Biographical Note
Choreographer Ruth Page was born March 22, 1899, in Indianapolis, Indiana. At age 12, she began to study ballet with local teachers. By the age of 20, she had toured South America with Anna Pavlova’s ballet company, and thereafter she was engaged as a principal dancer for Adolph Bolm’s Ballet Intime (1920) and Chicago Allied Arts (1924). An invitation to appear at the coronation ceremonies of Japan's Emperor Hirohito in 1928 took Page to Japan, where she extended her stay to tour throughout Southeast Asia and the Mideast (as well as parts of Europe), a cultural experience that would influence her future choreography. She was principal dancer or ballet mistress for notable companies such as the Chicago Opera Company, Ravinia Opera Company, Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Les Ballets Américains, among others. While many of Page’s dance works were based on classical themes and set to classical music (for example, Chopin Mazurka, 1922; Beauty and the Beast with music of Tchaikovsky, 1949), she became noteworthy for new ballets on American life and social themes with music by contemporary composers: The Flapper and the Quarterback, 1926, which used popular dance tunes such as "Too Much Mustard"; Hear Ye! Hear Ye!, 1934, with music by Aaron Copland; Americans in Paris, 1936, to George Gershwin's An American in Paris; and her most famous work Frankie and Johnny, 1936, co-choreographed with Bentley Stone and based on the African American ballad. Billy Sunday included spoken word within the ballet, as did other of her choreographic works dating from as early as 1926. In the 1950s, Page choreographed internationally at such companies as Les Ballets des Champs-Elysées, the London Festival Ballet, the Lyric Theatre, and the then-fledgling New York City Ballet, among others. In 1955 Page founded the Chicago Opera Ballet (called Ruth Page's International Ballet from 1966 to 1969), which toured internationally when not performing with Chicago's Lyric Opera. At Page's invitation in 1962, Rudolf Nureyev made his American debut dancing Don Quixote with the Chicago Opera Ballet. Page founded the Ruth Page Foundation for Dance in Chicago in 1971. She died April 7, 1991; her second husband, scene designer André Delfau, survived her.
Composer Remi Gassmann was born December 30, 1908, in Kansas. As early as age 10, he began to compose music. He received a master's degree in music in 1931 from the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music, and he studied for six years with Paul Hindemith at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin, Germany. In 1937, he married Marthe Loyson, a French citizen. Returning to the United States in 1939, Gassmann was appointed professor of music theory for the Chicago Symphony, for which his Symphonic Overture in G was commissioned for the 50th Jubilee season. In 1941, he was appointed assistant professor of music at the University of Chicago, where as director of the Composers' Concerts he hosted Stravinsky, Hindemith, Milhaud, Schoenberg, and others. In 1944, Gassmann became the director of the School of Music at Elmhurst College in Illinois. Gassmann has earned accolades as a composer for dance. One of his earliest compositions for ballet was the score commissioned by Chicago-based choreographer Ruth Page for her ballet Billy Sunday. Other notable examples include Paean for Tatjana Gsovsky's 1960 ballet of the same title and the score for George Balanchine's Electronics (1961). These two scores along with his electronic soundtrack for Alfred Hitchcock's film The Birds (1963) exemplify Gassmann's avant-garde contributions to electronic music. Gassmann's later work focused almost exclusively on research and development for electronic sound. He died March 2, 1982, in Strasbourg, France.
Chicago attorney Thomas Hart Fisher married Ruth Page in 1925. For several decades, he contributed substantially to the management of Page's career, especially legal correspondence and contracts. Disbarred in the 1960s after mishandling clients' estates and trusts, Fisher died in November 1969.