Opera for the People: English-Language Opera and Women Managers in Late 19th-Century America by Katherine K. Preston (review)

"We cannot see why we should be obliged to listen to an opera in Italian, and bad Italian at that, when the company can as well sing it in English," proclaimed the editor of Brainard's Musical World in 1872 (2). As Katherine Preston demonstrates in this meticulously researched book, the question of operatic performance in the vernacular was inextricably bound up in debates concerning the future of American cultural life and artistic production in the second half of the nineteenth century. At a time when foreign-language opera was increasingly "pricing out" all but the wealthiest of audiences, English-language opera production sought to attract the middle classes, offering the hope not only that opera might remain financially viable in America but that an audience "educated in matters of art" through an exposure to English-language opera might eventually sustain a homegrown American school of composition. Preston's book therefore sets out to explore the changing fortunes of English-language opera in late nineteenth-century America, examining its entangled identities as both artistically uplifting and straightforwardly entertaining while also uncovering the vital role that female managers played in cultivating vernacular operatic culture.

Over the course of her seven chapters, Preston ably reveals the vibrancy and diversity of American operatic life in the late nineteenth century. The first three chapters provide a detailed history of the relationship between foreign-language and vernacular opera, considering, in turn, the increasingly exclusive status of foreign-language opera in the 1850s and the thriving operatic climate in the period immediately following the Civil War; the "renaissance" of English-language opera that took place in the late 1860s and early 1870s; and the role the financial Panic of 1873 played in the decline of foreign-language opera troupes and the subsequent emergence of vernacular "grand opera" troupes. The next three chapters take the form of case studies of English-language opera companies and their female managers—Effie Ober and the Boston Ideals, the Emma Abbott Opera Company, and Jeannette Thurber's American Opera Company—in order to explore issues concerning management practices, public image, and music education. Finally, Preston turns to the 1890s, showing in her last chapter how opera was forced to compete with a vast range of emerging new entertainments, driving English-language companies to search for a niche in an increasingly saturated market.

Preston's book undoubtedly makes an exceptional contribution to the study of cultural development in North America. As she rightly points out, English-language opera in the United States has previously received little attention: English-language and "Englished" operas (i.e., foreign-language operas in English translation) litter the narratives of histories of opera in the United States, such as those by Karen Ahlquist, George Martin, and June Ottenberg, but rarely have they received direct and sustained consideration of the sort Preston gives here.¹ Yet Opera for the People argues convincingly that we cannot fully understand foreign-language opera production in nineteenth-century America without knowledge of English-language opera and the debates surrounding it.

The book's subtitle, English-Language Opera and Women Managers in Late 19th-Century America, sets up twin concerns for Preston's investigations, although she does not go on to treat them equally. To begin with her focus on female managers: throughout the book, Preston introduces a large cast of female protagonists, whose stories she skillfully interweaves with those of more familiar—but no more influential—male figures such as Max Maretzek and Maurice Strakosch. The competing pressures on these women's professional and personal lives shaped their careers in particularly diverse ways. In chapter 5, for example, Preston highlights just how crucial self-presentation was to the cultivation of a female manager's career through her discussion of Emma Abbott, "the people's prima donna," who...