Conference Agenda

In 1926, Chicago’s Civic Opera Company made the imperial aims of its annual touring efforts clear: “Culturally opera is one of several famous institutions which assure Chicago’s pre-eminence . . . as the Capitol of the great Empire of the Middle West.” With large-scale productions of canonic, foreign-language operas staged for aspiring urban satellites such as Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Des Moines, Omaha, St. Louis, Sioux Falls, and Wichita, the company’s lavish touring productions emphasized Chicago’s economic and cultural preeminence in locales otherwise lacking a permanent operatic presence. The tours precipitated noticeable press discourse regarding both opera’s role in defining perceptions of the nation’s cultural identity as well as Chicago’s position in the increasingly urbanized cultural ethos of the 1920s. In the process, the region’s press received the Civic Opera’s tours as the so-called “advance guard” of Chicago’s operatic culture, positioning the city as a would-be musical metropole and conflating operatic dissemination with contemporary notions of national progress.

Using extant institutional documentation from and period press coverage of the Civic Opera’s tours of the 1920s, this paper examines the implications of the city’s role as a major presenter of staged operas across the Midwest. Chicago was an actively constructed hub of operatic activity that supported both the physical dissemination of operas and the ideological propagation of the city’s influence. By examining the rhetorics of progress and imperial conquest that pervaded the Civic Opera’s regional presence throughout the decade, the paper highlights the city’s perceived importance to the spread of European repertoires and suggests a new paradigm for touring operas during a time of increased institutionalization within the field. It first situates the company’s promotional tactics within period displays of civic pride among competing cities and then addresses the ways that regional press outlets echoed the fervor, touting the cultural cachet of the Civic Opera’s residencies. Ultimately, the Civic Opera’s tours reveal much about the changing landscape of operatic promotion and reception in the 1920s, and the outpouring of local pride among the company’s regional destinations demonstrates opera’s significance to the growing influence of urban centers such as Chicago within the national consciousness.

The final years of Spanish colonialism (1790-1820) marked a period of profound changes across the entire Latin American region. While Madrid set out new reforms to update the administrative and social structure of its dominions and consolidate its power, new notions of modernity carried by cultural products coming from Italy, France and England began to slip through the cracks of a severely deteriorated imperial system. Recent debates have focused on the vital role that books and newspapers played in transforming the Atlantic world with new social habits and ideas of cosmopolitanism and liberalism. The contribution of music, and particularly opera, to this process remains, however, largely unexplored: between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century opera became one of the most widely representative products of Western culture from Lisbon to Moscow. Its success, however, soon transcended the European borders, first as a means of colonial domination and eventually as a laboratory for social interaction and cultural exchange between Western and non-Western societies.

My paper investigates the operatic genre as a privileged location to understand how the arrival of a new modernity from non-Spanish Europe redefined local fantasies and altered transnational dynamics of power and culture across the Spanish Atlantic at the end of its colonial history. As one of the main cultural hubs of the Spanish empire, Mexico was touched by this "new" culture quantitatively and qualitatively more than other colonies in the region. This interaction resulted in the premiere of new operas: while most of them were imported from Europe, a smaller but significant number of them was also composed locally and specifically for Mexican audiences. That was the case of Manuel del Corral’s opera Los dos gemelos which premiered in Mexico City in 1815. The documents about its representation and reception provide crucial information to lay the foundations for the history of the long-forgotten presence of opera in the late-colonial Spanish world. What did it mean to produce and perform an opera in late-colonial Mexico? How did the Western operatic tradition eventually resonate within the colonial society of Mexico and its cultural background? Which cultural traditions converged in the construction of a local operatic tradition in a period of expanding cultural networks? But, also, how did opera help Mexicans capture new cosmopolitan imaginations and construct an alternative model to the Spanish cultural hegemony?

By answering these questions, I advocate for the opera Los dos gemelos as a privileged case study not only to explore one of the lesser-known periods in Atlantic musical history (1780-1820) but also, and more importantly, to investigate how the operatic world allowed late-colonial societies to articulate their yearning for change while juggling between dreams of modernity and fears of change at the dawn of the nineteenth century.

“Help discover the stars!”implored a 1936 newspaper ad for the Metropolitan Opera Auditions of the Air. Decades later, Jessye Norman recalled singing in the Bavarian Radio International Music Competition, where biased jury members subjected her to different rules. Competitions—whether behind closed doors or airing to millions on the radio—played a formative role in the careers of most twentieth-century opera singers (and remain central to the industry today). Yet the role of competitions as operatic patrons or gatekeepers has received little critical attention, particularly in discussions about representation. Incorporating broader questions about mediatized performance, corporate and institutional practices, and bias and subjectivity, this paper explores how mid-twentieth-century competitions offer a unique lens into opera and race.

I begin with American operatic contests in the 1920s-60s, including the Lewisohn Stadium Concerts, the Atwater Kent radio show, and the American Opera Auditions. As Black opera singers negotiated segregated institutional practices, how did these competitions offer important opportunities? Conversely, how did subjectivity in judging support discriminatory practices? And how did the racialized histories of radio itself and radio’s acousmatic nature impact singers of color?

My main case study analyzes the Metropolitan Opera Auditions of the Air (1935-58). Sponsored by Sherwin-Williams and airing on NBC radio, each season auditioned hundreds of singers hoping to gain a Met contract. In the 1940s, this program seemed like a potential avenue towards desegregation; indeed, activists queried the auditions committee about accepting Black contestants. Eventually, the first generation of Black audition winners included baritone Fred Thomas (’51), Robert McFerrin (’53), Grace Bumbry (’57), and Martina Arroyo (’58). Yet like many contests judged on “artistic merit,” the auditions were fraught with problems.

Drawing on institutional documents, radio programs, memoirs, and press coverage, as well as work by Kira Thurman, Nina Eidsheim, and Naomi André, my study develops additional intersections between opera and race. In dialogue with scholarship by Katherine Meizel and William Cheng on reality television, I offer a new analysis of competition in classical music contexts. Ultimately, I argue these competitions uniquely illuminate historical connections and contemporary questions about opera, race, media, and money.