What is the last name of the person who recruited her niece Lilian Baylis to help run the theatre?
In 1889, Emma Cons, a Victorian philanthropist who ran the Old Vic theatre in a working-class area of London, began presenting regular fortnightly performances of opera excerpts. Although the theatre licensing laws of the day prevented full costumed performances, Cons presented condensed versions of well-known operas, always sung in English. Among the performers were noted singers such as Charles Santley. These operatic evenings quickly became more popular than the dramas that Cons had been staging separately. In 1898, she recruited her niece Lilian Baylis to help run the theatre. At the same time she appointed Charles Corri as the Old Vic's musical director. Baylis and Corri, despite many disagreements, shared a passionate belief in popularising opera, hitherto generally the preserve of the rich and fashionable. They worked on a tiny budget, with an amateur chorus and a professional orchestra of only 18 players, for whom Corri rescored the instrumental parts of the operas. By the early years of the 20th century, the Old Vic was able to present semi-staged versions of Wagner operas.Emma Cons died in 1912, leaving her estate, including the Old Vic, to Baylis, who dreamed of transforming the theatre into a "people's opera house". In the same year, Baylis obtained a licence to allow the Old Vic to stage full performances of operas. In the 1914–1915 season, Baylis staged 16 operas and 16 plays (13 of which were by Shakespeare). In the years after the First World War, Baylis's Shakespeare productions, which featured some of the leading actors from London's West End, attracted national attention, as her shoe-string opera productions did not. The opera, however, remained her first priority. The actor-manager Robert Atkins, who worked closely with Baylis on her Shakespearean productions, recalled, "Opera, on Thursday and Saturday nights, played to bulging houses."
Cons