Opera on the Road: Traveling Opera Troupes in the United States, 1825-60 (review)

Opera on the Road: Traveling Opera Troupes in the United States, 1825-60. Katherine K. Preston.Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001 496 pages, $39.95 (cloth), $22.50 (paper).

The early part of the twentieth century is often referred to by American devotees as the golden age of opera. The principal criteria for this designation were the popular operatic performances and the very public personalities of such luminaries as Caruso, Farrar, Galli-Curci, Martinelli, Ponselle, and many others. But that judgment was not made definitively until those singers had largely passed from the scene. Could not also the later periods that yielded singers like Bergonzi, Callas, Corelli, Sutherland, Tebaldi, and Tucker, to name only a few, be considered a truly golden age? Or perhaps that honor may be granted by future generations to the current operatic era.

In Opera on the Road, first published in 1993 and now in paperback, Katherine Preston advances the proposition that the period between 1825 and 1860 should also be considered a golden age of opera in the United States. Preston presents a convincing argument for this, based not particularly on any great voices or personalities but on evidence that operatic music itself had an immensely important effect upon the cultural life of Americans in the three and a half decades prior to the Civil War. The value of the book lies not only in the way she easily dispels the common notion that operatic music was an insignificant part of the American musical life of that period but also in the sheer wealth of historical facts she provides and in the vivid word picture she paints of the operatic culture of the era.

Preston's initial curiosity as to how the operatic scene in this antebellum period influenced the musical life of the final decades of the nineteenth century quickly led her into an operatic jungle. There were seemingly endless individual singers about the land, small and large opera troupes and companies coming and going, some succeeding, some failing, most frequently reorganizing with new names, new artists, new repertories, and complicated, confusing itineraries. Companies would lose their identities by combining with one another, and it was frequently unclear who was managing them. Some companies were known by the name of the principal singer or singers, and others by the name of an impresario or conductor. So many companies were known simply as "The Italian Opera Company" that it was often difficult to distinguish among them, especially when singers with one company would, without notice, suddenly pop up as members of another.

Earlier authors have written sparsely on the operatic culture of the era as part of more wide-ranging treatises on opera in the United States. Among the most notable are such works as Krehbiel's one-hundred-fifty-year overview in Chapters of Opera, Lahee's Grand Opera in America, and A Hundred Years of Music in America, edited by W. S. B. Mathews. ¹ But Preston is correct when she claims that the current knowledge of the history of music in early-nineteenth-century America can still be characterized as "a partially drawn map of an unexplored region" (p. xiv). It is certainly the case that this period exists only on the outer fringes of the knowledge possessed by most opera historians. Until now, few have seen a need for a comprehensive musical history of the period.

Preston admits, however, that hers is still not a definitive history in the sense that every singer, impresario, troupe or company, repertory, and itinerary of the period would be dealt with in detail—and in a chronological manner. One need not read far into her general description of the period to realize that this would have been virtually impossible in one lifetime. Instead, she has wisely described the period's operatic culture by first defining the three types of opera troupes in...