| OPERA IN THE UNITED STATES by Nicolas Reveles |
OPERA IN THE UNITED STATES
— by Nicolas Reveles
Theatrical presentations in the United States have had a major musical component from the earliest stagings of works brought here by French and Spanish settlers in the 16th century and English settlers in the 17th and 18th centuries. Perhaps the most popular of these theatrical entertainments (and the closest relative to European-style opera) were the English ballad operas that were produced in the original colonies from about 1730. Ballad operas were short, comic plays, with musical numbers derived from popular music, usually with special texts that applied to the situations found in the plays. (The music used in these works was often by various composers rather than by one single artist.) Theatres that featured these works were to be found in New York; Williamsburg, Virginia; and Charleston, South Carolina where Flora, or Hob in the Well was performed in 1735. Flora may have been the first ballad opera performed in the colonies. It was soon surpassed by many performances of other English comic operas such as Love In A Village (1761) by Thomas Arne and The Poor Soldier (1784) by O’Keefe and Shield, an extremely popular piece that was even performed on the Western frontier (Detroit!) in 1799.
American-born composers began producing such works as early as 1730. The earliest American ballad opera written for an American stage is The Disappointment, or The Force of Credulity by Andrew Barton (a fictitious name). It seems to have been very popular in the Philadelphia area in the mid-18th century. The period of the Revolutionary War saw considerable decrease in such entertainments.
After the Revolutionary War, the arrival of immigrants from countries with strong operatic traditions led to the beginning of a rich era in the arts. By 1800, the ballad opera was being replaced by works with music by a single composer. One such work was The Aethiop by Raynor Taylor, a remarkably successful opera produced in Philadelphia in 1814 “in a style of splendour never exceeded on the American stage”. Other such works include James Hewitt’s Tammany, or The Indian Chief and Benjamin Carr’s The Archers, or The Mountaineers of Switzerland. English and American comic opera was more popular in the Northern and Eastern seaboard cities, while in the South, foreign-language operas began to dominate. Cities such as Baltimore, Charleston, Savannah and New Orleans began to produce French opera, a reflection of the large French-speaking populations in these Southern towns. Between 1806 and 1810, New Orleans saw the premieres of 76 French operas in the comique tradition by 32 different composers. The elegant roster of French artists was joined by a native composer, Philip Laroque, whose works were frequently performed up to 1810. Baltimore, with its large German population, saw a performance of Die Zauberflöte in 1850.
After the rage for the English ballad opera, Italian opera began to hold sway in Eastern cities such as New York and Philadelphia, when English versions of works such as Don Giovanni by Mozart and La Cenerentola by Rossini were presented. In 1825, under the auspices of the then-resident Lorenzo da Ponte (librettist for three of Mozart’s operas), the company of Manuel Garcia gave the first Italian language performances of an Italian opera in the United States, Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia at the Park Theatre in New York. (Garcia’s daughter, the great Maria Malibran, sang the role of Rosina in this production at the tender age of 17!) Bel canto works such as La sonnambula, Norma, and La fille du régiment were given in this country within a few years of their world prèmieres. With the proliferation of these large-scale works came the construction of theatres large enough to contain them: the Italian Opera House (again, with the help of the inexhaustible da Ponte), the Astor Place Opera House, and the Academy of Music, all in New York City. At the same time, we find native composers, heavily influenced by the Romantic conventions, producing works in English. Among them was George F. Bristow who based his magnum opus on Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle.
In the mid-19th century, various traveling companies began performing operas throughout the United States, among them the Andrews Opera Company, an American family of nine who became prominent after the Civil War. Perhaps the most ambitious company of the era was the American Opera Company of Theodore Thomas, founded in 1886, which produced grand opera in English translation all over the country, giving works by Wagner, Verdi, Mozart and Meyerbeer. At its height, the American Opera Company had 300 performers, and the tons of equipment necessitated two railroad trains for transportation!
Regional opera companies began to appear during the latter half of the 19th century, but probably the most important company to open during this period was the Metropolitan Opera in New York — on October 22, 1883 with a performance (in Italian) of Gounod’s French opera Faust. The company soon began to specialize in the German répertoire, presenting the first full version of Wagner’s Ring cycle in 1888-89. (At this time they presented all operas, not just German ones, in German.) Over the years, the Metropolitan Opera presented the greatest operatic voices in the world, including Caruso, Farrar, Scotti, Galli-Curci, Martinelli, Gigli and, more recently, Sills, Sutherland, Domingo and Pavarotti.
American composers began to write operas based on American themes including The Scarlet Letter by Walter Damrosch and Merry Mount by Howard Hanson, both based on stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Soon they began to be influenced by American musical idioms such as jazz, folk music and the popular style that dominated the Broadway musical scene. George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1935) is a typical example, combining elements of most of these American genres, along with African-American styles such as gospel and spirituals. In purely popular terms, Porgy and Bess is arguably the most successful “American” opera, greater than the sum of its parts in that the composer cleverly utilizes all of the operatic conventions (aria, recitative, ensembles, leitmotiv and thematic reminiscence) in a thoroughly musical and sophisticated manner while, at the same time, never losing touch with the broad audience to which it was directed.
Twentieth-century American operas include The Conquistador by local composer Myron Fink, which San Diego Opera premiered in 1997. Other examples are: The Ballad of Baby Doe by Douglas Moore and The Face on the Barroom Floor by Henry Mollicone, both about early Colorado; Antony and Cleopatra by Samuel Barber; The Tender Land by Aaron Copland, about a Midwestern farm family of the 1930s; and the well-known Christmas opera, Amahl and the Night Visitors by Gian Carlo Menotti. Cold Sassy Tree, Of Mice and Men, Susannah and The Passion of Jonathan Wade by Carlisle Floyd, and A Streetcar Named Desire by André Previn have all been presented by San Diego Opera. There have been operas written about President Nixon’s visit to China, about the sinking of the Achille Lauro, and about Jackie Onassis and Marilyn Monroe. Recently the opera Dead Man Walking, based on the book by Helen Prejean, had its prèmiere in San Francisco. There are now many regional opera companies in the United States, of which San Diego Opera is one, presenting a broad repertory featuring mainly young American singers.
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