Struggle for Power

Within the span of two brief seasons, Chicago's Lyric Theater, a nonprofit corporation organized to present grand opera, managed to restore much of the splendor and prestige of the old days of Mary Garden and Samuel Insull. Night after winter night, the huge Civic Opera House was sibilant with mink and sables while the stage vibrated under the temperaments of the highest-priced stars in the operatic firmament, e.g., Maria Meneghini Callas, Renata Tebaldi. Opera lovers began to think that the Lyric group might succeed where others had failed.

But the mixture of big money and priceless glamour makes tricky chemistry. Last February Managers Carol Fox and Lawrence V. Kelly, both 29, and Artistic Director Nicola Rescigno tangled in a struggle for power--and Chicago's other musical movers and shakers joined in behind the scenes. Last week, after minuets of mediation, largos of litigation and concertos of comment, the Lyric was ordered into receivership (the receiver: Chicago Bar Association President Augustine J. Bowe). with its assets and liabilities probably to be assigned to a new corporation called Opera Theater Association, heavily backed by Carol Fox's friends.

Kelly has won a week's delay but the end seems certain: the new company will take over, start out with debts of some $112,000. Chicago desperately wants its opera, and it probably will get it again this fall, even if in somewhat tattered form.

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