Opera for the People is an in-depth examination of a completely forgotten chapter in American social and cultural history: the love affair that middle-class Americans had with continental opera (translated into English) in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. This work challenges a common stereotype that opera in nineteenth-century America was as it is in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: elite, exclusive, expensive, and of interest to a niche market. It also demonstrates conclusively that the historiography of nineteenth-century American music (which utterly ignores English-language opera performance and reception history) is completely wrong. Based on information from music and theatre periodicals published in the United States between 1860 and 1900; letters, diaries, playbills, memoirs, librettos, scores, and other performance materials; and reviews, commentary, and other evidence of performance history in digitized newspapers, this work shows that more than one hundred different companies toured all over America, performing opera in English for heterogeneous audiences during this period, and that many of the most successful troupes were led or supported by women—prima donna/impresarios, women managers, or philanthropists who lent financial support. The book conclusively demonstrates the continued wide popularity of opera among middle-class Americans during the last three decades of the century and furthermore illustrates the important (and hitherto unsuspected) place of opera in the rich cornucopia of late-century American musical theatre, which eventually led to the emergence of American musical comedy.
‘Scribner’s Illustrated New Orleans’: Convergence Culture and Periodical Culture in Late 19th-Century America