In the epilogue to Opera for the People, Katherine K. Preston ponders a perplexing question, the same one that readers will be bound to ask themselves after reading the first few pages: how could the vibrant and complex performance culture of American opera have disappeared from the knowledge of American social and cultural history? In 1993, Preston took the first step toward filling that knowledge gap with her book Opera on the Road: Traveling Opera Troupes in the United States, 1825–60.Footnote 1 In the volume under review here she recounts the intriguing story of English-language opera in the general cultural and historical context of American music from the immediate postbellum years through the beginning of the twentieth century. She shows that the American middle class of those years grew tired of foreign-language opera and, as the title suggests, English-translated operas came to be the choice of ‘the people’. With acute attention and sensibility, Preston shows how notable American women performers and managers staged well-known French, Italian and German operas in vernacular English translations, and were able to overcome the many social and professional obstacles facing women at the time.
Funded by the American Musicological Society and thoroughly researched, this study abounds with archival material. The accounts of now-forgotten European and American singers and troupes traveling around the United States unfold through anecdotes and lively descriptions, and the several illustrations included in each chapter give a vivid impression of their stories. The illustrations include theatre programmes, images of opera houses, engravings, photographs of singers and managers, posters, newspaper cartoons, and most interestingly, pages from librettos with handwritten translations, and prompt scores with alterations.
Chronologically speaking, the book starts where Preston's earlier book on opera troupes in America ends. Opera for the People, however, focuses almost exclusively on the role of vernacular language in opera as opposed to foreign language. The middle class's approval of foreign works in English contrasted with the social elites’ preference for operas in Italian, German and French, which they viewed as cultural enrichment rather than mere entertainment. Reviewers and critics of the time took varying positions, promoting or disapproving of the new vernacular trend. The critics’ arguments favouring English-language opera were mostly based on cost-effectiveness and patriotism. Preston explains the main points made by these critics. ‘Opera, as an art and a business’, she writes, ‘would succeed only if middle-class Americans supported it; reaching out to the “masses” required the performance in English because foreign language opera was incomprehensible’ (pp. 1–2). Critics also argued that ‘the translation of operas into the vernacular should be acceptable in the United States because it was a regular practice in Europe’ (p. 2). And finally, ‘an American style of opera could evolve only when the dominant performance language was English’ (p. 2). On this last point she then clarifies that although over thirty composers had written multi-act operas in English by 1886, only a few American companies would take the risk to perform such unknown works (p. 8). Focusing on these points and others – for example, the charismatic appeal of particular singers and the skilful entrepreneurship of some managers – Preston examines in detail the ‘for the people’ style of performance of English-language opera (production, translation, singing, etc.) that dominated the last 40 years of the nineteenth century.
The overall plan of the book is chronological. The first three chapters provide the context and history of foreign-language opera performances and their expansion from before the Civil War through the 1870s. The next three chapters zero in on three English-language opera companies and their female managers active in the 1880s. The final chapter explores the last decade of the century when English-language opera and operetta struggled to compete with other popular genres and eventually merged into American musical comedy.
More specifically, the first chapter focuses on light and grand opera productions during and immediately following the Civil War through the postbellum period, when opéra bouffe started to become popular. Companies travelled across the country performing foreign-language operas and English-language comic operas, as theatrical establishments relied on them and their repertoires. Max Maretzek's companies and American prima donna Clara Louise Kellogg, who was the manager of her own English-language company, are discussed in this chapter that ends its narrative at the time of the Reconstruction Act of 1867.
The second chapter is a contextual study of the two prominent English-language troupes that emerged during the postbellum period, and of their managers, English-born American soprano Caroline Richings and Scottish soprano Euphrosyne Parepa-Rosa, both prima donnas. Richings made English-language opera performances part of American entertainment in the late 1860s. She also created several adaptations of the operas she chose for the company repertory, ‘which reveal a great deal about the nature of the repertory mounted by English-language companies in mid-century America’ (p. 100). In this fascinating section, Preston discusses Richings's adaptation of Donizetti's La fille du régiment, and how Richings's changes suggested a comic aspect that was more suitable for entertainment, quite different from the earlier ‘militaristic’ version proposed by Maretzek and Kellogg (pp. 27–8). Comparisons of these and other adaptations of operas of the time would have been useful for a better understanding of how English-language operas were shaped, but unfortunately, as Preston tells us, such comparisons are outside the scope of the book. Parepa-Rosa organized her own Grand English Opera at the same time, and soon put Richings out of business. The story of the competition between the two managers and their organizations could have well taken the form of a book by itself.
Chapter 3 looks at how the Panic of 1873 and the subsequent economic depression impacted opera productions. The perception of foreign-language opera as an elitist form of entertainment was reinforced by the high prices charged by theatres and companies and the fees demanded by the famous Italian opera stars. On the other hand, by offering lower prices and eliminating language barriers, vernacular opera and the lighter genres of opéra bouffe and comic opera gained popularity. Preston investigates the English-language company led by American soprano Clara Louise Kellogg, and her great success. Interestingly, reviewers interpreted Kellogg's triumph as a result of her popularity and not of her ‘artistic’ merit. In fact, ‘artistic’ was a term that mid-1870s Eurocentric critics used only as a ‘coded reference to performances by foreign-language companies’ to hint at their ‘superiority’ (pp. 191–3).
The fourth chapter turns to the Boston Ideal Opera Company, a vernacular comic opera troupe managed by Effie H. Ober Kline, an ambitious American businesswoman with no experience as a performer or artistic director. The chapter explores Ober's managerial skills and the company's strengths. Her success, Preston explains, demonstrates how in postbellum America, middle and upper-middle-class women began to work outside their homes. Resourceful and detailed descriptions of many of the English-language American vocalists provide evidence for the quality of her troupe.
The protagonists of Chapter 5 are American soprano and impresario Emma Abbott and her very successful English Opera Company, active in the 1880s. Abbott's puritanical beliefs and her constant desire for independence were driving forces behind her struggle with the critics who preferred the exclusive, educated style of foreign-language operas and who criticized her taste for popular musical theatre; they also account for the significant alterations of the works performed by her company and for how she reached great popularity. The scholarly research and documentation on Abbott's travels and successes and hardships, and the gripping narrative of her life story surely are worthy of a separate publication that could complement Martin's 1891 biography of Abbott.Footnote 2
Chapter 6 focuses on American philanthropist Jeannette Thurber, who organized the American Opera Company, later renamed the National Opera Company, which was active only in 1886 and 1887 but gained great success for its high-level productions of operas in English. This chapter illustrates the context of the American audience of the time, one divided between the so-called cultural elites and the middle-class operagoers.
The final chapter looks at the gradual change in American audiences’ taste in opera during the last decade of the century and their increasing preference for musical theatre. It explores two successful ensembles: the Bostonians and the Castle Square Opera Company, both affiliated with the Syndicate, a centralized organization that represented American venues, signing exclusive contracts with artists and companies on their behalf. A discussion of how Henry W. Savage, an American manager and Syndicate artist until 1910, linked the tradition of English-language opera and the new style of American musical comedy, closes this final chapter.
Opera for the People is not a study about repertories, as Preston makes clear. However, titles and dates of operas performed by the Richings Opera Company, the Kellogg English Opera Company, the Boston Ideals, the Emma Abbott Opera Company, the Hinrichs Opera Company, and the Bostonians are mentioned and briefly discussed in light of the companies’ pragmatic rationales. For example, particular operas could be chosen because they were well known; they belonged to the standard English-language opera repertory; they suited their singers; they conformed to the expectations of the audience; and ultimately, because they could successfully compete with other productions.
The contemporary Italian operas included in the repertories of most Italian-language and English-language opera productions in the United States could be a topic for further study. One wonders if managers, singers, and audiences – whether elite or middle class – were aware of what those Italian operas signified in their original performative context. Most Italian operas that are mentioned in Preston's book were performed for the people in small Italian provincial theatres as well as for the elites in distinguished metropolitan theatres. In both contexts, some of those operas (for example, Verdi's I Lombardi alla prima crociata and Ernani, later performed in translated versions in America) epitomized the people's democratic ideals of the Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy movement, especially in the chorus numbers.Footnote 3 Verdi's name was often associated with the pre-unification movement in Italy, and by the 1860s his popularity as a composer and as a political figure had reached the United States.Footnote 4 A discussion of the historical and political aspects that made those Italian operas so popular in Italy could illuminate what had been transformed or lost in translation not only linguistically but also in cultural terms.
After her lengthy, multi-layered discussion, Preston offers an explanation for why music scholars have neglected the history of English-language opera productions in America. The primary mistake, she concludes, has been to rely almost exclusively on the nineteenth-century critics’ insights on the culture of the time. Most of them were more concerned with foreign-language performances, ‘convinced that “real” opera had to be sung in foreign languages’ (p. 562).
Finally, while vernacular opera and women managers are the main topics, they are not the only points of interest in the book The extensive information on the business of opera in nineteenth-century America included in Opera for the People – dates, information on venues, organizations, and names of performers and managers – will facilitate future studies of performance culture in America.Footnote 5 Preston also prompts the reader to reflect on cultural issues, social and gender disparity, and nationalistic sentiments that have characterized the history of the United States throughout that long century. Particularly thought provoking are the discussions of the conflicts between English-language opera and original-language opera, the fashionable and the unfashionable, elite and popular, popular and artistic, American-born singers and overseas artists – all subjects that add to the already rich fabric of this multifaceted work.
