From Johnson's Kids to Lemonade Opera: The American Classical Singer Comes of Age (review)

Victoria Etnier Villamil's delightful book covers two decades of relatively recent operatic history, from 1935 to about 1955. But the era it chronicles seems as distant today as the age of the pyramids. It's hard for contemporary opera lovers to imagine a time when opera companies were not thick on the ground, when American singers didn't dominate their rosters, when cities such as Chicago, Seattle, St. Louis, Houston, Dallas, and Washington, D.C., were not thriving centers of operatic activity. But those days were not that long ago, and this engaging history explains how opera was transformed just before, during, and just after World War II — in other words, the period of Canadian-born Edward Johnson's leadership of America's premier company, the Metropolitan Opera. As the author describes her work in the preface, "It is the story of a generation of classically trained American singers who saw their profession, their image, and their art transformed by the extraordinary times in which they lived; it is about the obstacles they overcame, the breakthroughs they made, and the legacy they left" (p. ix).

American singers have always played a part in America's musical life, of course. Indeed, the third performance in the Met's inaugural season was an 1883 Trovatore in which Baltimore's Alwina Valleria, as Leonora, became the first American-born singer to perform in that house. She stayed throughout the season, amassing forty-three performances in eight roles and appearing in seven concerts. But Valleria was the exception rather than the rule until Johnson's predecessor, Giulio Gatti-Casazza, took the reins at the Met in 1908, vowing to engage more native artists — while also paying them a fraction of the fees European singers commanded. As he stated in his memoirs, quoted in Villamil's book, "It was from the beginning my intention and my manifest duty to do my utmost for American artists and American art" (p. 29). He succeeded. In his twenty-seven seasons at the helm, Villamil writes, "Gatti had not only presented the Metropolitan's first American opera¹ and followed it with some fifteen more, but also engaged some 125 American singers. Granted, he had proceeded slowly, but of his final roster of 101 singers, 44 were American, and of these almost half sang leading roles at least occasionally. This is an impressive statistic when one considers that of the thirty-four singers on the Metropolitan's first roster, probably only two, notably Alwina Valleria of Baltimore, were American,² and that of the seventy-seven singers on the last roster of Gatti's predecessor, Heinrich Conreid, nine sang leading roles and an additional six to nine (approximately) sang secondary roles" (pp. 30–31).

The Gatti-era Americans who made the biggest splash and opened the doors widest to their compatriots were Rosa Ponselle, who made her legendary debut in the Met premiere of Verdi's La forza del destino opposite Enrico Caruso in 1918, and Lawrence Tibbett, whose equally famous leap into star status came as Ford in Verdi's Falstaff six years later. The success of these two towering figures, the former a vocal icon, the latter a model of the modern singing actor, made it possible for Johnson — who, when forging a prominent career in Italy, felt constrained for marketing purposes to use the name Edoardo di Giovanni — to build on Gatti's record and help American singers to assume their rightful places on the rosters of opera houses and record companies around the globe. During Johnson's fifteen-year tenure as general manager of the Met, his campaign to discover and nurture native artists was greatly aided by the Metropolitan Opera Auditions of the Air, whose almost 500 contestants included Eleanor Steber, Leonard Warren, Margaret Harshaw, Richard Tucker, Risë Stevens, Robert Merrill, Walter Cassell, Martha Lipton, Patrice Munsel, Mack Harrell, Thomas Hayward, Arthur Kent, and many other...