Conference Agenda

Paris was the future once. Much of the enduring appeal of Puccini’s La bohème rests on the allure of its romanticized vision of the French capital and the lives of its charismatic young bohemians. Yet then as now, this was just one template for the modern city and a modern urban lifestyle, and its claim to modernity already had a retrospective, nostalgic aura. For a quite different model – and in some respects a more radical one – we might turn to Manchester, the city in which La bohème received its British premiere in 1897, in a production by the Carl Rosa Opera Company supervised by Puccini himself. A city of factories, not arcades, Manchester was associated more with conspicuous production than conspicuous consumption. Its citizens’ devotion to the profit motive, on the one hand, and civic responsibility, on the other, hardly suggested promising ground for a bohemian refusal of conventional modes of economic and social productivity.

Foregrounding such disjunctions, this paper offers the first detailed investigation of the Manchester performance of La bohème. In so doing, it seeks to challenge an established tendency in Puccini studies to foreground capitalism and empire above all as ‘contexts’ for hermeneutic readings (particularly as regards exoticism in Madama Butterfly and Turandot). Retracing the material and institutional conditions behind the composer’s brief sojourn in Manchester, I argue that commerce, industry, and imperial power were also fundamentally constitutive of the performance and media environments in which his operas emerged and flourished. This perspective, in turn, underpins my analysis of the early British reception of La bohème. Exploring how quite un-bohemian audiences and critics responded both to the alternate vision of urban modernity staged in the work and its attendant style of operatic ‘realism’, I show how profoundly their engagements with culture were shaped by anxieties about social class: a fundamental but potentially unstable category for late nineteenth-century Mancunians, as they sought to secure their standing in the city and their city’s standing in the world.

In a 1921 issue of The Music News, composer and prominent Chicago clubwoman Eleanor Everest Freer decried the apparent foreign domination of opera in the United States. “Americans are beginning to realize their hospitality to foreigners . . . has fatally impaired the racial integrity of their nation,” she proclaimed amid a call for opera’s “Americanization,” adding that “foreign-born citizens must be assimilated . . . through the universal employment of our language.” The topic was nothing new to Freer, who had officially taken up the cause of promoting English-language operas with the establishment of the American Opera Society of Chicago (formerly the Opera in Our Language Foundation). Incorporated by Freer and fellow Chicago clubwomen, the Society sought “the Americanization of our national musical art” through the proliferation of translated libretti and propagation of new, domestically composed operas. Throughout the decade, the Society’s boosterism actively brought the issue of language in operatic production to public consideration, promoting the use of English as a nationalistic imperative and reflecting period xenophobic rhetorics of compulsory Americanism (Bennet 1988, Goldberg 1999, Church 2015, and Lee 2019).

Using press clippings as well as the organization’s extant scrapbooks and records, this paper explores the assimilationist underpinnings of the American Opera Society in the 1920s, placing the organization’s nationalistic aims in dialogue with the wider anti-foreign impulses and anti-immigration policies that remained potent forces in the wake of the First World War. As Katherine Preston and Kristen Turner have shown, by the early-twentieth century, English-language operas already carried connotations of nationalism and a discourse of democratization. By the 1920s, however, they adopted chauvinistic implications. This paper contextualizes Freer’s prolific writings within the decade’s anxieties over immigration and chronicles her organization’s participation in state-sponsored assimilationist activities. It first covers the Society’s origins and operatic boosterism, and it then details a Chicago-wide campaign to promote English-language operas among the city’s ethnic enclaves in 1929, which garnered praise from Hoover’s ultra-reactionary administration. Ultimately, it presents a case in which translation, fervent nationalism, and operatic promotion coalesced into direct political action against foreign-born citizens, reflecting the period’s harmful—and acutely relevant—(inter-)national insecurities.

Just like so many politicians, the contemporary American opera industry is beholden to a donor class. The concept of the “donor class” is rooted in American political science and theory, inspired by the back-room campaign-finance deals and influence-peddling occurring in statehouses nationwide, particularly among conservative and right-leaning politicians in the neoliberal era. The political donor class is responsible for the emergence of think-tanks, high-impact lobbying, white papers, and pre-authored legislation. While not nearly as well-organized as its political cousin, opera’s donor class nevertheless employs money and power to affect not just choices of repertoire, staging, and dramaturgy, but also to enact its own preferences and prejudices on the stage by influencing who gets to direct, design, conduct, and—ultimately—sing opera in America.

I analyze the impact of opera’s donor class on the contemporary art form using four lines of inquiry. First, I trace the emergence of opera’s donor class through the widespread adoption of the nonprofit corporate form in the mid-twentieth century, wherein the American opera industry pivoted from a for-profit model of private, investment-based enterprise to a nonprofit model of public, donation-based enterprise. Second, by analyzing annual reports and routine tax filings from several major opera companies over the last twenty-five years, I demonstrate how American opera companies rely on donations from a relatively small number of wealthy individuals and families to cover the significant annual deficit between the high cost of producing opera and the generally low yield from ticket sales. Third, I show how opera’s donor class has loosely cohered around a specific set of values—including prestige, recognition, and tradition—to wield outsized influence over both how opera is produced and who gets hired to perform it. Fourth, I show how these same values shape the behavior of both opera companies and opera singers, who are collectively incentivized to do whatever it takes to keep opera’s donor class happy. To conclude, I identify several cases in which donor interests appear to have directly or indirectly affected the hiring of opera singers, leading to enactments of racism, homophobia, transphobia, and fatphobia on American opera stages.