To the Opera House? The Trials and Tribulations of Operatic Production in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract

Musicologists and historians have recently become more interested in the history of operatic production in the United States during the nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century Americans, we now understand, were quite familiar with European opera in all its guises (staged performances, concerts of operatic music, and operatic melodies arranged for various instruments or combinations of instruments). We also are beginning to understand that European opera played a role in nineteenth-century American musical culture that is completely unlike its role in the twenty-first century. Staged operatic productions were a staple of the American popular stage. Americans of most economic classes were attracted to the melodrama of operatic stories; they whistled and hummed the tunes; they attended performances in droves—not as “high art” or as a source of edification but rather (as far as we can tell) for the simple joy of theatrical spectacle, tuneful melodies, and popular entertainment. This ready familiarity with opera as musical theater eventually led to a ubiquity of operatic melody in American society: as dance and parade music, as piano fantasies, “gems” and piano/vocal arrangements, even as pounded out by organ-grinders. That opera was important to nineteenth-century Americans is inescapable; it is also an important component of the performance history of nineteenth-century European opera.