An Introduction to America’s Music

232 PART 2 | FROM THE CIVIL WAR THROUGH WORLD WAR I

MUSICAL THEATER AT THE TURN

OF THE CENTURY

It is possible to arrange the early twentieth century’s various genres of musical

stage entertainments into a hierarchy based on the cultural prestige claimed by

their creators and performers. At the bottom was burlesque, in which the display

of the feminine fi gure took precedence over other artistic considerations. Begin-

ning as comic travesties of serious plays, burlesque shows would by the 1930s

degenerate into striptease. A rung higher up the ladder was more family-friendly

vaudeville, a variety style of entertainment presenting a succession of short acts,

musical and nonmusical. Then came more elaborate and costly genres favored

by the Broadway stage: revue, which presented variety, often with an overarch-

ing theme absent in vaudeville, and musical comedy, which involved characters

and a story. At the top of the ladder were the genres linked most closely with the

classical sphere and its emphasis on the role of the composer: operetta and, on

the highest rung, opera.

OPERA AND OPERETTA

In 1903 Broadway song-and-dance man George M. Cohan wrote a patriotic num-

ber, “I Want to Hear a Yankee Doodle Tune,” that included the following lines:

Oh, Sousa, won’t you write another march?

Yours is just the melody divine.

Now you can have your William Tell,

You r Faust and Lohengrin as well,

But I’ll take a Yankee Doodle tune for mine.

Cohan could be sure that his audience would recognize William Tell, Faust, and

Lohengrin as the names of famous operas. For while opera in the early 1900s was

the most glamorous of musical genres, it was also part of the common culture.

Tin Pan Alley produced many novelty songs—comic songs, often topical in subject

matter—with operatic allusions, many of which made jokes that required at least

a passing familiarity with opera. Like Cohan, the writers of those novelties could

count on their audience’s recognition of snippets of famous operatic tunes, allu-

sions to operatic characters, and mention of operatic celebrities such as Enrico

Caruso, from 1903 to 1920 the star tenor at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera.

The Metropolitan Opera had opened its doors in 1883. Backed by wealthy

patrons, the new enterprise won a fi rm fi nancial footing in the later 1880s by spe-

cializing in German opera, especially the music dramas of Richard Wagner. From

the start, the opera company toured each year after concluding its New York sea-

son. In 1890, with a few Italian operas added to its repertory, the company trav-

eled as far as San Francisco and Mexico. In a tour of twenty-three cities ten years

later, the Metropolitan spent fi ve months on the road. In 1906 the company was

caught in the San Francisco earthquake, bringing an abrupt end to its April tour

when sets, costumes, and most of the orchestra’s instruments were lost.

Through much of the twentieth century, the opera repertory in the United

States resembled the symphony orchestra’s, emphasizing classic works rather

than new ones. Yet during the 1910s especially, the Metropolitan encouraged

The Metropolitan

Opera

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