In January 1921, operatic diva Mary Garden was appointed music director (or "Directa" as she styled it) and the recently divorced McCormick promised to pay that year's difference exceeding $100,000, the previous high being $300,000.
The subsequent blow-out season was finished with the hugely expensive world premiere of Sergei Prokofiev's The Love for Three Oranges, which had been commissioned by the Opera Association.
Opera Association general manager Harold F. McCormick resigned and was replaced by utilities magnate Samuel Insull, while sixteen of the eighteen directors were carried over from the old company.
Productions were supposed to based upon what the people wanted, though they turned out to be the Italian repertory that the sponsors and the executives favored and the modern French operas beloved of reigning diva Mary Garden, while German works and operetta were sadly neglected.
The building of the new opera house was to be semi-financed by Insull, and the rest would be leveraged in with bonds to be held by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.
This was a magnificent plan and would have worked wonderfully, except that opening night ironically fell on November 4, 1929 (again with a delightful performance of Aida) less than a month after the Black Tuesday stock crash.
Mary Garden, the star-power and resident genius of Civic, never happy with the new opera house, retired abruptly after a performance of Massenet's Le jongleur de Notre-Dame at the end of the 1931/2 season.