National Identity and the Oratorio in Antebellum New Orleans

In a travelogue of 1851, the touring French pianist Henri Herz remarked upon the rigid social bifurcation he observed in one of America's most musically vibrant cities. "New Orleans is divided administratively into six quarters or districts," he wrote. "In reality, however, there are only two quarters: the English or American, and the French. They are, to all intents and purposes, two cities in one, two cities perfectly distinct from each other in every respect, from physical appearance to spirit of the inhabitants."¹ Although the notion of "two cities in one" has long framed romantic depictions of the city's history, the influence of this duality on the musical life of New Orleans remains surprisingly forgotten, ignored, or misunderstood. Newly uncovered sources have begun to expose this history, however, revealing stories fraught with cultural tension and stress but also with cooperation and solidarity.² Perhaps the most striking aspect of this new history is the story of how, precisely, New Orleans came to be seen as an "American" city: how over the course of the nineteenth century its French conversations shifted into English, its Latin heritage faded into a memory only preserved by street names and architecture, and its once-vibrant opera culture became a shadow of those in northern cities. To ask "how" shifts our attention from a myopic focus on New Orleans's French past—and the themes of cultural loss that attend such a focus—toward an engagement with the city's so-called American residents, a group whose musical contributions have been largely neglected.

In the decades following the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, residents of the northern United States, particularly those from urban centers such as New York and Boston, began to migrate to New Orleans in search of new political and economic opportunities.³ This wave of arrivals from the Northeast peaked between the late 1830s and the mid-1840s, when thousands of mostly middle-class merchants set up shop in the Crescent City, importing elements of a northern business culture.⁴ They also brought with them musical practices distinct to that region, such as Protestant church music, music education in public schools, music publication, and English-language opera.⁵ But perhaps the most significant musical contribution of this community was its establishment of a sacred music performance tradition like that cultivated by Boston's famous Handel and Haydn Society. Previously unexamined archival evidence shows that in the early 1840s, public performances of oratorios and other sacred music became more and more frequent in New Orleans. These concerts engaged both the city's amateur and professional talent, introduced its audiences to works by famous European composers, and served as a vehicle for spreading a moral ideology derived from the New England sacred music reforms of the early nineteenth century. This article establishes the history of public sacred music performance in antebellum New Orleans and explains how musical practices that were not seen as distinctly American in Boston and New York became identified as such in New Orleans.⁶ In doing so, it draws upon the work of Douglas Shadle and Charles Hiroshi Garrett, who have defined American musical identity as a "contested moving target" in which musical practices took on new meanings in different contexts.⁷ In antebellum New Orleans, such a resignification was carried out by these transplanted northern musicians, whose social performance of their northern identity was understood by themselves and their neighbors as the performance of an American one.⁸ Of course, this transformation represents just one thread in a larger story of shifting political ideologies and identities that played out against a backdrop of migration in the American nineteenth century. New Orleans stood as perhaps the most diverse American city during the antebellum period, and because of that diversity groups of immigrants, such as those from various European nations, the Caribbean, and people of African descent, both free and enslaved, found that they could establish communities of cultural and class identity through shared musical experiences.⁹

Examining the history of sacred concert music in New Orleans has important implications for our understanding of the...