Conference Agenda

On November 1, 1914, Washington D.C.’s Evening Star reported on a “recital talk” given by Mignon Ulke Lamasure on Huperdinck’s 1892 opera Hansel and Gretel. According to the paper, Lamasure provided “a thumbnail sketch of the composer and his work” and “gave all the vital points of plot and character of the opera […] displaying a fine histrionic sense as well as a thorough training in the reading of scores at the piano.” Operatic lecture recitals like Lamasure’s generally aimed to explicate full operatic works while also highlighting specific points of interest in the scores, all in around an hour. The recitals were meant to entertain even as they edified, keeping the attention of audiences with thrilling musical examples and accessible language. Existing secondary literature on lecture recitals (Bomberger 2018; Kimber 2020) and the history of pedagogical techniques in music appreciation (Volk 2007; Chybowski 2017) have noted a trend of female lecture-recitalists in early 20th-century America who modeled diverse ways of engaging with the operatic repertoire, drawing on their own unique skill sets and interests in presenting operas to the public.

This paper will offer an in-depth exploration of the work of three contemporary pianists who lectured on opera: Henriette Weber, Mignon Ulke Lamasure, and Julia E. Schelling. Weber utilized the standard operatic repertory to lead her audience into a deeper appreciation of music, believing that when music is paired with a story “it becomes something human, something tangible, something nice and neighborly and close to us.” Lamasure brought new and niche works (such as Smetana’s Bartered Bride) to her audiences, expanding their musical horizons. Schelling, on the other hand, focused almost exclusively on Wagner’s compositional style, becoming such an authority on the subject that she became the first person to lecture in English at Bayreuth in 1930. In centering the lecture recitals of Weber, Lamasure, and Schelling, this paper uncovers the differences in their methods and objectives, showing the diverse ways in which opera education of the time approached narratives of social uplift and performed the virtuosic labor of mediating between operatic works and middle-class audiences.

Between February and March 1920, The American Hebrew and Jewish Messenger, The Jewish Voice, and The B’nai B’rith Messenger published non-Jewish writer Yetta Kay Stoddard’s short story, “Yellow Elbows: The story of a Jewish girl’s faith in her ability as a singer, and the happy consequences of that faith.” In this work of fiction, a Russian Jewish immigrant successfully elevates herself from “the class of yellow elbows” to “polished ivory flesh tints” by learning how to sing opera. In addition to capturing the fluidity of the Jewish place along America’s color line, this tale frames learning about opera as a potentially useful tool for Jews pursuing social integration and racial uplift. As my paper shows, Stoddard’s tale was only one of many examples of how American Jews came to understand opera education as part of their collective acculturation process in the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth century United States.

Extensive press research reveals that Jewish men, women, and children living in New York were among many minoritized groups that bought into prevalent ideologies about the uplifting potential of opera education. While scholarship has considered African American and Italian uses of opera education in social uplift initiatives (Gerbino and Zimei 2023, Farel 2022, Agugliaro 2021, Turner 2015), parallel Jewish efforts have not yet been the subject of scholarly attention. I argue that Jewish immigrants’ ethnic fluidity singularly positioned them to connect the accruing of operatic knowledge with increased access to real world opportunities.

This paper tells a new story about Jewish immigrants and their multifaceted relationship with opera education in New York between the Metropolitan Opera House’s autocratic incorporation in 1880 and eventual democratization in 1940. Press reports reveal that Jews wrote, read, and featured in short stories and opinion editorials promoting opera education, arranged for underprivileged youth to attend performances, trained in the Met Opera Ballet and Choral Schools, gave lecture recitals on opera, and taught opera pedagogy. Investigating Jewish New Yorkers’ various engagements with opera education provides a musicological case study of how religious difference and gender have historically intersected with race and ethnicity to shape encounters with musical culture.

In 1911, operatic soprano Helena Frederick told the Los Angeles Herald that she thought that singing opera on vaudeville was “something like administering it homeopathically, but it must make everyone more familiar with music of the best sort, and eventually cannot but help elevate the musical taste of the audience.” Performers and critics alike presented opera in vaudeville as something of a gateway drug that could improve listeners’ taste and introduce them to classical music. Although much of the entertainment on a vaudeville bill was comedic, there was a subset of acts that communicated respectability and were framed as uplifting and educational including short lectures, nonfiction silent films, and operatic song acts.

For critics and many classical music performers, opera’s role in popular entertainment was to uplift the audience. The Progressive Era (1890s–1920s) was suffused with optimism that Americans could “evolve” into better people—which the dominant society thought meant being respectable, morally upright, and assimilated into white middle-class values and public etiquette. Musicians and critics believed that facilitating access to opera could contribute to the spiritual enrichment of the masses and help to refine their behavior in preparation for a better life. “Good” music (that is Western classical music) supposedly had the ability to discipline listeners and purify disorderly emotions that could lead, if uncontrolled, to sinful behavior and disrupt the listener’s and American society’s upward trajectory.

Gevinson, Kibler, and Wertheim have demonstrated that entrepreneurs programmed opera to signal that vaudeville was suitable for middle-class audiences. But, I argue that critics and singers framed opera as uplifting to the diverse vaudeville audience as well. Drawing upon reviews and coverage in print media, and building upon work by Chybowski on the music appreciation movement and scholarship on classical music and uplift by Broyles, Horowitz, Karpf, and Schenbeck, I demonstrate that vaudeville was an unlikely but important site of musical uplift and education. Writers and musicians flattered, cajoled, and sometimes browbeat audiences to listen and learn from operatic repertoire as part of larger goals of uplift and assimilation.