| This study investigates the conception, design, and reception of major opera houses in the United States from the mid-nineteenth century to the Depression. Musicologists have thoroughly documented the American history of opera, celebrating it as a vigorous, often controversial enterprise in the country's social history. Yet the buildings in which opera's history has unfolded have largely escaped the scrutiny of architectural historians. This dissertation thus contributes to the history of both architecture and music, enriching our understanding of an urban institution that holds considerable cultural significance.; The project approaches opera houses along three thematic lines---their reinforcement or rejection of social privilege, their expression of civic ambition, and their mediation between private and public interests. It emphasizes the influence of patronage, audience strategy, class relationships, and urban growth patterns on site choice and design. As an architectural analysis, this study discerns both general and exceptional characteristics of American opera houses. As an interpretation of social history, it illuminates the building type's participation in larger cultural developments of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The dissertation examines six projects, interrelated thematically and linked by urban circumstances and operatic history. The competing Academies of Music in New York (1853--54) and Philadelphia (1855--57) introduce opera's accessibility and subscription patronage as social and architectural issues. The elite stockholders of the Metropolitan Opera House (1881--84) insisted that their private boxes dominate its design, neglecting general audience accommodations and civic image. The Chicago Auditorium (1886--90), opposed the Met in its egalitarian design and reformist politics, responding to an imminent threat of class war and reformulating the building type with a sophisticated, mixed-use program. This formula reappeared in Chicago's Civic Opera Building (1928--29), which united opera and big business in a stunning, forty-five-story skyscraper. San Francisco's more conventional War Memorial Opera House (1931--32), the only project in this study to receive municipal funds, placed the building type within an idealized but flawed urban vision. Thus the dissertation surveys the American opera house from its mid-nineteenth-century origins until the 1930s, when new entertainment technologies and the Depression transformed the operatic landscape. |
