than voices come in too. You have an apology in here, too, to some of the older girls who are too old to be in Carmen, but not all of them are required for Boheme -- when they have grown-up girls but they didn't want or need as many grown-up girls as you had.

CM: Right. We had a few grown-up looking girls -- mature looking girls of whatever age -- that were too numerous to fit in the roles available for such. The problem was that in Carmen you should look as though it was appropriate for you to be playing like little boys at being soldier for the changing of the guard. And so that wouldn't let very many older girls in there, and you weren't about to have an older girls list for Boheme. It had to be both boys and girls and younger and older, so we used girls as assistants or found roles where some could be helpful if possible.

WTH: That would have been in your second season with Lyric that you did this opera Mefistofele.

CM: And Mefistofele for children is the prologue. There is actually a culminating, brief reprise of that material at the end of the opera, but the kids were not used for that because it would have meant lying around the opera house literally all night long every time. But the prologue is a major work that is often performed on its own. It requires a stentorian adult chorus, plus a large children's choir.

WTH: So they decided to do that opera in part because they had the children's choir?

CM: That's right. When I was called in during January 1961 to discuss what happened next, I found that they were programming Boito's Mefistofele for opening night, and that was kind of a story in itself. And they were doing this because they had always wanted to do this opera. It is a spectacular opera, and the prologue is utterly spectacular. But before us, they had not had a children's choir that could deal with that assignment.

Now that assignment has two different difficulties intertwined: it has a chorus of, if you will, musical mosquitoes -- the little angels, the little cherubs -- who swarm around Satan in the clouds -- (whole bunch of splendori spumonti stuff) -- done at a pace of (rapid fire sound) -- a little musical jackhammer going about that fast in Italian, split second timing which we had to prepare for by working all spring.

That was the spring that we lost the army of able kids. We had done our preparations thoroughly enough so that we were in no way embarrassed. We would have had a little easier time and been a stronger group if we had done this assignment in the spring before our losses. But the losses didn't really hit us until, as we said before, a year, a year and a half later. But we had to practice this thing because we had to be up to a machine-gun like pace of delivering this one particular segment that comes twice in the prologue.

The other problem is that it is a scene on a cloud, and this is the angelic chorus misticus that is heard but not seen. Now, how do you hear but not see 100 adult voices, 30 or 35 children, in a position that has clear visibility for the conductor, clear audibility for the audience, and total invisibility visually? Well, you create this monstrous cloud base on stage. You create a cloud that has a ceiling and a back and sides so you will not have any silhouettes. And it has a mosquito netting-like front at least from waist up. And it reaches from side to side of the stage and is strong enough in the middle so that Mefistofele can stand on it. By the time you have done this, and packed in 150 bodies, you have a ventilation problem of major proportions. There were no problems in the initial rehearsal preparations of this piece.

WTH: Who was the director, by the way?

CM: Sansonio, who was the music director of Milan. And Sansonio is an extremely able man who has very little feel for kids. His beat was often atrocious...and the one request that I had from the kids on opening night and before opening night was that he come into the Civic Theater, which was being used as the ready room for the kids on that performance -- they didn't need to dress -- they came dressed -- wear dark so that nothing will reflect light. None of the white tops business. Wear dark everything so that you will be further invisible in that cloud.

But the kids wanted the conductor to come in and give them the first cue a couple of times. It was a very hard cue to feel because it wasn't an on-the- beat kind of thing, and it was difficult to tell where his beat was in relation to what was wanted. And Sansonio was doing whatever and he just sort of smiled at me and said, "Oh, I don't need to come in. You just tell them I......" Which is precisely what the problem was. And what they needed was a chance to feel their way one or two more times in private before they did it in public so that there were no accidents. One of our parents of chutzpah and ingenuity took a tape recorder, stole into the fly storage area way, way up on one of the catwalks, and made a tape recording of this, which I think somewhere around here I still have.

But let me return to the problem of the cloud. It was breathless in that cloud. It was an ordeal. And, at the orchestra rehearsal, the dress rehearsal, at one of the key rehearsals, one of our boys passed out. You couldn't get him out of there, and yet you had to get him out of there. They had to lift him up. The adults had to lift him up and pass him over their shoulders and heads...as a sort of inert form...to one end and an exit hatch. That led them to put a couple of fans in there to try to at least move the air. But getting ready to go in the cloud was not an ethereal experience at any of the performances for the kids. So that was Mefistofele.

WTH: Did the Italian conductor approve of the kids' Italian?

CM: Yes. We didn't do too badly on that. We had a pretty good track record on the languages. Now, this poses the interesting question of why go through all of this. We did it for far more than the glamour, or the aura. The Lyric assignments were, with the exception of Mefistofele, assignments of limited time focus where you had to have every detail right and you had to be prepared to deliver this in a setting that wasn't your choral formation with your director close and right with you.

So you had to develop a total poise in a setting that gave you approbation, applause, the glamour of the costuming, of the excellence of the artists around you -- the whole thing. But it allowed you and forced you to polish details in a way that you couldn't possibly justify with young kids in a routine choral setting. You would then come out of this, we hoped, with an appreciation of the importance of details, so that with less attention given, we would get some of that fine detail work by better attention given by the singers from their appreciative understanding of why the same rules really applied and that the key to getting these results was not how much time we put in on every detail a la the Lyric context, but taking your awareness of how to function and how to come up with this kind of detail work and responsibility and applying it yourself as a singer in other rehearsals.

Along the way, there were the special experiences of getting to meet and work with Grace Bumbry, Morely Meredith, Renata Tebaldi -- there were individual singers at Lyric who with their own great humanity, or with the encouragement of other adults on the Lyric staff who would occasionally introduce the kids to a person that they were working with and seeing but had no basis of just chatting with -- would build a bridge and you would get scenes.

One of the most touching scenes I remember involved performances of Tosca that were conducted by Lovra Von Maracek. Lovra Von Maracek did not do a lot of conducting at the Lyric, whether or not we want to put it in writing, I suspect that his spirit was not congenial to some things about Lyric and Lyric may not have been in that sense congenial to his spirit at that time.

Von Maracek walked up to the kids at a free moment outside the stage and started talking with them about the experience they were having growing up in this kind of choir and then shared the fact that he'd been a Vienna Choir Boy in his childhood, and here there was this several minutes of rapturous interchange between this older man who was musically in charge of the whole scene they were in and this group of kids. He was welcoming them Julius Ruddell-style into this world that he was in and sharing how he'd come out of experiences like those they were having right now. This was absolutely fabulous. And to me, that's what opera involving kids should be all about.

WTH: Now when you started -- when the choir started with the Lyric -- was this the first time that you had significant income from engagements for the choir? I guess you had been paid by the Chicago Symphony...

CM: Some amount. I think our Chicago Symphony payments mainly covered our transportation costs and a list of 35 kids in a day -- and I think it was in the day before the Grant Park underground. We had to use a bus. We couldn't use private cars. The attractiveness of the Lyric assignments was the smaller lists, larger number of performances kind of thing. I think that our Chicago Symphony subsidy essentially covered costs. I don't think it gave us any leeway money, so that, you're right, Lyric gave us the first identifiable chunk of money, not enormous, but it ran into the hundreds of dollars -- it could be a thousand or two --in a season which, for that day in the early '60's and against the background of what our budget then was, which was not that many thousand dollars.