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3 Opera’s “Impossible Country” Figuring the american diva in their rude forcefulness and freedom from restrictive conventions they might be said to be representative of the american people.They are so full of that vital energy which made us a nation. —Henry Krehbiel, in Joseph Horowitz, Classical Music in America Clara louise Kellogg,one of the nation’s first home-grown opera stars,begins her Memoirs of an American Prima Donna (1913) with a new kind of origin story for nineteenth-century white american operatic identity.Recalling how often she “slept and waked”as her slave nurse sang “Jim along Josy”while rocking her, Kellogg claims that her “first musical efforts,”before she could even speak,“were to sing this ditty in imitation of my negro mammy.” She then boasts that in her youth she became “the first american girl who ever played a banjo. . . . i watched and studied the darkies until i had picked up the trick of playing it, and soon acquired a real negro touch.”1 Highlighting the distance she has traveled from the antebellum american South to the high cultural enclaves of new York and europe, and from singing negro “ditties”to the italian and French operas that marked her greatest successes, Kellogg’s memoir asserts her distinction from european operatic identity, as an american who had imbibed “real negro”musicality at the source. By the time Kellogg wrote her memoir , long after the peak of her career in the 1880s, american operatic identity had become associated with a new musical repertoire as well as a new discursive terrain. Rather than the operatic fare of gounod and Rossini, the new american diva distinguished herself in the mythical and highly demanding roles of Richard Wagner. in place of Kellogg’s domesticated plantation scenes,the modern american diva’s musicality would be associated ,more abstractly,with the“rude forcefulness and freedom from restrictive conventions”that,according to new York music critic Henry Krehbiel, made Wagner roles “representative” of american identity. Two novels written around the same time as Kellogg’s memoir— gertrude atherton’s Tower of Ivory (1910) and Willa Cather’s Song of the opera’s “impossible Country” 69 Lark (1915)—contribute to this new association of Wagner with american identity by imagining origin stories for american divas who sing Wagner. Resonating with Krehbiel’s pronouncement, these novels give us singercharacters who embody a “vital” american spirit that seems specifically to suit them for Wagner’s roles, but unlike Krehbiel, and the many other critics opining at this time about the special relationship between Wagner and america, they explore the origins of this vitality in particular american scenarios. The origin stories proffered by these novels take us not to the antebellum South and scenes of encounter with black musicality but to new scenes of encounter that remain, nonetheless, defined by crossracial intimacy. Both novels figure the diva as a product of her experience in the frontier West,and,among other things,of her intimacy with native americans. Bringing to mind the new american composers discussed in the introduction,these novels participate in constructing a modern american musicality by appropriating the primitive “vitality”of the nation’s most “native,” and most mythologized, peoples. Cather claimed to have taken inspiration for her diva character from the life of olive Fremstad, one of the great Wagnerian sopranos of the era who, though born in Stockholm, was raised in and “adopted by” america as one of its own. in an essay entitled “Three american Singers,” Cather had called Fremstad “the most interesting kind of american” who was “a great and highly individual talent, unlike any that had gone before it,”invoking Roosevelt’s idea that “americanism is not a condition of birth, but a condition of spirit.”2 But in spite of the existence of numerous prominent american singers at the time they were written, these novels register the degree to which american origins were still considered obstacles to musical success at the time their characters were beginning their careers.atherton ’s Tower of Ivory introduces her diva’s nationality as, indeed, a problem: “origin in america [does not count] with europeans in the least,” her narrator tells us, and to ward off such prejudice, her diva-heroine Margarethe Styr has revealed little about her past: “Beyond the bare assertion that she is an american she has barely alluded to her impossible country.”3 Cather’s fiction, including Song of the Lark, is peppered with european immigrants alienated by the...

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