Opera

Opera. Opera came to America in 1735, in the form of English ballad opera featuring spoken dialogue, new lyrics set to familiar tunes, and subjects taken from ordinary life. In the 1790s, French opera reached New Orleans. Italian opera made its debut in 1825 with the appearance of the Manuel Garcia Company in New York City. Lacking both court and aristocratic patronage and state subsidy, opera in America confronted the vagaries of a market economy. With no music schools to train native‐born performers and composers, American operagoers until well into the twentieth century depended on touring companies, unknown itinerants, and the occasional celebrated star. William Henry Fry's Leonora, the first known performance of an opera by an American composer, premiered in Philadelphia in 1845.

So emerged nineteenth‐century America's dual operatic culture. Small companies with modest resources and without famous singers continued the English‐language tradition, crisscrossing the country, bringing to small‐town opera houses the operas of the Irish composer Michael William Balfe, and the English team of W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. This was long dwarfed, however, by the high‐culture “European” tradition, featuring large orchestras and star singers performing in a foreign language, centered in the major cities, and dominated by an elite seeking social prestige. Large opera houses—Philadelphia's Academy of Music (1857), the first Metropolitan Opera House in New York City (1883), the Auditorium Building in Chicago (1889)—flaunted the plutocrats' wealth in a style appropriate to “grand opera,” as the operas of Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti gave way to those of Meyerbeer, Verdi, Gounod, and Wagner.

In the twentieth century, this European tradition, vastly broadened by radio, recordings, and English supertitles, spread throughout the nation and attracted a more diverse audience and a more musically mature one, as demonstrated by the fact that Mozart's operas, represented primarily by Don Giovanni in the nineteenth century, now all entered the repertory. Regional opera companies proved particularly receptive to the works of American composers. Meanwhile, the English‐language opera tradition evolved to incorporate operettas and musical theater. The tradition of spoken dialogue, modest scale, melodious music, and subjects drawn from contemporary life was transformed by Sigmund Romberg, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, Leonard Bernstein, and Stephen Sondheim (among others) into a distinctively American form, reaching a vast international audience, multiplied by film and television.

The outlook for opera appeared mixed as the twentieth century ended. Governmental subsidies for the arts, originating in a modest way with the New Deal Era of the 1930s and institutionalized in the 1960s, remained precarious, leaving opera dependent, as always, on wealthy patrons, supplemented now by corporate and foundation support. But there were also reasons for optimism about the future of this four‐hundred‐year‐old artform as the new century dawned. Two generations of American singers and conductors, trained in music schools and university departments, and—with racial barriers diminishing—broadly representative of American society as a whole, now played a major role in the U.S. operatic world. Innovative productions drew upon modern technology, and the cross‐fertilization of opera and popular culture offered exciting possibilities. Late twentieth‐century operas by American composers utilizing American themes included Aaron Copland's The Tender Land (1954); Douglas Moore's The Ballad of Baby Doe (1956); Jack Beeson's Lizzie Borden (1965); Scott Joplin's Treemonisha (composed 1907–1911, first performed in 1972); John Adams's Nixon in China (1987); Daron Hagen's Shining Brow (1992), about Frank Lloyd Wright; William Bolcom's McTeague (1992), based on a novel by Frank Norris; and John Harbison's The Great Gatsby (1999).
See also Music: Classical Music; National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities.

Bibliography

John Dizikes , Opera in America: A Cultural History, 1993.
Karly Lynn Zietz , National Trust Guide to Great Opera Houses in America, 1996.

John Dizikes