| "'Vox Populi': Popularization and Americanization of Opera in America, 1931-1966," explores strategies of popularization and growth of the opera audience in America during the 1930s and 1940s, followed in the post-war period by the development of American opera: an artistic maturation built upon audience expansion.;Chapters 1 and 2 focus primarily on the Metropolitan Opera and its efforts (along with the Metropolitan Opera Guild) to expand its audience and financial base, especially through the use of mass media, particularly radio. It was also a strategy designed to stabilize finances in a time of crisis. The Met used the dominant rhetoric of the day (the Great Depression and World War II) to advance popularization and identification through membership. A language of "democratization" of the opera audience arose in the 1930s, and, in the 1940s, that language was linked to America's international status as a keeper of Western Civilization in the midst of the world conflict.;As a result of this activity, the 1950s saw the true beginning of a permanent American operatic repertoire. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on a number of institutions in the post-war period (particularly in New York City) that entered into the debate over the rise of an American operatic repertoire, as well as the continuing issues of opera in English and increased accessibility of opera to the American public, including "crossover" activity in mediums such as film, radio and television. (Pre-war Hollywood had embraced opera singers, for example.).;Chapter 3 looks at the continued activities of the Met, including forays into television if not into American opera, as well as the brief moment in which opera flourished on Broadway. Chapter 4 concentrates on the more successful work of the Columbia University Opera Theater Workshop and the New York City Opera to promote American opera. Of particular interest are the Ford Foundation-sponsored seasons of American opera at City Opera in the late 1950s, and the Foundation's subsequent initiative to support further production of American opera.;A Prologue and Epilogue provide, respectively, historical background and a look at opera in America today. |
