Reverberating Voices and Spaces: Overtones of Opera from Whitman
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
REVERBERATING VOICES AND SPACES: OVERTONES OF OPERA FROM WHITMAN TO WHARTON by CARMEN TRAMMELL SKAGGS (Under the Direction of Hubert H. McAlexander) ABSTRACT By using the lens of opera to consider a broad range of American literature, this study seeks to “escape from the boundaries of ordinary literary discourse” (Lindenberger, Opera: The Extravagant Art , 70) and expand the critical framework. As Herbert Lindenberger noted, literary critics have embraced musical terminology to “suggest nonverbal dimension beyond what we ordinarily take to be the realm of literature” ( Opera: The Extravagant Art , 70), but many of these same scholars have been wary of embracing anything operatic. After all, the “operatic” often suggests absurdity, artificiality, irrationality, and extravagance. Some of the works included in this dissertation are indisputably canonical; others might be described in operatic (and disparaging) terms: contrived, artificial, bizarre. Through the critical discourse of opera—both as art form and social institution—scholars of American literature may deepen their understanding of a period marked by significant developments. As the canon of American writing grew more diverse, so, too, did American exposure to opera. The literary works studied here reflect the writers’ efforts to articulate the artist’s vision while also establishing an authoritative authorial voice. Opera’s voices and opera’s spaces enriched the works of Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Louisa May Alcott, Kate Chopin, Willa Cather, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. INDEX WORDS: opera, perception, transcendence, spectacle, gaze, Künstlerroman, etiquette, Wagnerism, diva, opera box, artifice, convention, display, performance, class, voice REVERBERATING VOICES AND SPACES: OVERTONES OF OPERA FROM WHITMAN TO WHARTON by CARMEN TRAMMELL SKAGGS B.A. Mercer University, 1998 M.T.S. Duke University Divinity School, 2000 M.A. The University of Georgia, 2002 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2006 © 2006 Carmen Trammell Skaggs All Rights Reserved REVERBERATING VOICES AND SPACES: OVERTONES OF OPERA FROM WHITMAN TO WHARTON by CARMEN TRAMMELL SKAGGS Major Professor: Hubert H. McAlexander Committee: Kristin Boudreau Anne Williams Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia August 2006 DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to my son, Nathan Skaggs. You have filled this year—the first one of your life—with creativity, wonderment, and delight. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I gratefully acknowledge Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature for permission to reprint a version of my essay, “Looking through the Opera Glasses: Performance and Artifice in The Age of Innocence ,” as a part of this dissertation. The essay was first published in Mosaic 37.1 (March 2004), 49-62. A Dissertation Completion Assistantship awarded by the Graduate School of The University of Georgia allowed me the privilege of an uninterrupted year of work on this project. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .......................................................................................................... v INTRODUCTION......................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1 Embodying Poetic Transcendence: Whitman and Opera............................................. 17 2 Comedic Grotesquery and Gothic Terror: Opera in Poe and Alcott ............................ 44 3 An Awakening of the Artist: Opera in Chopin and Cather .......................................... 72 4 A Standard of Taste and Form: Opera in the Cosmopolitan World of James and Wharton...................................................................................................................... 119 CONCLUSION ......................................................................................................................... 177 WORKS CITED........................................................................................................................ 181 vi INTRODUCTION Coincidentally, in 1607, the same year of Jamestown’s establishment in the New World, Monteverdi’s Orfeo , the first great opera, premiered in Mantua. Joseph Kerman describes the achievement in this way: “ Orfeo is the first opera to reveal the characteristic composer’s struggle with the libretto” (21). Musicologists consider the seventeenth century composer the “founder of that tradition of opera-as-drama that passed through Gluck and Wagner, and, indeed, through most of the composers who have been accorded the highest prestige in histories of music” (Lindenberger, Opera in History , 49). Many years passed, however, before opera came to America. The largest metropolitan cities in America’s infancy—Boston, Charleston, New Orleans, New York, and Philadelphia—strove to be the nation’s cultural centers. Charleston hosted America’s first performance of a ballad opera, Colley Cibber’s Flora, or Hob in the Well , in 1735, and The Beggar’s Opera came to New York in 1750 (Dizikes 17-18). Historical records confirm the arrival of opera in New Orleans in 1796 and to Boston in 1797. These initial performances paved the way for the flowering of opera in the New World. A few years after Walt Whitman’s birth, Italian opera arrived in New York. On November 29, 1825, Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia , performed at the Park Theatre, proved a sensation. While the press and the public recognized the significance of the event, some critics questioned opera’s wide appeal to the American public—one that demanded drama with a “natural-born subject” that “represents the actions and passions of men as we see them in the world at large” ( New-York Literary Gazette 239). The reviewer commented that “from what we had previously read of it [the Italian opera], we always esteemed it a forced and unnatural 1 bantling; seeing it has not changed our opinion” (239). But thirty years later, Walt Whitman, one of America’s strongest spokesmen for democracy, defied the assumption that opera belonged to the European elite by translating opera into the poetry of democracy. As the nineteenth century neared its close, opera gradually infiltrated even the small-town opera houses of middle America, moving from the East Coast westward and expanding beyond the confines of the privileged. In response to the spread of democratic concepts throughout the United States, a new literary voice emerged. In his 1844 essay “The Poet,” Emerson had longed for a “genius in America” with a “tyrannous eye” to celebrate the wonder of the country. “America is a poem in our eyes,” Emerson exclaimed; “its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres” (235). Walt Whitman answered Emerson’s call, and in the 1840s and 50s, this self-proclaimed American poet discovered in opera an authentic mode of expression to describe the transcendent power of poetic vision. From the middle of the nineteenth century on, opera appeared in a diverse cross-section of American literature. Although writers from Whitman to Wharton appropriate opera for different purposes, they all found the hybrid art form suited to an American canvas. Three American cities—New Orleans, New York, and Boston— influenced significantly the American writers Whitman, Poe, Alcott, Chopin, Cather, James, and Wharton. From the late 1700s until the Civil War, New Orleans was the center of opera in the United States. Unlike other American cities producing opera, New Orleans boasted the only opera company—at times as many as three companies— to perform continuously, interrupted only by the Civil War (Kmen vii). In New Orleans, opera reflected the strong influence of French culture and language—favoring the works of French composers, importing artists from France, and performing operas in French. Rather than fearing the foreign element of opera, New 2 Orleans embraced it. But New Orleans did not exclude other forms of opera. “It is true that the repertoire before the 1830s was primarily French and was what we now call light opera—but that was the opera of the time,” Kmen comments. “As opera itself changed and developed, the opera in New Orleans kept pace. Thus when Caldwell [James Caldwell] imported Italian companies in 1836 and 1837 the way had been prepared by the French company” (Kmen 199). While other American cities, under the influence of nationalism, rejected opera because they considered it alien and strange, New Orleans promoted it. Playing a pivotal role in the development and reception of this hybrid art form from the Southern gulf coast to the cities of the Eastern seaboard, New Orleans influenced the operatic tastes of those who never visited Louisiana. With over fifty artists on tour from 1827 to 1833, the Orleans Theater opera company under the direction of John Davis influenced the musical tastes of several other major metropolitan cities; Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore got their first tastes of a regular opera company; and in the two latter cities, the success of Davis’ production of Der Freischutz presented a sharp contrast to the costly failure of local productions of the same opera shortly before. New York, to be sure, had already encountered grand opera when Manuel Garcia’s company played in the two seasons immediately preceding the visits of the New Orleans company. But it found the latter [New Orleans company] to