In Katherine K. Preston's newest magisterial volume, strong, intelligent, talented women command center stage, both literally and metaphorically. Her critical examination of their substantial, tireless, and heretofore-undervalued work forms the scaffold of this exhaustive study of late nineteenth-century opera in the United States. Among her many significant conclusions, Preston demonstrates, through meticulous research and thoughtful analysis, that these women, who were often denigrated or dismissed by critics, fostered an American appreciation and enjoyment of opera that would have suffered without their contributions. Despite the reality of opera's continued problematic position within the US consciousness, without these women managers and their labors, we might have no US opera scene at all today.
This expansive tome, which clocks in at an impressive 618 pages, spares no effort towards comprehensiveness. It is sure to become an invaluable resource to all scholars of the nineteenth century. While its title suggests a narrow exploration of one facet of musical life in the United States in the latest part of the century, in reality, the scope of Preston's work reaches far beyond those boundaries, exploring music, performances, and people from the immediate postbellum years through the earliest years of the twentieth century. Her exhaustive research was conducted over years of archival study examining primary materials, much of which seems never to have been examined before, in a plethora of libraries and archives listed in the acknowledgements (xix). This impressive body of sources, combined with Preston's own uncanny ability to connect the dots, shapes a historical world in which the characters, many colorful and unforgettable, swirl around one another, their careers and trajectories intertwining and influencing each other. The tome is formidable, but any scholar with interests in opera and the stage, music criticism, or the shaping of US musical culture needs this volume in their library. In truth, Preston could have written at least four books; the fact that we have all this information here in a single volume is both remarkable and extremely valuable to scholarship in the history of US music.
Preston frames her book through the lens of several musical women, the “managers” of the title. But manager is too small a word to describe the ways in which these women shaped their vocations. Most were also performers, excluding the socialite Janette Thurber, whose infamous disaster with the American Opera Company is reframed in chapter 6. The stories of these tireless individuals are striking in their quest for success and the popularization of opera during a time in which women were traditionally and generally excluded from such work. A book each could have been written on Caroline Richings, Euphrosyne Parepa-Rosa (both discussed in chapter 2), Clara Kellogg (chapter 3), Effie Ober (chapter 4), and Emma Abbott (chapter 5).
In the introduction, Preston articulates both her primary objective, which is “examining in detail the forgotten world of English-language opera, a dominant style of performance on the American stage during the last three decades of the century” (6), and the justification for doing so: “[I]t fills a lacuna in American music history and provides insight into late-century American social culture… [and] will also shed light on a growing American middle-class disenchantment with and disparagement of foreign-language opera during this period” (6). Connecting this aim with her framing device, she further seeks to “provide insight into the work of strong, active women who refused to be constrained by a dominant social order that still affirmed they did not belong in the public sphere.”
It's in chapter 4 where the stories of these women truly start coming to life. Preston's marvelous discovery in the form of the Ober letters—correspondence from the performers with whom Effie Ober worked—imparts “unprecedented insight into the establishment and operation of an itinerant opera company during the period, including information on such issues as hiring artists, choosing and adapting repertory, resolving conflict, making on-site decisions, and arranging for appropriate publicity. To a remarkable extent, the documents bring to life the experiences of English-opera singers active in America during the early 1880s” (243n3). These letters paint the richness of the theatrical world in a way that straightforward documentation cannot. Reading the words of the performers, one wishes Ober's own letters had been preserved in a similar fashion so that we could read both sides of the correspondence.
Preston takes great care in surveying the life and career of Emma Abbott in chapter 5. As she remarks, “of all the performers active on the American operatic stage during the second half of the nineteenth century, Abbott is the most enigmatic to the historian, for during her professional career she was both admired and reviled, described as a musical missionary and a charlatan, praised and applauded by some critics but excoriated by others” (315). Giving equal weight to questions of social class as to gender, she further articulates that the Abbott troupe's “primary identity was as a purveyor of translated continental opera that was valuable as cultural capital to audience members interested in buttressing their middle-class status” (366). Preston's systematic examination of critical reviews of Abbott provides much-needed context on the larger musicological problem of the often unvoiced personal agendas of individual critics. For example, “the characterization of Abbott's performance as ‘crude and unscholarly’ (Musikus, Dwight's Journal of Music) illustrates some critics’ self-appointed role as educators of public taste” (338; 338n61). This larger question of the unearned power and privilege critics held in the development of a US musical culture is one that warrants further exploration, but Preston vociferously calls out and addresses the problem, especially in the section “War With The Critics” (389–407), thus beginning the necessary work within our discipline of a more critical consideration of the words of these (mostly) white male writers.
Preston peppers her narrative with a piquant variety of illustrations, visual aids, and quotations, all of which bring the stories of these women and their operatic ventures to vibrant life. Her inerrant eye for vivid quotations from the newspaper reviews of the time connects delightfully with numerous illustrations from a remarkable variety of resources, including playbills, programs, scenery sketches, images of performance venues, and photographs and lithographs of many of the managers and performers discussed in the text. Tables including repertories for various companies over—in some cases—a decade or more help to contextualize the managerial choices over a longer span of time. In addition, Preston frequently suggests areas ripe for future research that have been uncovered by her work, paving the way for younger scholars whose interest in US nineteenth-century music might be piqued by the colorful interwoven stories she's told here. For example: “Thorough and much-needed scholarly studies of the Seguin family and of Arthur Tams would shed a great deal of light on American musical culture of the 19th century” (103n74). Extensive and meticulously documented footnotes appear on the pages of the text rather than being relegated to endnotes. This editorial choice facilitates the usefulness of the book as a reference source for any scholar of American music writ large or, indeed, any opera scholar focused on the nineteenth century. Even scholars researching European opera composers or performance life should read and own this book; the dissemination of European and foreign-language operas in America is a crucial component of the performance life of those works and should not be discounted.
Furthermore, eight appendices included on a companion website include itineraries for the opera companies under discussion as well as a file on the various music critics “whose voices are heard throughout the book” (xv). Although there are gaps in the knowledge, which Preston marks with question marks, the material that exists has been shaped in a way that traces the companies’ journeys in a clear path, giving a new framework to our knowledge about the paths, speed, etc. at which these companies were able to move around the country. In her notes on the “Music Critics File,” for example, she states, “Since much of this information is, at best, elusive, I compiled the chart and make it available to other scholars as a way to begin to build a cache of information about these individuals. I welcome corrections and, in particular, additions to this document” (https://global.oup.com/us/companion.websites/9780199371655/resources/app8/).
Although Preston unequivocally states that “this book is not intended as a comprehensive history of opera performance in America during the second half of the nineteenth century” (6), she very closely reaches that goal anyway. She also asks (and attempts to answer) crucial questions of the discipline of musicology, including “how could [this] performance culture … simply disappear from our knowledge of American social and cultural history? And how can we, as scholars, avoid making the same mistakes in the future?” (13). The overarching and more systemic issues Preston considers in her epilogue include the unquestioned assumption of “musical progress” in American music history as well as “the tendency of musicology as a discipline to privilege instrumental over vocal music, and—more pertinent for this discussion—composers and composition over performers and performance history” (563). In sum, this book is a welcome addition to the current scholarship on nineteenth-century US music, but more broadly an important work in the areas of gender, class, music criticism, opera studies, and performance studies. Musicology is a richer field for its existence.
