100 years ago today in Spokane: Opera delights Spokane

Music critic Hannah Hinsdale reported that “Spokane’s traditional coldness as an audience entirely melted last evening” when a crowd at the Auditorium Theater delivered a warm and prolonged ovation to the touring Scotti Grand Opera Co.

Hinsdale herself was beyond effusive.

“There were no lapses, no hitches, no rough edges, no voices that needed forgiveness, no lacks in the chorus to feel sorry for,” she wrote. “Grand opera in its finest and most triumphant guise was here.”

She also noted that the Auditorium crowd presented a “really gala appearance, the women with their shoulders and coiffures gleaming and their heavy fur weighted evening wraps thrown back.”

From the museum beat: In other cultural news, the Spokane Daily Chronicle’s editorial page made a wholehearted pitch for state funding for a new museum in Spokane.

The Eastern Washington Historical Society had assembled valuable collections, but the “museum has outgrown its present quarters,” which consisted of just a few rooms on an upper floor of the Crescent building. The Chronicle called for a permanent institution to be built.

“The legislature has provided for a museum on the West Side,” said the Chronicle. “The East Side of the state should have its proportion of assistance for a similar purpose. … The whole state will gain by a large institution in this city.”

This would eventually happen, but slowly and in stages. In 1924, the museum moved to the Campbell House, which had been donated by the Campbell family. In 1960, a new building was opened next door, the Cheney Cowles Memorial Museum. In 2001, the current museum building was opened and renamed the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture (MAC).