Rosa Raisa was an opera star in Chicago in the early 20th century, who was featured in the La Scala premier of Turandot at the request of composer Giacomo Puccini.
Operatic contralto Cyrena van Gordon, from left, soprano Rosa Riasa and tenor Antonio Cortis, circa 1932.
He set down his baton and, his voice choking with emotion, announced: “Here is where the maestro died.’’ Raisa later recalled. Raisa was Polish-Jewish. She was born in 1893 in Bialystok, a city then ruled by the Russian czar and regularly subject to pogroms, like the one she witnessed in 1906. Returning home after going into hiding, “I passed a hospital where hundreds of dead people lay scattered on the ground of the courtyard, victims of the enraged savage mobs,” she later recalled.The experience prompted Raisa to leave Bialystok and join a relative who found refuge on the Italian island of Capri.
“And from the first day I arrived, Chicago has been my home,” she told Studs Terkel in 1959. “You have opened your arms and you still love me, and I still love the people, my friends of Chicago.”The notices of her 1913 debut in Verdi’s “Aida” were favorable, but the company’s director warned the press that, as a young performer, she would have “diamond in the rough moments.” She was 20 and didn’t return for four years.
Upon Raisa’s retirement from the Chicago’s opera company later in the 1930s, she and her husband operated a school for opera singers in the Congress Hotel, where they lived.They also continued to concertize together. She told a Los Angeles Yiddish newspaper: “I also have got a home in Santa Monica but my dream is to take a trip to the land of Israel and make my home there.”
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Fight reported near Santa Rosa's Montgomery High; 2 teens arrested with weaponsTwo Montgomery High School students were arrested by Santa Rosa police Friday after a report of a fight between several juveniles near the troubled school, authorities said.
Read more »
2 Santa Rosa students arrested after fight, marijuana and weapons foundTwo Santa Rosa high school students were arrested Friday morning for possession of weapons after police responded to a school about a fight.
Read more »
2 Montgomery HS students arrested for bringing weapons to campus, Santa Rosa police sayTwo Montgomery High School students were arrested Friday for possessing weapons on campus after report of a fight, Santa Rosa police said.
Read more »
Young woman's body found tied up in shopping cart in SW Side alley, family saysRelatives of Rosa Chacon say her body was found in a shopping cart, tied up and wrapped in sheets in an alley on Chicago's Southwest Side.
Read more »
Missing woman's body found tied up in shopping cart in SW Side alley, family saysRelatives of Rosa Chacon say her body was found in a shopping cart, tied up and wrapped in sheets in an alley on Chicago's Southwest Side.
Read more »