Conference Agenda

Russian-Jewish immigrant Samuel Chotzinoff (1889-1964), was, like many of his generation, transfixed by opera from an early age. His use of the NBC radio and television networks, with the backing of another Russian-Jewish immigrant, head of NBC David Sarnoff (1891-1971), to democratize symphonic and operatic music is representative of a longstanding pattern of Jewish consumption and performance of prestigious “highbrow” European culture. From the late eighteenth century, Jews had embraced the concept of Bildung (education), especially regarding music, as a pathway to social acceptance and advancement, and in turn, a feeling of belonging to mainstream culture. In establishing the NBC-TV Opera Theatre (1949-64), Chotzinoff demonstrated his passion for making opera accessible to a wide audience through adaptation via television (abridged and translated into English, or commissioning new works, most famously Amahl and the Night Visitors), thus speaking to the American audience on its own terms.

I argue, therefore, that the democratizing vision of the NBC-TV Opera Theatre has important roots in Chotzinoff’s and Sarnoff’s Jewish background. Drawing on Chotzinoff’s memoirs, biographies of Sarnoff, and NBC archival documents at the Library of Congress, I demonstrate how their experiences as immigrants in New York’s Yiddish-speaking community, including early exposure to opera and Yiddish theater, are a key but hitherto overlooked element informing NBC’s abridged English-language adaptations of operas. Beyond representing mid-century American cultural populism that promoted modified, easily accessible “highbrow” culture for mass audiences (“middlebrow” culture), I show how NBC’s approach echoed not only the Bildung ideology but also the motivations and approach of late nineteenth-century reformers of the Yiddish theater. I suggest that Chotzinoff’s and Sarnoff’s early social and cultural experiences provided the ideological foundation of their democratizing outlook premised on the desire to cultivate a sense of belonging through familiarity. Through the NBC-TV Opera Theatre’s emphasis on opera’s theatrical aspects, the program’s promotion of a sense of intimacy and belonging was an animating principle of cultural production no less important at mid-century than it is today.

The Chicago School of Television has long been characterized by elements of improvisation and intimacy drawn from theatrical roots, and it is exemplified by Kukla, Fran, and Ollie (1947–57), a campy ad-libbed puppet show aimed toward both children and adults. While KFO became known for its daily broadcast improvised sketches, its treatment of music differs from its theatrical roots in improvisation. Music was an integral part of the show and its reception, and it integrated songs ranging from Great American Songbook standards, film music, operetta, and newly composed songs by music director, Jack Fascinato. Over its run, the show mounted a full production of The Mikado (1950), presented multiple opera and operetta scene-study episodes, and premiered an opera written expressly for the program in collaboration with the Boston Pops, St. George and the Dragon (1953). Music was treated as the lone static part of the show's framing, even as everything around these songs was improvised. Yet this formal fixedness in operatic and musical performance created a culture of fans engaging with the program by submitting their own compositions, including full operetta scores.

In this paper, I argue that KFO demonstrates how operatic culture and fan-submitted music functioned as instrumental tools of engagement within the Chicago School of television. KFO’s differing principles of improvisation between comedy and music highlight the way in which aesthetics of intimacy differ among theatre, music, and screen. Drawing on archival materials including annotated scripts, fan mail, and both accepted and rejected sheet music, I demonstrate how theories of intimacy in performance studies privilege theater at the expense of our understanding of musical improvisation and fixedness. By examining cases of disjuncture where music and dialogue are produced under different aesthetic conditions, we can better understand the relationship between postwar television, theatre scene, and its diegetic musical performances.

Scholarship on television opera has distinguished between opera merely transmitted by television and the genuine Medienoper, a work in which camera, microphone, and montage are compositionally constitutive rather than documentary. Yet the original television operas produced by Czechoslovak Television (ČST) in the 1960s have received far less attention than their American and Western European counterparts, despite forming a distinctive repertoire shaped by different institutional and aesthetic conditions. This paper takes Jaroslav Křička’s thirty-minute comic opera Kalhoty (The Pants, 1962) as a case study to examine how a classical theatrical convention, namely, the aside, is fundamentally reconstituted when the medium shifts from the proscenium stage to the television screen. The analysis proceeds from a specific compositional problem: what happens to a theatrical convention when the medium that carries it changes its acoustic, visual, and spatial conditions? The aside, traditionally a dramaturgical convention sustained by tacit agreement between performer and auditorium, becomes in Křička’s hands a compositionally differentiated tool whose expressive meaning shifts depending on the orchestral dramaturgy and camera behavior that accompany it. In one instance the orchestra functions as the protagonist’s ally, sharing his self-satisfaction through a quietly circling motif. In another it mocks him before falling silent, leaving him exposed in a whispered confession directed at the camera lens. The paper then turns to two further cases, the paired women’s arias and a camera “mirror trick” impossible on the stage. Through close reading of the score and the surviving broadcast, the paper traces these shifts and proposes what I term “televisual complicity” to describe the new relationship between singer, orchestra, and home viewer that the Medienoper makes possible. Throughout, the screen turns theatrical convention into comedy, and thusly casts the home viewer as the one who sees the disaster coming. The case of Kalhoty is situated within the rapid expansion of Czechoslovak television in the early 1960s, when a single broadcast could reach an audience equivalent to hundreds of sold-out opera performances. This shift in scale, I argue, demanded a paradoxical compositional response. The larger the audience grew, the more intimate the address became.