After completing Denver’s Broadway Theatre, Ed Loitz went on to Ogden, Utah, in 1890. Located at the convergence of the Ogden and Weber Rivers in northern Utah, the town claims to be the oldest settlement in Utah because of its founding in 1845 with a small picket enclosure, Fort Buenaventura, constructed by Miles Goodman. Goodman was a mountain man working in northern Utah who met the Mormons coming west in 1847. They purchased his fort and claim during November of that year. Brigham Young sent families to settle the area in 1851 and the community primarily grew as a rural agricultural area with small settlements along the river until 1869. With the completion of the transcontinental railroad, the area changed considerably as Ogden became a main terminal on the Union Pacific and Central Pacific lines. Eventually nine railway systems had terminals in Ogden.
Politically, the established Mormon community leadership was challenged by an increasing non-Mormon presence brought west by the railroad. In 1889 Fred J. Keisel, a non-Mormon was elected mayor of Ogden, the first breakthrough in Utah of the Mormon-dominated politics. Significant business activities thrived in the ensuing decades. Many of the successful businessmen also invested heavily in the construction of a theater.
In Ogden, Moses and Loitz started another scenery installation contract for the Grand Opera House. Joe Wikoff, a Sosman & Landis stage machinist, accompanied Moses to join Loitz on site during the fall of 1890. Moses wrote, “We worked every night and hustled it through December 31.” The Orpheum Theatre was located just south of the Reed Hotel on Washington, where it opened to the Ogden community as the “Grand Opera House” on December 29, 1890.
In his typed manuscript, Moses recalled an entertaining story that took place on the opening night of the Grand Opera House. A performance of “Carmen” with Emma Abbott and her opera company opened the new venue. The first scene for production was described in a Dec. 30, 1890 review for the “The Standard.” It noted, “The curtain rose on a rustic scene, the flat, wings and set pieces forming as pretty a spectacle of the kind as was ever seen on stage.” But the painted scenery or actors were not visible for long. Moses wrote, “Someone cut the main electric cable, plunging the theatre into darkness. There was no gas on stage and we hustled out and got some big candles and lanterns and finished the opera. It was ludicrous.”
Emma Abbott, of the Emma Abbott Opera Company, was a popular opera singer who toured throughout the country and had performed at many other venues prepared by Moses. She had also been the opening act in Altoona, Pennsylvania, for the new Plack’s Opera in 1888, another venue that used painted scenery produced by Moses.
Abbott was born in Chicago during 1850. She was the daughter of struggling musician, Seth Abbott and his wife Almira Palmer. The Abbott family moved to Peoria, Illinois, when Emma was four years old as her father was unable to make a living from teaching music. To help out the family’s finances, Emma and her brother George began performing when she was nine years old. The two had been taught voice, piano, guitar and violin by their father at an early age.
By 1866 she joined a concert troupe and performed all across the country, later pursuing a career in opera. Abbott studied in New York City with Achille Errani and soon made her professional concert debut in December 1871, later traveling abroad to study with Antonio Sangiovanni, Mathilde Marchesi, Pierre Francois Wartel and Enrico Delle. She appeared in several Paris productions and was later awarded a contract with the Royal Opera in London. In 1876, she was performing the role of Marie for “La Fille du Regiment” at Covent Garden when she met and fell in love with Eugene Wetherell. They were married in 1877 and returned to the United States where she organized her own opera company by 1878.
The Emma Abbott Opera Company rapidly gained a reputation for their quality productions that included “Romeo and Juliette,” “Paul et Virginie,” “H.M.S. Pinafore,” “Martha,” “La Sonnambula,” “La Traviata,” and “Carmen.” Abbott performed until her sudden death from pneumonia in Salt Lake City in 1891. She was 40 years old at the time. Odgen papers noted the physical strain that Abbot had endured leading up to the opening of the Grand Opera House’s production of “Carmen.” I wonder if Ogden was the beginning of Abbott’s end.
To be continued…
