Ravinia Revival

Twenty-five years ago Louis Eckstein, rich Chicago merchant and real estate operator, began sponsoring summer orchestra concerts at Ravinia Park, 37 acres of woods he owned on suburban Chicago's North Shore. Later, not instruments but voices made Ravinia famed. The Ravinia Opera which Louis Eckstein produced, signing up the best artists, casting them, supervising every production detail, cost him some $1,500,000 before Depression halted it four years ago (TIME, April 11, 1932). Patron Eckstein, who kept hoping to revive Ravinia, died last winter. Last week there was orchestra music once more in the open-sided theatre at Ravinia Park, a major North Shore event for Chicago society editors but otherwise a pale shadow of pre-Depression days.

Thirty-six years ago Louis Eckstein married Elsie Syndacker, a dark, handsome University of Chicago girl, picked out for him by a Chicago woman in whom he had confided his wish to marry. Pretty Mrs. Eckstein never cared much for opera, but with devout admiration for anything her husband did she attended Ravinia every night so long as he ran it. Mr. Eckstein left her about $1,000,000. was reputed to have given her five or six million more before he died. She has been deaf to all appeals to revive Ravinia Opera, feeling that no one could do it as well as Mr. Eckstein had.

This year Mrs. Eckstein was toying with the idea of cutting Ravinia's 37 acres into lots, at $10,000 an acre, when a delegation of 25 young Chicago business and professional men went to her with what they convinced her was a feasible plan for summer music. She agreed to let them have her Park for concerts by the Chicago Symphony, provided they would permit her to pass upon the list of conductors. With Banker Willoughby George Walling as chairman, the group quickly raised $30,000 in guarantees. Since the Chicago Symphony was also scheduled for free concerts in Grant Park, sponsored by the City and the local Federation of Musicians, the Ravinia organizers had to be content with four concerts over each of five weekends during the summer. With moderate prices they had a good advance sale when the first concert began last week.

Mrs. Eckstein did not attend Ravinia's revival which was launched by Conductor Ernest Ansermet. That spry, bearded Swiss gave modern Russian music many a first performance when he played for the old Diaghilev Ballet, has since guest-conducted in Europe and South America. Other Ravinia conductors who passed muster with Mrs. Eckstein were to be Willem van Hoogstraten. Hans Lange, Werner Janssen and three local men-- Henry Weber, Rudolph Ganz, Isaac Van Grove. Whatever ghosts of old operatic voices lingered in the Ravinia rafters, Conductor Ansermet drowned them out with Wagner, Stravinsky, Liszt, Berlioz before taking a plane to California to open the agreeable summer concerts of the Hollywood Bowl.

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