Opera in the Jazz Age: Cultural Politics in 1920s Britain by Alexandra Wilson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Opera in the Jazz Age: Cultural Politics in 1920s Britain by Alexandra Wilson Stewart Duncan Opera in the Jazz Age: Cultural Politics in 1920s Britain. By Alexandra Wilson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. [xv, 256 p. ISBN 9780190912666 (hardcover), $36.95; also available as e-book, ISBN and price vary.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. In her study of operatic practices, norms, and conventions in 1920s England, Alexandra Wilson not only provides a welcome addition to recent musicological studies of “middlebrow” culture but also models how well-written scholarship can draw from and influence the arts today. Opera in the Jazz Age examines the discourses that surrounded opera in Britain during the first decade of the interwar period, focusing specifically on the ways the genre was situated within the newly emerging categories—the “brows”— that dominated commentary in the musical and popular press. The process by which opera was deemed either “highbrow” or “lowbrow” during this decade, Wilson argues, illuminates both opera’s complex interwar status as well as the tropes and prejudices that govern its reception today. Though the book confines itself to a narrow window, its ambitions are vast: Wilson aims to address musicological neglect of opera in interwar Britain, to highlight the absence of music within studies of middlebrow culture, and to deconstruct the notion that opera is and has always been elitist. The book’s success—underpinned by Wilson’s command of the rich contemporary debates in print and the genre’s unexpected connections to other aspects of 1920s [End Page 59] culture—encourages readers to reconsider opera’s cultural status. Opera in the Jazz Age focuses on the 1920s because of the widespread concern for hierarchy and classification in the period’s artistic, social, and intellectual conversations. It was during this time, Wilson writes, that the drive to organize culture and consumers into tiers first came to the forefront of British society. Though present before the First World War, this impulse gained traction during the following decades as new values, new media, and new audiences loomed as a possible threat to traditionally “high” culture. New language emerged to describe not just the “highbrow” and “lowbrow” categories but a new band between them: the “middlebrow.” As Wilson demonstrates, these labels were neither widely agreed upon nor consistently applied. Even more significantly, contemporary performers, audiences, and commentators argued vigorously over opera’s place in this emerging hierarchy. Too highbrow for some and not enough for others, opera was simultaneously a symbol of elite snobbery and of cheap entertainment. Wilson aims to show that these vibrant debates reveal opera’s middle-brow status in the 1920s. In each chapter, Wilson addresses a different way operatic performers, commentators, and audiences interacted with the notion of the brows. An introductory chapter provides an overview of the challenges facing opera in England in the 1920s. The second and third chapters delve into the brows and how they were applied to audiences and their tastes. In a time when class membership was increasingly fluid, the ways in which one consumed opera defined and delineated a number of possible identities. For example, intellectual and aesthetic divisions emerged alongside existing social and economic hierarchies: upper-class opera goers could simultaneously disdain the taste of inexperienced poorer audiences while resenting the old elite who used opera as a social experience (p. 50). Furthermore, like all aspects of opera in the 1920s, prejudice separated perceptions from reality. The press, for example, commonly presented Covent Garden as a “socially exclusive place cut off from the real world,” though audiences were more diverse than one might expect (p. 60). Nevertheless, efforts were made to reach wider audiences. Many opera companies encouraged coverage in the popular press, embraced wireless broadcasts, and attempted to educate potentially “untapped” audiences by positioning opera as a perfectly “middlebrow” pursuit (p. 68). These efforts and their reception often leaned on emerging stereotypes of different audiences. In the third chapter, Wilson examines two of the most prominent: the “highbrow” and the “man in the street.” Rather than by social or economic status, the high-brow listener was defined by snobbery. It was a performative identity marked by “feigned taste” and condescension to set oneself apart...