Opera in a New Age: Mass Media, the "Popular," and Opera, 1900-1960

Abstract

This dissertation examines the role of opera in the mass media (the press, phonograph, radio, television, and especially movies) from the early to mid-twentieth century. During this time, opera experienced a golden age of popularity as a part of American mass culture. It appeared frequently in the media in ways that would be surprising and unexpected today, and its effects were far reaching and varied. Opera and the mass media worked together in complicated and symbiotic ways, creating and reaching new publics and perpetuating earlier operatic traditions and certain aspects of vernacular culture.

Cultural arbiters increasingly signified opera as a part of specifically "high" culture by the late nineteenth century. Opera as set-apart and sacralized "art" continued to function as a pervasive, formative trope in a wide variety of cultural products, even as the genre became increasingly popularized in reality via the media. Different groups of peoples, including diverse producers, performers, and consumers, appropriated and utilized the "highbrow" discourse surrounding opera to their benefit. The ways in which they deployed (or countered) this discourse in the media brought them money, fame, power, and cultural capital, as it also spread opera more broadly throughout American culture.

These mass media productions illustrate how opera could be simultaneously elite and popular. Its valence was structured by its medium, venue, format, quality, and inscribed messages. Moviemakers like Cecil B. DeMille and Jesse Lasky, while trying to legitimate their industry, were able to take advantage of this duality by making operatic films that were both "elevated" and popular. Later filmmakers, in movies like A Night at the Opera and The Great Caruso, used opera's high culture connotation merely as a target, while reconfiguring opera as working class. Opera's prestige coupled with its popularity in the media also opened up new opportunities for women performers like Geraldine Farrar and foreign singers like Enrico Caruso, whose opportunities might otherwise be limited. These films, programs, and recordings illustrate how supposedly "elitist" opera could be the purview and possession of Americans from a wide variety of backgrounds, regardless of class, social station, ethnicity, or gender.