100 years ago in Spokane: Opera star opts to cut German music from show

Madame Frances Alda, international opera diva, announced that her program at the Auditorium Theater would contain no German music.

Anti-German sentiment apparently was still widespread, despite the fact that the war had been over for months. The New Zealand-born opera star said that she simply saw no need to sing German music.

“Without discrediting the musical beauty of the compositions given the world by some of the composers of Germany, there is so much beautiful music of English, French and Italian origin that we can afford to dispense with German music,” she said. “I make it a fixed rule to do so.”

After her Spokane concert, she was headed to the Metropolitan Opera to sing “Faust” and “La Boheme.”

From the health beat: Spokane was organizing a “women’s social hygiene committee” to deal with the problems of social disease.

The plan was to provide educational information, preventive work, increased law enforcement, the “betterment of social conditions” and better care care for women in “social disease institutions.”

Dr. Mary McMillan Rodney was named committee chair.

Also on this date

(From the Associated Press)

1865: President Abraham Lincoln spoke to a crowd outside the White House, saying, “We meet this evening, not in sorrow, but in gladness of heart.” (It was the last public address Lincoln would deliver.)