Opera and Ethnic Diversity

Opera in the United States

With the influx of European immigrants to America came a corresponding increase in the number of operas that focused on their lives. Although George Whitefield Chadwick's The Padrone (1912) and Frederick Shepherd Converse's The Immigrants (1914) addressed the immigrant experience, white ethnic characters continued to compose the dramatis personae of American operas for decades to come. Gian Carlo Menotti's 1954 opera The Saint of Bleecker Street featured Italian Americans in the tenements of Manhattan's Lower East Side. Evangeline, written by Otto Luening in 1932, concerned Greek American characters in Louisiana. Leonard Bernstein's A Quiet Place (1984), which examined modern notions of the American dream, prominently featured a French Canadian character. William Bolcom's 1990 adaptation of Arthur Miller's A[Page 1647]View From the Bridge depicted the lives of Italian Americans in 1950s Brooklyn.

Perhaps because of opera's great popularity outside the United States, many of America's most esteemed opera singers and composers—including Maria Callas (Greece), Plácido Domingo (Spain), Rosalind Elias (Lebanon), and Leonard Bernstein (Ukraine)—have international roots. Austria, which is home to a number of well-regarded conservatories such as the University of Vienna, the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, and Mozarteum Salzburg, produced several of America's most celebrated composers and conductors, including Arnold Schoenberg, Karl Böhm, and Fritz Stiedry. Northern Europe, where the works of Richard Wagner were especially popular, produced a coterie of strong singers who were very popular in the United States, such as Kirsten Flagstad, Christina Nilsson, and Jacques Urlus. Further, Jewish Americans played pivotal roles in the early development of many of the nation's important opera companies, including Leopold Damrosch at the Metropolitan Opera, Oscar Hammerstein at the Philadelphia Opera Company, Joseph Rosentock at the New York City Opera, and Kurt Herbert Adler at the San Francisco Opera. In many ways, the artistic work of these diverse artists contributed to the mainstream of acceptance of ethnic Europeans in America, in addition to popularizing the art form in the United States.

A cultural tradition of great significance in Italy, opera was advanced in the United States by Italian immigrants who sought to preserve their love of the art form in their new homeland. Opera thrived in Italian enclaves and alongside puppet shows, concert bands, chorales, and theaters in New York, New Jersey, California, and Pennsylvania. Italian Americans compose the ranks of America's most esteemed opera composers, including Dominick Argento (a Pulitzer Prize winner for From the Diary of Virginia Woolf); John Corigliano, whose The Ghosts of Versailles was commissioned by the New York Metropolitan Opera; and Gian Carlo Menotti, who wrote on Italian American themes. Additionally, some of the nation's most successful classical vocalists have been Italian American, most notably tenor Mario Lanza, who was the first singer to make a record that sold more than 2 million copies.

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