Opera for the People: English-Language Opera and Women Managers in Late 19th-Century America (original) (raw)
Related papers
Opera and Music Drama (1850-1900)
Survey of repertoire, critical issues, and cultural themes in European opera of the later nineteenth century. Chapter 14 of _The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music_ (Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 371-423.
Between cosmopolitanism and nationhood: Italian opera in the early nineteenth century
The revival of interest in music evident in recent historiography has led to an investigation of the specifically transnational nature of musical languages and practices. This article explores the possibility of re-reading in a transnational perspective the classical theme of the relationship between the Risorgimento and opera. It focuses on two different points of view: on the one hand, the construction of the librettos as a delicate balance between European romantic narratives and dramatic themes evoking nationalistic sentiments; on the other, the fact that ideas and practices of the theatre as a vehicle of political mobilisation developed in a broad international context where Mazzini and many other nationalists found inspiration in multinational political experiences and discourses. The article concludes by saying that the meanings of terms such as cosmopolitanism and nationalism need to be carefully weighed when we look at nineteenth-century opera production. Only in the closing decades of the century did genuine competition between national traditions arise, which led in Italy to a veritable 'obsession' with 'Italianness' in music.
The study of opera in the second half of the eighteenth century has ourished during the last several decades, and our knowledge of the operas written during that period and of their aesthetic, social and political contexts has vastly increased. Much of what we have learned in these and other areas of scholarship has been recorded in the form of articles published in scholarly journals and in collections of essays. This volume will explore opera and operatic life in the years 1750–1800 through several English-language essays, in a selection intended to represent the last few decades of scholarship in all its excitement and variety. This introduction provides some context for the essays that follow. It briey discusses some of the institutional developments and intellectual trends that have informed scholarship in eighteenth-century opera and mentions some of the criteria that have guided my choice of the essays reprinted here. In following the publisher's policy of limiting this collection to essays written in English, I did not mean to suggest that these essays were in any way superior to the best essays of my colleagues writing in other languages.
Amerikamude/Europamude: The Very Idea of American Opera
The Opera Quarterly, 2008
My subject is the concept of American opera. I situate a particular discourse about this concept within a more general one about actuality and possibility, weariness and hope, drawn from predominantly German-American philosophies of history and art. Most of this essay surveys the ...
Affect, language, race, voice: opera singers in nineteenth-century United States
Ethnomusicology Forum
Affect has often been an overlooked factor in many music histories because it appears unavailable or superficially undecodable in linguistically based documents that form the primary source of data analysis in historical ethnomusicology/musicology. However, careful attention to words, linguistic structures, and surrounding social formations can reveal the spaces left by affect's resistance to signs and representations. The words 'sympathetic' and 'pathetic' as descriptions of human singing voices in the late nineteenth-century United States provide a window into how sound, music, timbre, and affect interacted with ideas of race, class, and gender. Voices of Italian, German, African American, and other singers were described in different ways, determined not only by social assumptions but also by affective encounters between embodied subjects in concert halls. Using Edward Soja's spatial geography, along with Deleuze and Guattari's attention to structures of writing and other affect theorists' attention to bodies in spaces, I challenge assumptions about the lack of affective encounters through linguistic documents and stretch ethnomusicological approaches to historical sources.
Music & Letters, 2018
Due to the grand scale of the productions, the unmatched musical forces, the virtuosic vocal display and the complicated literary narratives of personal triumph drawn from chronicles of history, French grand opera was perceived by many throughout the nineteenth century as an aspirational art form that redefined what was possible on the dramatic stage. Wherever French grand opera was presented, be it in Switzerland, Russia or Spain, in translation or severely reduced due to local censorship, the works exported a world-view that highlighted the liberal forces of a bourgeois city centre founded upon revolution.
From Festivals to Organ Grinders: Race and Opera in Nineteenth-Century Chicago
Opera in nineteenth-century United States inhabited sound worlds across the spectrum of everyday life, including theaters, parlors, and streets. While scholars have addressed the social and class history of opera in U.S. theaters (e.g. Karen Ahlquist, Katherine Preston, Joseph Horowitz), musicologists have typically overlooked the intersection of race and classical music prior to the twentieth century (with a few exceptions such as Jann Pasler and Julie Brown et al.). I situate opera in the critical categories of race and nation by investigating opera’s performance by organ grinders and other street musicians. In this way, I analyze the complicated connections that nineteenth-century scholars and critics made between varieties of European races, issues of immigration, and the performance of European opera in the United States. In particular, I focus on Chicago in the last decades of the century, where immigrants and native-born Americans heard, performed, and lived with opera within a framework of debates about nationality and race. In writings on opera in this era, Italian-ness emerged as salient, a contradictory field encompassing both refined professional singers (sometimes Americans with Italian stage names) and lowly street musicians vending opera arias on hand organs, accordions, fiddles, and harps. These musical performances were not only defined by language, their sounds also provided words with significance. That is, in addition to being physically located in a space, opera came to reside in language – so that the sounds of theaters and organ grinders endowed the meaning of “Italian” with a particular weight, an accent, which came to bear on its contradictory connotations. Music was formative in the understanding of race by occupying the linguistic, legal, social, and economic associations of the word Italian. Carolyn Abbate has argued that music can be made to speak in the service of a critic; Lawrence Kramer and others have argued that language attaches itself to music in a way that can create new meanings. This paper, by contrast, argues that music changed, enhanced, and contradicted the debates about opera and nationality by living in and animating language.