Music: Miss Cassidy of Chicago

For years, flame-haired young Claudia Cassidy grubbed away writing a music-and-theater column for the Chicago Journal of Commerce. Her pay was low but her spirit high: steadily and surely Miss Cassidy became known to an ever wider public as the best music critic in Chicago. Her two 18-carat assets: 1) a shrewd sense of musical values, 2) a gift of writing pointed criticism engagingly. Examples: (after Galli-Curci's ill-fated attempt at a comeback) "Instead of cream velvet jeweled with coloratura splendor there is an unsteady little lyric soprano quavering like a sad ghost pleading for reincarnation"; (describing William Walton's Scapino Overture) "A...