The Cosmopolitan Lyceum: Lecture Culture and the Globe in Nineteenth-Century America

3. Bringing Music to the Lyceumites: The Bureaus and the Transformation of Lyceum Entertainment

67 3 Bringing Music to the Lyceumites The Bureaus and the Transformation of Lyceum Entertainment Sara Lampert The sale of season tickets for the Worcester Lyceum Course was particularly lively the weekend of October 17, 1874. The first local residents began lining up outside the box office at Mechanics Hall at seven o’clock the evening before the sale began, and their numbers totaled twenty-five by midnight. The course for 1874–75 was slated to open with Camilla Urso’s Concert Company. A French violinist and impresario, Urso was an “established favorite” in Worcester and sold out every seat in Mechanics Hall for her October concert.1 The lyceum committee had discovered that the cost of bringing a concert combination in place of a lecturer more than paid for itself in ticket sales. During the 1870s, both of Worcester’s major lyceum courses, the Worcester County Mechanics Association Course and the Lyceum Course (formerly the Lyceum and National History Association Course), included at least one concert combination in a season of six to eight evening entertainments . Over the fall and winter months, patrons of the 1874 Lyceum Course would also enjoy dramatic celebrity impersonations by Helen Potter, including her portrayal of temperance lecturer John B. Gough, and then be able to compare Potter’s version to Gough himself when he came to speak in January. Bayard Taylor promised an edifying lecture based on his travels in Egypt, and English dramatic reader Mrs. Scott-Siddons would provide a e f 68 Sara Lampert combination of “culture and instruction” with her selections from Shakespeare and popular novels of the day.2 Although the lyceum remained a vital and thriving American institution in the decades after the Civil War, it was no longer a pure medium for lecturing—if it ever had been. The composition of its entertainment was shifting, featuring a more diverse array of spectacles in addition to lecturing. This brought European celebrities into the lyceum while also creating another market for American performers who aspired to global careers. Dramatic readings and musical performances had occupied a small place in the lyceum since the 1830s. But by the 1870s, dramatic readers, musical combinations, and stereopticon and other entertainments occupied a growing segment of lyceum lists and were actively promoted by lyceum bureaus and their agents. In the late 1860s, the formation of these centralized bureaus, which represented lecturers and performers and marketed them to local lyceum committees, had the effect of standardizing the business of lecturing and expanding the capacity of the lyceum to accommodate new forms of entertainment. In 1872, the Redpath Lyceum Bureau introduced its Musical Department, which more than doubled the number of musical offerings on its lists. Many of the artists were European celebrities, such as Urso, who headlined concert combinations consisting of foreign and American-born musicians. The lyceum bureaus both accessed and contributed to the transatlantic circulation of performers, seeking out international musical celebrities, such as Urso and German prima donna soprano Ermina Rudersdorff, and organizing concert combinations of foreign and native-born performers designed to appeal to a broad popular audience. The first wave of continental stars entered American markets in the 1840s, having been preceded by British performers for at least thirty years.3 Significantly , the increase in musical entertainment in the lyceum had the combined effect of expanding the market for foreign artists in America while creating new avenues for American musicians to develop regional and national touring careers, travel to Europe to study and perform, and obtain the foreign pedigree needed to facilitate claims to musical celebrity with the American public.4 Some contemporary critics such as Josiah Gilbert Holland, who had toured as a lecturer in the 1850s, accused the Redpath and other bureaus of contributing to the decline of lecturing in America, a sentiment echoed by early historians of the lyceum.5 However, the story is far more complex. To understand it fully, we must move beyond a declension narrative, in which the rise of the bureaus and the influx of entertainments is viewed as contributing to the decline of lecturing, and examine the relationship between 69 Bringing Music to the Lyceumites changing business and promotional models and the shifting popularity of different kinds of amusements relative to each other and to the public. When we place entertainments, and music in particular, at the center of the narrative, we can better situate the lyceum as a...