Opera

OPERA

OPERA performance in America has predominantly consisted of works imported from Europe. The earliest operas heard were English ballad operas brought over from London in the 1730s. French opera flourished in New Orleans from the 1790s through the nineteenth century. Italian opera was more popular in the north, first heard in English adaptations and then introduced in the original language in 1825. After the 1850s, German opera, particularly that of Richard Wagner, became more prevalent until it dominated the repertory toward the turn of the century. Twentieth-century audiences enjoyed a wide variety of foreign works in many languages as well as a growing number of American operas, particularly after the 1960s.

Early opera performances were typically produced by touring companies in temporary quarters until such institutions as the Metropolitan Opera (established 1883) were founded. The twentieth century saw the development of organizations including the San Francisco Opera (1923), the New York City Opera (1944), the Lyric Opera of Chicago (1954), and dozens of other regional companies, as well as summer festivals and opera workshops. Radio broadcasts since 1921 and television brought opera to a growing audience.

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Opera composed by Americans prior to the twentieth century adhered to the style of imported works popular at the time, as illustrated by Andrew Barton's ballad opera, The Disappointment (1767), or the first grand opera, William Henry Fry's Leonora (1845), composed in the style of Vincenzo Bellini or Gaetano Donizetti. A number of operas acquired an American identity through plot or setting and often include indigenous musical elements, such as jazz and spirituals in George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1935) or Appalachian folk style in Carlisle Floyd's Susan-nah (1956). Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) exhibited a new musical style modeling the inflections of American speech. Many other composers did not attempt to develop a dramatic or musical style identifiable as "American" but pursued a variety of individual, even eclectic, approaches to opera on a wide variety of subjects.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dizikes, John. Opera in America: A Cultural History. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993.

Kirk, Elise K. American Opera. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001.

Sadie, Stanley, ed. The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. 4 vols. New York: Grove's Dictionaries of Music, 1992.

Sadie, Stanley, and H. Wiley Hitchcock, eds. The New Grove Dictionary of American Music. 4 vols. New York: Grove's Dictionaries of Music, 1986.

Martina B. Bishopp

See also Music: Classical .