An Introduction to America’s Music

60 PART 1 | FROM COLONIZATION THROUGH THE CIVIL WAR

By the 1790s, with companies established in Baltimore, Boston, Charleston,

New York, and Philadelphia, the theatrical repertory was growing. New works

were imported from overseas, while brand-new pieces were created by immi-

grant composers and play wrights on this side of the Atlantic. Established favor-

ites were sometimes updated by replacing original numbers with newer ones or

plugging in popular songs. Thus English works were routinely transformed in

performance into Anglo-American ones.

The glamour of the theater was an illusion created by players at work in a

low-paying vocation. A typical stage performer made an annual salary of around

$300, about the same as, or somewhat less than, that of an average Ameri-

can laborer in the 1790s. Unlike laborers, however, stage performers might be

rewarded with benefi ts: performances whose benefi ciary kept whatever pro-

ceeds topped expenses. A star’s benefi t might net as much as $500 or more; a

decent yield for nonstarring players was $100.

Female actors were paid less than males. In an age when most theater works

idealized the virtues of their heroines, an actress could not count on being treated

with respect, onstage or off. No matter how important her role, her name always

followed those of male actors on the bill. She was fair game for comments on her

personal life and appearance and was expected to perform as long as possible

during pregnancies.

Company managers leased theaters from local proprietors, ran the company’s

day-to-day operations, took the fi nancial risk, and reaped the profi ts if any.

It was their job to decide the length of each evening’s entertainment and the

assignments of individual players, although they could be sure that their deci-

sions would be debated and sometimes denounced by performers, critics, and

audience members.

The chief American companies spent the season in the major cities of the

Eastern Seaboard and—after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 made it part of

the United States—New Orleans. Smaller companies were formed from their

ranks for summer touring, which gave players year-round work. A memoir by

actor-dancer John Durang describes what life was like in such an outfi t. Between

1808 and 1816 Durang toured with a small company to towns in Pennsylvania

and Maryland. Preparing seven or eight nights of entertainment, Durang’s

troupe ran through the repertory, then moved on to the next town, where they

repeated it. They adapted “tragedys, comedys, farces, and operas” for smaller

forces, offered their audiences dancing, pantomimes, and acrobatics, and even

catered to some of their immigrant audiences with plays performed in German.

Into the 1820s, stock companies such as Durang’s were still playing such

venerable English works as The Beggar’s Opera and Love in a Village. But newer

works such as the British composer Henry Rowe Bishop’s melodramatic opera

Clari, or The Maid of Milan, with a libretto by the American actor and writer John

Howard Payne, also entered the repertory. First performed in London in 1823,

Clari opened six months later at New York’s Park Theater and held a place on the

American stage into the 1870s. One of its songs may explain the opera’s success.

Bishop and Payne’s “Home, Sweet Home,” written to express the heroine’s emo-

tion as she returns home after being abducted, became one of the most popular

songs of the nineteenth century.

Many Americans found “Home, Sweet Home” an apt refl ection of their love

of domesticity, which they claimed to value above exotic “pleasures and palaces.”

professional actors

theater managers

“Home, Sweet Home”

touring

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