CHAPTER 5 | ITALIAN OPERA IN THE UNITED STATES 111
García rented the theater for two nights a week, sharing
the stage with an English stock company already in residence.
An orchestra of twenty-six accompanied the performances.
By all accounts, the Garcías’ opera season was neither a
smashing success nor a failure; rather, it marked the start of a
long struggle, lasting almost three decades, to establish Italian
opera in New York. And on the eve of the Civil War, New York,
New Orleans, and San Francisco were still the only American
cities with resident opera companies of their own. Neverthe-
less, it is no exaggeration to call opera the most potent force
to hit the American musical world in the nineteenth century.
Opera relies on the drama inherent in the notion of larger-
than-life characters, with strong, sometimes beautiful voices,
pouring out their emotions—love, rage, grief, exultation—on
a grand scale, to music suited for such displays. Singers like
Maria García earned adulation and moved audiences by mak-
ing public spectacles of themselves. Their skill at communi-
cating the human passions with utter conviction surely helped
opera cut across social and class lines, attracting a wide range
of listeners.
Another factor in opera’s popularity was the interactive
environment in which performances took place. By most accounts, audiences
of the period were anything but silent and passive. “We (the sovereigns) deter-
mine to have the worth of our money when we go to the theatre,” a Boston cor-
respondent wrote in 1846. “Perhaps we’ll fl atter Mr. Kean [tonight] by making
him take poison twice.” Rather than mere spectators, audience members were
participating witnesses who cheered favorite performers on, abused others, and
expected calls for encores to be obeyed.
Opera is a form uniting drama, spectacle, and music, but it also is a bundle
of elements that can be pulled apart and changed. The programs given around
1840 at New York’s Olympic Theater refl ect opera’s adaptability. The Roof Scram-
bler, a parody of Vincenzo Bellini’s La sonnambula (The Sleepwalker), was a partic-
ular hit there, as was Fried Shots, a parody of Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz
(The Freeshooter). In works such as these, performers twisted operatic dramas
for comic effect, adapting music freely from the original scores. Offstage, the
melodies, titles, subjects, leading characters, and plot elements of famous operas
supplied hit musical numbers for the sheet music trade, for home performers
to sing and for pianists and wind bands to play. (Bishop’s “Home, Sweet Home,”
discussed in chapter 2, is an example from the English tradition.) As a theatri-
cal form, opera struggled for a toehold on these shores. But as a frame of refer-
ence and a cornucopia of song, it enriched the theater and the musical scene as
a whole.
The poet Walt Whitman celebrated opera’s adaptability in “Italian Music in
Dakota,” a poem picturing a regimental army band stationed at the edge of a vast
Western wilderness, playing operatic songs. W hitman fancies nature listening
“well pleas’d” to the band’s twilight performance. His recognition of the power
of melody provides another illustration of how Italian opera won a place in the
lives of nineteenth-century Americans.K Maria García
(1808–1836), Spanish
mezzo-soprano, came to
the United States with her
father’s troupe in 1825,
married Eugène Malibran
in 1826, and returned to
Europe in 1827, having
achieved stardom on these
shores. Highly acclaimed
in Europe, she died from
injuries suffered during a
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