Cather Studies, Volume 9: Willa Cather and Modern Cultures

13. “Before Its Romanzas Have Become Street Music”: Cather and Verdi’s Falstaff, Chicago, 1895

266 13 “Before Its Romanzas Have Become Street Music” Cather and Verdi’s Falstaff, Chicago, 1895 J O H N H . F L A N N I G A N In March 1895, as Willa Cather was about to graduate from the University of Nebraska, she traveled with a university librarian friend, Mary Jones, to Chicago to hear five opera performances featuring Metropolitan Opera stars making their annual visit to the Auditorium Theatre.1 The trip was a momentous one for Cather. She had not been outside of Nebraska since arriving there at the age of nine, and she would hear some of the finest singers then active in Europe and the United States in roles that made them famous.2 The Metropolitan’s offerings were a veritable feast for music lovers, yet Cather, who for some time had been actively writing music and theater criticism for the Nebraska State Journal, published a single column for the Journal mentioning only two events from that memorable week. Cather devoted a brief paragraph to the American soprano Emma Eames, who sang the role of Desdemona in the Saturday, 16 March, performance of Verdi’s Otello; the rest of her review is given over to the Thursday, 14 March, performance of Verdi’s final opera, Falstaff.3 Her column, an extraordinarily perceptive piece of work for a twenty-one-year-old college student, represented Cather’s debut as a critic of musical events beyond Lincoln , Nebraska, and makes interesting reading today now that 267 “Before Its Romanzas Have Become Street Music” Falstaff, after more than a century of lukewarm critical responses , has found a more or less secure place in the operatic canon . The review is all the more interesting given Cather’s almost complete lack of musical training. A reluctant piano student and raised on a diet of light opera and mediocre performances by touring groups, Cather nonetheless proved herself a sharper and more perceptive critic of Verdi’s unabashedly modern opera than others with far stronger credentials and wider experience. The resistance Falstaff met as it made its way into opera companies ’ repertoires has its roots in both musical and cultural shifts in the late nineteenth century. On the musical front, the explosion of interest in Wagner’s complex musical dramas had caused a general backlash against Italian opera. For many early audiences and critics, however, Verdi had unfortunately ended up on the “right” side of the Wagnerian controversy: the music of Falstaff was too Germanic, too Wagnerian, and not sufficiently Italian to satisfy audiences used to Verdi’s traditional musical vocabulary (Hepokoski 138–41). Broader cultural shifts had also affected public tastes in theater and symphonic music as well as in opera. According to historian Lawrence W. Levine, the cultural hierarchies that privilege “serious” entertainments over “popular” ones began hardening into ironclad divisions as early as the mid-nineteenth century (33). For Levine, this “sacralization of culture” began with nineteenth -century America’s turning away from popular parodies of Shakespeare’s plays and ended with a “society in which Shakespeare is firmly entrenched in the pantheon of high culture” (4). This shift in taste was repeated in the public’s increasing disdain for popular opera and orchestral music and the gradual adoption of rigorous “categories of culture”—“high” and “low”— that are “fixed and immutable” (8). Because of the fossilization of such hierarchies, Verdi’s Falstaff, with its rollicking story and genuinely funny music deriving from perhaps Shakespeare’s most broadly humorous comedy, seemed destined to fall on the wrong side of these cultural developments. 268 john h. flannigan Upon her arrival in Chicago, Cather had already joined this struggle between high and low cultures, and in her Falstaff review she clearly states her sympathies: “To be present at the fourth American presentation of Verdi’s ‘Falstaff’ was more than a pleasure: it was a privilege and a great opportunity. There is something especially wonderful and sacred about any great masterpiece in its first youth, before its romanzas have become street music, before the concocters of comic opera have stolen the choruses , while it is played by the first cast, and the ink of the score is scarcely dry” (“As You Like It”). The constellation of images in these opening sentences—“sacred,” “street music,” “concocters of comic opera,” “stolen” choruses—implies a tension between the real and the fraudulent, the legitimate and the counterfeit , and the sacred...