Fifty years after Cincinnati Opera presented its final open-air season at its first performance home, the Cincinnati Zoo, the company will return to the outdoors this July for our 2021 Summer Festival, Summer at Summit. The reimagined season will take place July 11-31 at Summit Park, located in the heart of Blue Ash, Ohio, and will feature internationally renowned artists, the Cincinnati Opera Chorus, and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.
In the following excerpt from a new book celebrating our 100th anniversary, Cincinnati Opera: A Centennial Celebration, writer and Opera supporter Cynthia Starr offers a peek at our early outdoor roots. Hers is one of eight essays and hundreds of photos you’ll find in the commemorative book, available now through Cincinnati Opera’s online Bravo Shop.
Singing With the Seals
By Cynthia Star
Cincinnati Opera’s home until 1971 was the Zoo Pavilion, seen here across from Swan Lake.
In 1920, the Cincinnati Zoo unveiled a groundbreaking new attraction. In addition to the beloved lions, elephants, waterfowl, and peacocks, the Zoo would showcase a rare subset of the human species: those who could truly sing. In a novel experiment that would launch a 50-year tradition and a 100-year institution, the Cincinnati Zoo Opera was born. Performances featuring renowned vocalists from around the world as well as musicians from the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra drew a collective audience of more than 100,000 during the inaugural seven-week festival. As the Cincinnati Times-Star reported, the Opera’s debut season at the Zoo closed “with a history of success never before equaled by any attraction of that resort.” Indeed, all 42 performances had sold out. Opera in Cincinnati was off to a roaring start.
A sold-out audience enjoys a 1962 performance at the Zoo.
For the next 50 years—with only one exception—Cincinnati’s summer opera season took place at the Cincinnati Zoo. Those who attended remember it as a period of magic and romance, a time when couples of all generations and backgrounds mingled and the Zoo’s permanent residents contributed unscripted “songs” of their own. Patrons arrived wearing dark suits and gowns, while others rushed over directly from their workplaces. Families enjoyed picnic dinners on the grassy areas prior to the performances, and some brought small children, pushing strollers right up to their seats. Attendees purchased cushions and copies of the libretto from ushers and, once darkness had fallen after the first act, they followed the words with their flashlights. All were joined by a common bond: their love of opera.
“It had a carnival-like atmosphere, in a nice sense,” recalls Igor Dumbadze, a retired physician who served as an usher with his future wife, Jane, during the 1960s. “The festivity was what made it so enticing. It was informal. You could go out and walk around the Zoo and listen to the animals and have a beer. The animals bellowed. During a love duet, some seal or peacock would start blaring. But nobody got upset. It was part of the charm of opera at the Zoo.”…
The cast of the 1949 production of Andrea Chénier gets acquainted with a feathered fan.
Over the decades, the Zoo Opera enjoyed its status as a destination for music lovers of all ages. Charlin Devanney Briggs, an interior designer and longtime Cincinnati Opera trustee, remembers the Zoo Opera in the 1950s as central to courtship and romance. “You really knew a boy liked you when he invited you to the opera at the Zoo,” she recalls.…
For Charlin Briggs and countless others, participation by the Zoo’s permanent residents would become a beloved memory. Some observers speculated that the animals were irritated at being disturbed during the night. Or—more likely, in view of our growing understanding of animal intelligence—they were moved by some innate appreciation for the operatic voice. Whatever their motivation, the animals frequently joined the singers. None were more notorious than the Zoo’s own divas, the peacocks, which for years roamed free and fearless and seemed to have a natural interest not only in opera crowds, but also in the music.
La Traviata was performed every season from 1938 to 1958.
“The animals were all around us,” Briggs recalls. “The most wonderful part was sitting there, as close as you could get to the stage, and the soprano—one of the great sopranos of our past—would be singing away, when the seals lifted their heads and kept in tune with the soprano.
“And not just the seals. Any of the animals that had a voice that they could lift in any measure would keep time. It was extraordinary. It was like the chorus. And it was such a joy to sit there and watch all of the wonderful things on the stage—the same wonderful things we see today on the stage—while surrounded by animals who could listen and join in. They absolutely sang along with the music. Now nobody will believe that. Everyone will think I’m telling a story. But anyone who went to the Zoo Opera will say, ‘Yes, you’re right. That is what happened, and that is a memory.’”
Bass-baritone Norman Treigle towers over the 1969 cast of Faust at the Cincinnati Zoo.
Read the entire essay in Cincinnati Opera: A Centennial Celebration.
Cincinnati Opera: A Centennial Celebration is a keepsake publication spanning the company's history from 1920 to 2020. This commemorative book features full-color photos and collected essays chronicling Cincinnati Opera's vibrant first century.