Word: raisa
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...Burschsteins of Bielostok was born last week in Chicago a grand- daughter, Daughter Rosa's first child. If this birth was one of the year's most notable,* it was because Daughter Rosa is now a world-famed diva, Rosa Raisa of the Chicago Opera Company; and because, wife of Baritone Giacomo Rimini, she had become increasingly famed in 1928, when obstetrical forecasts in the Press were limited mainly to royalty and gossipy tabloids, by being reported "expectant" (TIME, April 30, 1928). The public had watched and waited while Soprano Raisa went with her husband to their villa...
Less spectacular but more an artist than the unmarried Mary Garden, Rosa Raisa made her Chicago debut (in Aida) in 1913, three years after that of Chicago's Mary. She has seen the Chicago Opera undergo many a vicissitude,† and at 38 (Mary Garden who left this year is 54) she may look forward to years more of good & bad times. Tall, swart, she has neither the chic of Lucrezia Bori nor the Viennese brilliance of Maria Jeritza: she looks Jewish, and like Soprano Alma Gluck and Contralto Sophie Braslau, is proud of it. Annually (except this year...
...Raisa sings some 80 roles; she began her career by studying coloratura as well as dramatic parts. Her favorites are Norma and Aida (she feels the "terrible oppression" they suffered), Rachel in Halévy's La Juive ("It is of my own land . . . my race, which in Poland suffered inconceivable persecutions") and Maliella in The Jewels of the Madonna ("a vamp type . . . brilliant temperament of a feminine mind"). In 1924 Arturo Toscanini, then director of La Scala in Milan, offered her the leading soprano role in the world premiere of Arrigo Boito's posthumous Nerone. Regretfully...
Baritones are seldom heroes. In La Tosca Mme Raisa has many times stabbed Husband Rimini. In Otello he is responsible for her death by strangulation. Seldom lovers on the stage, Soprano and Baritone have been (for opera singers) amazingly felicitous in the home. Domestic as are few couples so loaded with fame, they would have found no fault last week with the colyumist's casual, stereotyped term, "blessed event...
...many a Chicagoan the opera season does not start until Mary Garden returns. This year she is particularly welcome, for Chicago's opera affairs are not in a happy state. Sopranos Rosa Raisa, Claudia Muzio, Lotte Lehmann, Frida Leider have been giving capable performances. But despite expectations the pretentious new house has not proved popular. Beauty is widely conceded to the building. On the northwest edge of the Loop, it rises from the murky Chicago River directly across from the unquestionably beautiful Chicago Daily News Building & Plaza. But the acoustics are not yet so good as in the famed...