American opera: innovation and tradition

Kirk, Elise

doi:10.1017/ccol9780521780094.013

Cited by 2 publications

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“…After his politicised musical plays of the 1930s, Blitzstein turned to a more realist and emotional style in his 'Broadway opera' Regina (based on Lillian Hellman's 1939 play The Little Foxes), commissioned by Koussevitzky in 1946, as did Weill in Street Scene, his 'American opera' for Broadway from 1947. 97 Moore's Giants of the Earth (1951) represents a realist turn from The Devil and Daniel Webster's concerns with myth and the supernatural in 1939. Even Thomson's The Mother of Us All seems touched by realism (in the sense of representing a recognisable historical episode) compared to the earlier Four Saints.…”

Section: Embracing Sincerity In Peter Grimesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Discovering America: FromPaul BunyantoPeter Grimes

Wiebe¹

2015

OPR

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Britten and Auden’s ‘choral operetta’ Paul Bunyan, written in New York in 1939–41, has often been seen as out of touch with its American context and as an anomalous precursor to the triumphant Peter Grimes (1945). A closer look, however, suggests a more complex engagement with American musical life and with the problem of American operatic populism. Indeed, if Paul Bunyan offered one set of answers to this problem, toying with popular genres and smaller forms, the rejection of this approach in Peter Grimes also seems tied to shifting American ideas about contemporary opera. Attention to Paul Bunyan in its American context highlights the transatlantic nature of both American and British operatic developments in the mid-twentieth century, while also recasting Britten’s operatic trajectory, restoring a sense of scepticism and uncertainty to his operatic project at its very beginnings.

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Section: Embracing Sincerity In Peter Grimesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Discovering America: FromPaul BunyantoPeter Grimes

Wiebe¹

2015

OPR

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Samuel Barber’s A Hand of Bridge and Anxieties of the American Middlebrow

Dupuis

2022

The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Middlebrow

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This chapter examines Samuel Barber’s diminutive 1959 opera, A Hand of Bridge, as a case study of American operatic representations of the midcentury middlebrow. The piece’s status as an outlier in Barber’s oeuvre serves as the entry point for a close reading of the opera as an intentioned critique of mid-twentieth-century American culture and, more specifically, middlebrow intellectualism. To shed light on the opera’s particular musical style and au courant topicality, frameworks underpinning Weimar Era Zeitoper are applied to A Hand of Bridge and comparisons are drawn to other American operas that address similar themes. The chapter concludes by considering broader cultural trends of American midcentury anxiety relevant to the opera.

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American opera: innovation and tradition

Cited by 2 publications

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Discovering America: FromPaul BunyantoPeter Grimes

Discovering America: FromPaul BunyantoPeter Grimes

Samuel Barber’s A Hand of Bridge and Anxieties of the American Middlebrow

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