Singers and managers: women and the operatic stage in late nineteenth-century America

ABSTRACT

Most scholars of American history are completely unaware that opera – in particular opera performed in English – was an extraordinarily successful style of popular entertainment in the United States during the nineteenth century. In this article, we will investigate both the activities of the most important and successful English-language companies of the time as well as the confident, ambitious, skilled, and determined women who managed them. In the process, readers will learn about an almost completely overlooked element of American popular culture of the second half of the century and gain new insight into changing gender roles in the United States during this period.

KEYWORDS:

• Opera
• women
• America
• history

In 1881 the town of Denver, Colorado numbered nearly 35,000 inhabitants – a 700% increase over its population in 1870 and a third of what it would be ten years later. Ambitious and proud citizens of the raw but burgeoning city, however, craved not only population increase and economic success but also the trappings of urbanity and culture. The latter was provided by the brand new Tabor Grand Opera House which, as one journalist put it, was “a monument to the culture, good taste, and refinement” of the far western city.¹ The Tabor, like countless theaters across the country (many of them called “opera houses”) would subsequently offer Denverites a wide assortment of entertainments, ranging from blackface minstrelsy, vaudeville, and comedy to melodrama, straight dramatic fare, concerts, and opera – a style of musical theater that ranged from operetta and opéra comique to the standard European fare performed mostly in either Italian or English that occupied a remarkably large place on the American stage during the second half of the century. English-language opera, in particular, was extraordinarily popular across the country and, by a twist of fate, many of its most successful troupes were directed by women.² Those forgotten professional singers and managers will be the focus of this article.

The artistic director of the Tabor, in fact, had managed to secure a plum entertainment for the theater’s opening night in December 1881: the Emma Abbott Grand English Opera Company. This troupe was headed by one of those professional singers and managers: Emma Abbott, who would become the most successful and popular English-speaking prima donna in 1880s America. And that choice by the Tabor proved astute, for by midafternoon of opening night, December 5th, tickets for every seat in the new opera house had been snapped up.

That evening, after the orchestra members had filed into the pit, the theater manager stepped before the curtain and announced that, prior to their main presentation, Abbott would perform the mad scene from Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, an adaptation of Walter Scott’s popular novel. The audience greeted this announcement with enthusiasm, for the prima donna was well known nationwide for her interpretation of that powerful scene. The orchestra played its ominous short introduction and the curtain rose to reveal the soprano entering the stage from the left wing, in what would have been Lammermoor Castle. In the story, she was coming from another part of the castle, where she had lost touch with reality and stabbed to death the man she had just been forced to marry. As a critic recounted the next day, while walking downstage, Abbott uttered “a hideously realistic laugh, that mockery of joyous freedom from care and careless happiness.” After “the moment of hysteria … passed,” he continued, it was followed “by a sweet and almost placid resignation, which … seems to permeate her whole being … giving grace and dignity to every motion.” But suddenly “she [was] roused from this seeming pensive reverie, and her whole being became animated … with [the] intensity of love and passion, [stirred] by the sound of a voice” – that of the man she really loved. Spiraling more deeply into insanity,

… a smile like an illuminating flash of lightning passed over her face as, soft and low [and] with great pathos and feeling, she repeated the words, ‘Oh, those dear accents once more, once more I hear.’ Slowly but surely from this point onward … did the prima donna rise to the exigencies of the piece, her phrasing not only being perfect, but her voice clear, true and ringing as a bell.

The audience members “hung on every note she uttered,” and sat frozen in their seats, transfixed. “There was little or no applause,” the critic remembered, for “the feeling was too intense for that.” The silence, he noted, was particularly noticeable “towards the close of the first scene [at the duet] between the flute and the singer. Then, indeed, were the full powers of Emma Abbott’s voice revealed.” The scene was so realistic “that it became almost painful in its effect upon those who, listening, could scarce but believe that what they were witnessing was not a reality.”

At the conclusion, the audience rewarded Abbott with enraptured applause. “Miss Abbott’s triumph,” the critic concluded, “was a perfect one. She had sang her way into the hearts of her audience.”³ For the next two weeks, in fact, Denverites crowded the theater for the company’s fourteen performances (twelve nights and two matinees) of eleven different operas, a bill of fare that was only slightly more ambitious than usual for an English grand opera company active during the 1880s.⁴ This was a remarkable record for a city of fewer than 40,000, and suggests local pride.

It also, however, indicates the general appeal of English-language opera to middle-class Americans, a demographic that we have long assumed had no interest in this style of musical theater.⁵ And the detailed description of this performance clearly illustrates why many Americans flocked to operas mounted by Abbott’s troupe and other companies that presented opera in a language they could understand. Furthermore, although Abbott, as mentioned, was the most successful star and artistic director of an English grand opera company during the 1880s, she was hardly the first woman to enthrall American audiences with performances of this style of opera, nor the first female artistic director/manager of an American opera troupe. In reality, she was the beneficiary of groundwork laid by a sisterhood of predecessors, starting in the mid-1860s: Caroline Richings (1827–1882), soprano and “directress” of the Richings English Opera Company; the Scottish soprano Euphrosyne Parepa-Rosa (1836–1874), artistic director and star of her eponymous troupe; Clara Louise Kellogg (1842–1916), whose English Grand Opera Company thrived during the mid-1870s, when all the “fashionable” Italian-language troupes failed in the aftermath of the Panic of 1873; and businesswoman (but not prima donna) Effie Hinkley Ober (1844–1927), manager of the Boston Ideals, the most successful English comic opera company during the 1880s.⁶ This coterie of five energetic, ambitious, and entrepreneurial women challenged the budding image of opera as elite and exclusive, recognized a strong interest in vernacular opera among middle-class Americans, seized that opportunity, and gradually created a huge audience base that made the 1880s into the “golden age” of English-language opera in the United States. The sophisticated and strategic decisions that these women routinely made challenge our understanding of the agency of some female musicians active in late Victorian-era America, for these women, who have been forgotten by historians and musicologists alike, functioned as power-brokers in an emerging culture industry. And their remarkable success should have major repercussions on our understanding of American culture, for it also challenges the common belief that by the second half of the century opera, in the well-known characterization of historian Lawrence Levine, had been “sacralized” – made exclusive, aristocratic, and divorced from popular culture.⁷

We start with the operatic situation in America in the 1850s, when Caroline Richings began to make her mark. During the antebellum period, there were hundreds of operatic companies (performing in French, Italian, English, and German) that traveled all over the United States, attracting large and heterogeneous audiences.⁸ Foreign-language troupes (known, for the most part, as “Italian” opera companies despite their continental repertory) mounted works performed in Italian; English-language companies performed much the same repertory, but in the vernacular. Both types crisscrossed the eastern United States on the ever-expanding railroads, performing in regular theaters, usually for a week (longer in large cities, sometimes one-night stands in small towns), and relying entirely on box-office receipts. Until the mid-1850s, opera performed in English dominated the market, but opera of all kinds was a normal component of the popular stage. It was not yet considered elitist or aristocratic; nor was it seen as edifying or uplifting. Rather, it was pure popular entertainment that regularly attracted an astonishingly varied socio-economic range of American theatergoers.

One example is Walt Whitman, who in 1847 had urged Americans to throw off the yoke of European cultural domination, including the Old World’s “tenors and buffos, her operatic troupes and her vocalists,” but by the early 1850s was completely enamored of Italian opera, which became one of his greatest sources of poetic inspiration. He once described the impact of a performance by the Italian contralto Marietta Alboni (1826–1894), writing that the upper tiers of the Broadway Theatre were “packed full of New York young men, mechanics, ‘roughs,’ etc., entirely oblivious of all except Alboni, from the time the great songstress came on the stage, till she left it again.”⁹ Nor were all of these socially heterogeneous audiences white. According to theater historian Joseph Roppolo, antebellum audiences at the St. Charles Theatre in New Orleans included not only the “fashionable and elite” but also “housewives, clerks, salesmen, shopkeepers, prostitutes, vagabonds” as well as “slaves, male and female, armed with passes from their masters so they could ignore the eight o’clock curfew cannon.”¹⁰ An 1870 anecdote about a performance of The Marriage of Figaro by the Parepa Opera Company in Washington, D. C., in fact, describes Blacks seated in “the colored gallery” of the segregated National Theater, and an 1871 illustration of the New Orleans French Opera House includes images of a “Creole Family,” wealthy auditors in the “Loges Grilles,” and those seated in “The Negro Gallery.” Another representative image is “A Creole Night at the French Opera House” (Figure 1).¹¹

Figure 1. “Sunday Amusements in New Orleans – A Creole Night at the French Opera House.” Harper’s Weekly, 21 July 1866, 452. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library Digital Collections. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47de-18d6-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99.

Nineteenth-century Americans loved the melodramatic tales, the spectacle of theatrical scenery and beautiful costumes, and the sung melodies. Many libretti, like Donizetti’s Lucia, were based on well-known novels or dramas, and most of the tunes were likewise familiar. Sheet music was widely disseminated in American society and functioned essentially as nineteenth-century downloads, and middle- and upper-class women, in particular, had reams of it bound into personal collections called binder’s volumes. Both women and men entertained themselves, friends, and family members by using this music for amateur performances, and the mixed repertory in the volumes included operatic potpourris and fantasias for the piano, guitar, parlor organ, and other instruments as well as operatic arias, translated or not.¹² Dance was one of the most popular social activities for all classes, and dance cards from the period are replete with medleys (quadrilles and lanciers) and other dances (quicksteps, polkas, waltzes) fashioned from popular operatic tunes. Such music was also arranged for ensembles such as theater orchestras (as entr’acte music) or bands (at bandshell concerts, for picnic gatherings or other entertainments, or as marches in parades). Operatic music, in short, was ubiquitous.

This, then, was the rich musical culture in which Caroline Richings came of age. She was a child of the stage, daughter of the actor and operatic singer Peter Richings (1798–1871), who also later managed theaters in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York. As a singing actress whose early training was on the dramatic stage, Caroline personified the continued strong relationship between the theater and vernacular opera.¹³ In addition, both father and daughter were closely acquainted with Edward (1809–1852) and Anne (1814–1888) Seguin, leaders of the most popular and successful antebellum English opera troupe. Peter occasionally sang with the company and Caroline probably studied voice with Anne; she also made her operatic debut with the Seguins in 1852.¹⁴

But the dominance of vernacular opera started to wane during the 1850s, as a distinction between Italian and English opera grew in the popular mind. Wealthy urbanites of the East Coast wanted to make foreign-language opera into an “exclusive” style of entertainment. And even though Italian companies continued to rely also on working- and professional-class theatergoers to survive economically, the image of Italian opera changed, in part because many American critics endorsed foreign-language opera as “fashionable.”¹⁵ Since the wealthy patronized the Italian companies, their impresarios could import some of the most skilled and expensive singers from Europe, and pass on the increased cost by raising ticket prices. Americans were fascinated with these celebrities’ foreign reputations and musical skills, and many were willing to pay the elevated cost for a chance to hear them. American women who aspired to the operatic stage, however, could not compete with the star-power of European celebrities; as a result, the impresarios of foreign-language companies (all of whom were men, in both Europe and America) would not hire them. English-language troupes continued to perform in the late 1840s and into the 1850s, but these companies were increasingly less compelling because they were smaller and not as well supported financially as the Italian troupes; their featured singers, furthermore, did not have the allure of the European prima donnas. As a result, by the end of the latter decade English opera was considered old-fashioned and passé by American critics and other taste-makers.

Despite these setbacks in the image of English opera, Caroline and Peter created an early version of the Richings English Opera Company in 1859, and continued to perform during the war years. But their company was one of a dwindling number of vernacular troupes that hung on during the late 1850s and early 1860s. And this trend continued after the war, even though after 1865 the country enjoyed a period of incredible prosperity and economic expansion that fostered an insatiable demand for entertainments of all kinds, including opera.¹⁶ Unfortunately for the English troupes, however, most of the operatic attention in the immediate post-war years was focused on the foreign-language companies. Some Italian opera impresarios had hired American singers during the war – because European divas had been reluctant to travel to a war-torn country – but as soon as hostilities ceased the floodgates reopened and the European operatic stars streamed back to the United States.¹⁷ Italian companies became ever-more top heavy with foreign celebrities and garnered all of the attention of social commentators and critics. As one such journalist observed in 1867, “English opera appears to be doomed in this country” because of “the swelling tide of public favor which awaits grand Italian opera.”¹⁸ The impresarios of Italian troupes focused on the wealthy (who did not mind the rising ticket prices needed for the expensive foreign celebrities), and increasingly ignored the non-elite portion of the theater-going public.

This dismissal of a major portion of what had been a socially and heterogeneous operatic audience, however, played into Richings’ hands. English-language opera had long been extraordinarily popular among regular theater-going Americans, and Richings believed that both the critics and the foreign-language impresarios were wrong: there was still a strong market for opera in English, especially among middle-class Americans. The soprano recognized a niche she could exploit, and furthermore decided to forego the services of an impresario. Her strong grounding in the American theatrical world had provided her with effective role models who inspired her nascent managerial ambitions, for during the 1850s, 1860s, and later, there were many female theater managers active in America. These included Catherine Sinclair (1818–1891) of San Francisco; Elizabeth Crocker (Mrs. David P.) Bowers (1830–1895) and Louisa Lane Drew (1820–1897), both of Philadelphia; New Yorkers Laura Keene (1820–1873) and Matilda Vining (Mrs. John) Wood (1831–1915); and Sarah Crocker Conway (1834–1875), who worked in Brooklyn.¹⁹ There were also many celebrated actresses, including Keene, Drew, Charlotte Cushman (1816–1876), and Anna Cora Mowatt (1819–1870), who were likewise self-reliant and active in the public sphere. The fact that women managed some of the most important vernacular opera companies can be explained (at least in part) by these strong role models from the theater.

So Caroline Richings struck out on her own, with the important assistance of her father, whose presence also helped to maintain her image of social respectability (in 1866, for example, one critic wrote that “as a daughter and a woman,” Richings was “as meritorious in private as in professional life.”)²⁰ She organized a troupe of which she was “directress,” recruited singers, signed contracts, chose repertory, and created her own translations and adaptations (Figure 2). She especially targeted the non-wealthy theatergoers who were being ignored by foreign-language impresarios. And she was right: her company toured widely from 1866 to 1869, performing both operas written in English, including Wallace’s Maritana and William Balfe’s Bohemian Girl, Rose of Castille, and Enchantress, as well as translated continental operas, such as Donizetti’s Daughter of the Regiment and Linda of Chamounix, Vincenzo Bellini’s La Sonnambula, Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata and Il Trovatore, Daniel Auber’s Fra Diavolo, Friedrich Flotow’s Martha, and others. Both the operas originally written in English and the continental works (much the same as performed by Italian companies) had been performed by English troupes for decades, so Richings’ repertory was both familiar and beloved.

Figure 2. Caroline Richings. Undated photograph, Mathew Brady Studio, date unknown. Modern albumen print from wet plate collodion negative. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

The troupe was moderate in size (around 25–30 performers in 1867–68), although specific numbers are almost impossible to determine for any of the opera companies active during this period, as most published information focused primarily on name singers (principals and strong secondaries).²¹ Furthermore, most troupes included only a small number of musicians who served as the core of both chorus and orchestra, which were made up mostly of performers associated with the host theater. The Richings company attracted large audiences (of wealthy and non-wealthy auditors alike) and critical acclaim. In fact, the same critics who had predicted the troupe’s failure now admitted that its “brilliant success” had “astonished and dumb-founded the most acute and sagacious of theatrical observers” who now hailed her efforts at reviving “a golden age of English Opera.”²²

Richings challenged both the current belief that Americans would patronize only Italian opera and the convention that managers were male. As an unmarried woman, she was not impeded by the laws of coverture. And as an actress (and the daughter of a theater manager) she used as her role models the many women theater managers who were both successful and socially acceptable. She was regularly described as a manager who was determined, “indefatigable,” tenacious, and “full of indomitable energy,” all characteristics that were admired by Americans.²³ But her managerial activities elicited little or no apparent pushback from “society,” for critics warmly referred to her as the “fair directress,” praised her “energy, tact, and perseverance,” and pointed out that “her pure face and chaste demeanor” showed that it was “not necessary to throw aside womanhood when going upon the stage (Figure 3 and Table 1).”²⁴ In retrospect, it is obvious that her success was a defining moment, for she jump-started a renaissance of English opera that flourished for the rest of the century; her actions were a model to singer/managers who followed in her footsteps. Unfortunately, however, she was unable to enjoy fully the benefits of her ground-breaking work, because one of those followers arrived on the scene almost immediately and succeeded in ways that she could not.

Figure 3. Playbill for the Richings Opera Company from a Boston engagement in December 1867. Notice description of Richings as “directress.” Paul Glase Scrapbook, Free Library of Philadelphia, Theatre Collection.

Table 1. Richings Opera Company Itinerary, 1866–1867 (first season).

Dates	Venue
17–28 September 1866	Philadelphia. Academy of Music
1–13 October	Pittsburgh. New Opera House
15–20 October	Unknown. Harrisburg, PA? Wheeling, WV?
23–26 October	Baltimore. Concordia Music Hall
29 October–3 November	Washington, D. C. National Theatre
05–24 November	Richmond, Virginia. New Theatre
26 November (one night)	Washington, D. C. Metzerott Music Hall
3–8 December	Cleveland. Academy of Music
10–22 December	Buffalo?
24–29 December	Syracuse, NY. Wieting Hall
31 December–5 January 1867	Rochester, NY. Opera House
7–12 January	Albany, New York?
14 January–2 February	New York City. Olympic Theatre
4 February–2 March	Philadelphia. Academy of Music
4–16 March	Baltimore. Concordia Theatre
18 March–27 April	New York. Olympic Theatre
29 April–11 May	Philadelphia. Academy of Music
13 May–1 June	Washington, D. C. National Theatre
03 June	Philadelphia. Academy of Music
Concert 11 June	Philadelphia Horticultural Society

The Scottish soprano Euphyrosyne Parepa (1836–1874, later Parepa-Rosa) had trained in London and performed at some of the major opera houses in Spain, England, Italy, and Portugal before traveling to the United States in 1865 for concert tours; she was one of the many European divas who flocked to America after the war. On one of her tours she regularly encountered the Richings Company, and Parepa likewise recognized an opportunity. The owners of Crosby’s Opera House in Chicago had also noticed both Richings’ success and Parepa’s popularity, so they decided to form a second English opera company. Parepa, whom English opera impresario Clarence Hess later described as “shrewd and methodical in her business transactions,” signed as the company’s prima donna. When she announced her intentions, she reassured Richings that there was a sufficient market for English opera in the United States to support two troupes.²⁵ Richings must have had her doubts, however, for this association gave the Scottish soprano an incredible advantage: the financial backing from Crosby’s allowed her to pay higher salaries and create a larger company, possibly more than twice the size of Richings’ troupe. Furthermore, Parepa was a native English speaker who also had strong family connections with the Seguins, the popular English opera stars from the 1840s and 1850s (she was a niece of Anne Seguin), so she already had a foot in the American English-opera world. At the same time, however, Parepa satisfied the fascination with foreign celebrities that many American operagoers shared. She was also trained as an operatic singer, unlike Richings (who was a singing actress) and the critics swooned over her voice, describing it as “the absolute perfection of an instrument … rich, smooth, flexible, and powerful, flute-like, true in tone and classically elegant”²⁶ (Figure 4).

Figure 4. Lithograph of Euphrosyne Parepa-Rosa on a sheet music imprint of the type that would show up in binder’s volumes. (New York: Major & Knapp Eng. Mfg & Lith. Co, 1869). Courtesy of the Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music. The Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University.

Because of the Seguin connection, Parepa already knew many of the best singers in Richings’ company, and lured them away with offers of higher wages. Richings attempted to counter the threat by doubling the size of her troupe, putting her into a precarious financial position.²⁷ But when the 1869–1870 season opened, critics eagerly anticipated the coming “battle of the English companies”; in fact, when the troupes both performed in the Northeast in the fall, it was unclear which one dominated. In the spring, Richings decided to circumvent the punishing head-to-head competition by taking her company to the South, but was crippled by the loss of her best singers and the increased cost of her larger company. In the end, Parepa’s advantages were insurmountable, and by the conclusion of the season Richings declared bankruptcy.

Parepa (now known as Parepa-Rosa) subsequently solidified the American market for English opera that Richings had cultivated. She was prima donna and artistic director of her troupe (her new husband Carl Rosa [1842–1889] served as conductor and business manager), which enjoyed extraordinary success from 1869 to 1872.²⁸ In the early years, it was probably comparable in size (50–60 performers) to mid-century English-opera troupes. By its final season (1871–1872), however, the company numbered more than 100 performers, which meant that it could compete with the larger Italian troupes active in America. Parepa, in fact, had deliberately taken aim at these competitors by performing in English much the same repertory that they mounted, such as Bellini’s Norma and La Sonnambula, Verdi’s La Traviata and Il Trovatore, Gounod’s Faust, Flotow’s Martha, and Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, in addition to some operas written in English. By doing so she attracted heterogeneous audiences similar to those from the antebellum period and became a direct threat to the Italian troupes. In early 1872, then, English-language opera was no longer old-fashioned or passé, but could compete on equal footing with the Italian troupes and was poised to retake the American operatic market. Parepa and her husband, however, took a break. They had amassed a fortune but were exhausted, and returned to London in summer 1872, promising to return for the 1874–75 season. Unfortunately, however, she died in childbirth in January 1874 (For the company's itinerary in 1871–72, see Table 2).

Table 2. Parepa-Rosa English Opera Company Itinerary, 1871–1872 (final season).

Dates	Venue
2–21 October 1871	New York. Academy of Music
23 October–4 November	Philadelphia. Academy of Music
6–11 November	Baltimore. Ford’s Grand Opera House
13–18 November	Washington. National Theatre
20–25 November	Pittsburgh. New Pittsburgh Opera House
27 November–13 December	Cincinnati. Pike’s Opera House
14 December	Columbus, Ohio
15–16 December	Toledo. Wheeler Opera House
18–20 (?) December	Detroit, Michigan
21–23 December	Cleveland, Ohio. Academy of Music
25–28 (?) December	Buffalo. Academy of Music
29 December	Rochester
1–2 (?) January 1872	Syracuse
3 January	Utica
4–5 January	Albany. Trimble Opera House
6 January	Springfield, MA
8–27 January	Boston. Boston Theatre
29–30 (?) January	Providence, RI. Opera House
1–2 February	Hartford
3–4 (?) February	New Haven
5–17 February	New York. Academy of Music
19 February–2 March	Philadelphia. Academy of Music
24 February	New Haven. matinee opera
4–9 March	Washington, D. C. National Theatre
11–16 March	Baltimore. Ford’s Grand Opera House
18 March	Unknown. Harrisburg?
19–20 March	Philadelphia. Academy of Music
21 March	Brooklyn. Brooklyn Academy of Music
22 March	Newark, NJ
23 March	Brooklyn. Brooklyn Academy of Music
28 March	Hartford. Roberts Opera House
1–27 April	New York. Academy of Music
29 April	Farewell in Brooklyn
30 April	Grand Farewell. NY Academy of Music

Parepa-Rosa’s sudden death appeared to halt the resurgence of English opera in its tracks. Fortuitously, however, another American soprano had emerged even before Parepa died, and was ready to fill the hole left by her death. Clara Louise Kellogg (1842–1916), a South Carolinian, had made her debut in 1863 in New York City with an Italian company, because of the absence of European divas. She subsequently performed abroad for several years, and was lauded by critics as “the world-renowned American Prima Donna”; like many female performers on the American stage, she traveled with her mother.²⁹ Kellogg returned to America in 1872, just as Parepa left, to join the Lucca-Kellogg Opera Company, an Italian troupe that featured herself and an Austrian soprano, Pauline Lucca (1841–1908), who was visiting the United States for the first time. Her experience in this company is both significant and illuminating. The troupe’s business agent strongly publicized Lucca but ignored Kellogg, and the American public, which previously had enthusiastically supported Kellogg, found Lucca exciting, new, and foreign, while Kellogg was both familiar and a native. One critic explained that Americans were attracted by Lucca’s “novelty and renown,” but also described the audiences’ treatment of Kellogg as “contemptuous and deplorable.”³⁰ Lucca’s nights sold out; Kellogg’s audiences were meager, and after the tour she was fired.³¹

The American soprano later wrote that she was “very hurt and angry” about this treatment. But the humiliating experience resulted, as one critic wrote, in her being “driven into the English opera.”³² Kellogg claimed that “the idea of giving opera in English has always interested me,” and her timing was perfect: neither Richings, who was bankrupt, nor Parepa, who was in London, was fielding a company for the 1873–1874 season, despite the fact that, according to one critic, “English opera has become a necessity to the American public, and they have paid liberally and cheerfully to hear it.”³³ Like many women musicians, Kellogg had fashioned a career as a performer, but she must have seen the stars aligning. Her painful experience with a biased manager during the previous year, the directorial success of Richings and Parepa, a demand for English opera, and the lack of viable competition presented a golden opportunity, and she seized it. She easily recruited many English-speaking singers, resolved to make all artistic decisions herself, and hired a business manager who reported to her.

The Kellogg English Opera Company opened in October 1873 to some serious foreign-language competition: two powerful Italian troupes packed with expensive European operatic luminaries that under normal circumstances would have buried Kellogg’s troupe.³⁴ But fate, in the form of the Panic of 1873, abruptly intervened. This international catastrophe was the worst economic crisis up to that point in American history. The stock market closed, banks failed, railroads went bankrupt, and unemployment spiked. The resulting Long Depression lasted well into the 1880s in some parts of the country, and many Americans blamed the disaster on wealthy urban Easterners (the owners of railroads, banks, and corporations) and on Europeans (the catastrophe had started in Austria); this created antipathy towards the Eastern establishment and helped to fuel xenophobia, especially in the middle and far west.³⁵

The debacle had an almost immediate impact on operatic companies, for the bottom fell out of the market for expensive entertainment; ticket prices for foreign-language opera had skyrocketed after the war. This style of opera was also both European in origin and clearly associated with despised wealthy urban Easterners. Furthermore, middle-class Americans had become increasingly disenchanted with foreign divas, who tended to be capricious, pretentious, and greedy; they demanded, and were paid, huge salaries to come to the United States.³⁶ Even in times of economic crisis, however, Americans still sought entertainment, and they turned, almost en masse, to less expensive alternatives, such as variety and vaudeville. But they also turned to operetta, opéra bouffe, and English opera for, despite the growing antipathy towards foreign-language opera, middle-, professional-, and lower-class Americans all over the country still enjoyed opera, as long as it was affordable and devoid of any trappings of elitism. Kellogg’s company fit the bill (Figures 5 and 6).

Figure 5. Portrait of Clara Louise Kellogg, created 1860–65, when she was in her early twenties. Mathew Brady Collection, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.

Figure 6. Playbill from the Kellogg English Opera Company, performing Balfe’s Bohemian Girl on 14 March 1874 at the Boston Theatre during the company’s first season (1873–74). Paul Glase Scrapbook, Theatre Collection, Free Library of Philadelphia.

The 1873–1874 season was a disaster for all foreign-language troupes, but Kellogg played to “immense houses” in front of “astonishingly large” audiences, which stimulated “the popular desire for opera.” This pattern continued for four years: Italian troupes failed, but Kellogg’s company did “a splendid business throughout the country,” consistently “making money wherever it goes.”³⁷ The troupe numbered some sixty performers and mounted a repertory similar to that of Richings and Parepa, but also included works that the soprano had sung in Italian, including Verdi’s Il Trovatore, La Traviata, and Rigoletto, Gounod’s Faust (Marguerite was a signature role), Mignon by Ambroise Thomas, and Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Star of the North and Huguenots, all translated and adapted by Kellogg.³⁸ Her recipe for success was simple: she was popular, had low ticket prices, sang in English, and, in a time of increased xenophobia, was not European. This lasted until 1877, when Kellogg retired from management and returned to Europe to sing again in Italian opera (For the company's 1875–76 itinerary, see Table 3).

Table 3. Kellogg English Opera Company Itinerary, 1875–76.

Date	venue
11–23 October 1875	New York, Booth's Theatre
25 October–6 November	Boston. Boston Theatre
8–9 November	Providence, RI. Providence Opera House
10–11 November	Hartford, CT
12–13 November	New Haven, CT?
15–20 November	Brooklyn. Academy of Music
22 November–4 December	Philadelphia. Academy of Music
6–11 December	Cincinnati, Ohio. Grand Opera House
13–18 December	St Louis. DeBar’s Opera House
21 December (Tues)	St. Louis Mercantile Hall. Messiah
22–25 December	Unknown. Toledo?
27 December–1 January 1876	Detroit. Grand Opera House
3–22 January	Chicago. Hooley’s Opera House
24–29 January	Washington, D. C. National Theatre
31 January–5 February	Baltimore. Ford’s Grand Opera House
7–8 February	Unknown
9 (Wednesday)–12 February	Richmond, VA. Richmond Theatre
14–19 February	Washington, D. C. National Theatre
21–26 February	Baltimore. Academy of Music
28 February–11 March	New York City. Academy of Music
13–14 March	Brooklyn. Academy of Music
15 March	Waterbury, CT
16 March	New Haven, CT. Music Hall
17 March	Unknown
18 March	Hartford, CT. Roberts Opera House
20 March–1 April	Boston. Boston Theatre
3–8 April	(Concerts in New York?)
10–15 April	Unknown
18 April–6 May	Philadelphia. Academy of Music
8–13 May	New York. Booth’s Theatre

By that time, Italian opera companies had finally started to make money in America again, in part because the nouveaux riches of New York clamored for foreign-language opera as an expensive, elite, and exclusive style of entertainment. They recruited Her Majesty’s Italian Opera Company (managed by James Mapleson) from London, which arrived in 1878; it would dominate the foreign-language opera market until the mid-1880s. By the time Mapleson’s company arrived, however, middle-class American opera-goers were already rejecting foreign-language opera as aristocratic and a tool for the ostentatious display of wealth. A perfect portrayal of this is a fictional account of upper-class behavior in 1870s New York in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, the opening chapter of which depicts the protagonists attending a performance of Faust at the Academy of Music.³⁹ This pronounced shift in taste represents a remarkable change from the heterogeneous audiences for both foreign- and vernacular-language opera companies in antebellum America, and suggests clearly that by the 1870s the two styles of opera had switched places. English-language opera, whose popularity had waned in the late 1850s and early 1860s, had reclaimed its antebellum-era dominance; foreign-language opera was now the niche market. This, of course, has not changed, and is consistent with the popular image of opera in America today.⁴⁰ Kellogg had solidified American support for vernacular opera in the 1870s. Her success, furthermore, had set the stage for English opera in the 1880s, the high-water mark in America for this style of opera.

In the late 1870s, through the 1880s, and into the 1890s, English opera performance in the United States expanded dramatically and, in fact, dominated the operatic market for the rest of the century: most foreign-language companies, now including German troupes, increasingly limited themselves to a restricted market of wealthy audiences.⁴¹ The scores of English companies that toured all over America during that period can be divided roughly into two camps: “grand” English opera troupes, which performed a combination of works written in the vernacular and translated continental operas (as sung by the foreign-language troupes), and comic or light opera companies, which mounted operetta, opéra bouffe, opéra comique, and sometimes the lighter works of the continental repertory, such as The Bohemian Girl or La Sonnambula.⁴² The 1880s can be considered the “golden decade” of English opera in America, and two very different companies dominated the market: the Emma Abbott Grand English Opera Company (1879–1891) was the principal “grand” opera troupe, and the Boston Ideal Opera Company (1879–1904; after 1886 the Bostonians) was the preeminent purveyor of comic opera. The two complemented each other, and both troupes were managed by women: Emma Abbott (1849–1891) as prima donna and artistic director of the former and Effie Hinkley Ober (1843–1927) as founder and manager of the latter. This should not suggest that English-opera companies were exclusively the domain of women managers or artistic directors, for there were scores of such companies active in the last quarter of the century, and many men from the theatrical world organized troupes to take advantage of this “new” lucrative market. It is remarkable, however, that two of the most successful troupes were managed by women. A brief examination of each will illustrate both the importance of vernacular opera in America and the pivotal role played by women in its presentation.

We have already met Abbott. As both a prima donna and manager, she most closely followed the model established by Richings, Parepa, and Kellogg, so it is useful to commence with her. She grew up in Peoria, Illinois, the daughter of working-class musicians from New England. She had an excellent voice and was hard-working, confident, and determined; her childhood dream was to be a prima donna. Around 1870 she went to New York City to study with a voice teacher (Kellogg had provided an introduction). She also found a job as a soloist for a prominent and wealthy Manhattan church; in 1872 its congregation raised money to send her to Europe to study Italian opera. She returned to New York in 1877 to find a nation still in the economic doldrums. Foreign-language troupes were still failing, although the anticipated arrival of Mapleson’s Her Majesty’s Italian Opera Company from London in late 1878, at the direct invitation of wealthy New York opera-lovers, was encouraging to the supporters of Italian opera. Louise Kellogg, perhaps anticipating that competition, had just disbanded her troupe and returned to Europe. But Abbott saw that many Americans still thirsted for opera in the vernacular sans elitist baggage, and there were few strong English grand opera companies to fill the void. Her way forward was clear. As she later explained, “I was educated to Italian opera and I love it dearly and hated to give it up. But English opera is what the people want.”⁴³ She sang in the Hess English Opera Company in 1878 and established her own ensemble a year later.

Abbott’s husband Eugene Wetherell was the business manager, but the prima donna, like her predecessors, made all the artistic decisions. Both were determined to cater to and increase the size of the middle-class audience for opera, so they portrayed it as non-elitist entertainment. The company toured widely, performed in regular theaters (many now called “opera houses”), and maintained normal curtain times so that performances ended early enough that audience members could get up for work the next morning. There was no expectation for audience members to wear special “opera cloaks” or evening attire, although Abbott publicized her beautiful gowns, which added to the spectacle of her performances. Most important, management maintained low ticket prices. As one company member explained in a letter, the troupe “draw[s] not the fashion but the populace, so to speak” because of “the popular prices” (emphasis in the original). This was confirmed by many critics; as one pointed out, Abbott gave the public “an opportunity to hear grand operas of the highest standard at popular prices”⁴⁴ (Figures 7a,b).

Figure 7. (a) Emma Abbott dressed in a tasteful brocaded dress, perhaps similar to her costume for Lucia di Lammermoor. Cabinet Card, Prints and Photograph Collection, Chicago History Museum, ICHi-50283. Photographer, Gilbert & Bacon.

Figure 7. (b) Tenor William Castle and Emma Abbott as Paul and Virginia in Victor Massé’s opera of the same name. From Sadie Martin. The Life and Professional Career of Emma Abbott (Minneapolis: L. Kimball Printing Co., 1891).

Abbott was clearly a product of her times. She took inspiration from both her female operatic predecessors and successful women theater managers. In addition, the soprano, like many other young women of the time, followed the example of numerous strong and assertive women who, in the post-war years, decided to work outside the domestic realm that many Americans still believed was women’s proper domain. There were scores of social activists, authors, and suffragists, including Mary Livermore (1820–1905), Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902), Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896), and Olive Logan (1839–1909), who traveled widely and appeared regularly as public speakers in the popular lyceum series.⁴⁵ The initiative, entrepreneurial pluck, and example of these individuals, coupled with their ideas about what women could and should do, must have resonated with a young Abbott, who was regularly described in the press as task-oriented, energetic, disciplined, and determined. And the soprano not only emulated these women but also decided to become a role model for American women younger than herself. She once asserted in an interview, in fact, that “I made up my mind years ago to show the young girls in America, by my example, that poverty, humble birth, a plain face and all the disadvantages of one’s surroundings were not insurmountable obstacles to a girl’s success in life.”⁴⁶

Abbott was also brilliant at marketing. She knew her audience well and consciously created a public persona that spoke to the middle and professional classes. She proudly kept her own American name, refusing to “Europeanize” it, as did many singers. She grew up in the American West but had strong roots in Yankee New England, and deliberately made her heritage a part of her publicity. She worked hard to counter the common, and generally accurate, stereotype that foreign prima donnas were aloof and patronizing, and capitalized on her own friendly and outgoing nature by granting interviews to journalists and cultivating an image as a girl-next-door. She came from comparative poverty but had raised herself up by her bootstraps, just like the boys in Horatio Alger’s popular novels, who achieve success through hard work and determination. In fact, she once declared (in the interview quoted above) that “there could be ‘self-made girls’ just as well as ‘self-made boys’.”⁴⁷ She was also proud of her strong monogamous marriage, which significantly helped cement her appeal among the many church-going Americans who still harbored doubts about the propriety of attending the theater.

Abbott clearly believed that her success was the result of her own industry – that one needed only resolve and effort to succeed. And although she was successful at surmounting the rampant gender-related prejudice of nineteenth-century America, she was apparently blind to (or at least never mentioned) other biases, such as race, that worked in her favor. She clearly benefitted immensely from help within both her field (for example, Louise Kellogg’s letters of introduction) and social realm, such as the wealthy congregants of the Manhattan church who paid for her study in Europe. Such obvious support, or even the opportunity to build networks within her chosen profession, was available to her as a white woman. In fact, the opera world in the United States, like the rest of the country, was segregated, and although there were numerous highly skilled Black prima donnas who had successful concert careers – even singing operatic arias in concerts – they were not permitted to enter the ranks of professional operatic singers and participate in staged performances.⁴⁸ Among the most prominent of these women were Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield (1819–1876); Marie Selika Williams (ca. 1849–1937); the Hyers sisters Anna (1855-ca 1930s) and Emma (1857–1899?) and Matilda Sissieretta Jones (1868–1933), known as the “Black Patti,” after the reigning European diva Adelina Patti. The exclusion of these women from the operatic world in which Abbott and her predecessors excelled had nothing to do with their resolve, fortitude, or discipline.⁴⁹ As noted above, Black theatergoers enjoyed opera and regularly attended performances, but the stage was off limits to Black performers.

The Abbott Company traveled from coast to coast from 1879 to 1891, performing in both large cities and small towns on the East Coast as well as in the Middle West, South, and Far West. The troupe had some twenty-five or thirty operas in its repertory, but generally performed the same continental works as Kellogg and the handful of Italian-opera companies still touring, in addition to the usual English-language operas and the occasional operetta. Abbott had a high, supple voice and loved the cascades of notes typical of the bel canto style, which thrilled her fans. One critic described her appeal succinctly: “Emma Abbott sings to the people to please them,” he wrote. She “sings to their hearts.”⁵⁰ In eleven years, the company of “the people’s prima donna” never experienced a losing season, and Abbott and Wetherell became wealthy.⁵¹ It all ended, however, in January 1891 when Abbott, who had just turned forty-one, contracted bronchitis. She ignored her doctors’ advice and performed anyway; two days later, she was dead of pneumonia. Her company, without its charismatic prima donna, disbanded (For itinerary information, see Figure 8 and Table 4).

Figure 8. Summary of the large cities regularly visited by the Emma Abbot Grand English Opera Company, 1879–1890. The company also visited hundreds of smaller towns. The company performed in the cities in ovals every year; cities in rectangles regularly but not annually, and the cities in squares only occasionally. This is a Rand McNally (1889) map from the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection.

Table 4. Emma Abbott Grand English Opera Company Itinerary, 1889–90 (penultimate season).

23–28 September 1889	Detroit. Opera House
30 September–2 October	Unknown. Lansing, MI?
3–5 October	Grand Rapids, Michigan. Powers’ Grand Opera House
7–12 October	Chicago. Grand Opera House
14–16 October	Indianapolis, Indiana. Grand Opera House
17–19 October	Evansville, Indiana. Grand Opera House
21–22 October	Unknown. St. Louis?
23–24? October	Springfield, Illinois. Chattterton’s Opera House.
25–26 October	Davenport, Iowa. Burtis Opera House
30 October–2 November	Omaha. Boyd’s Opera House
4–9 November	St. Louis. Olympic Theatre
11–16 November	Kansas City. Coates Opera House
18 November	Leavenworth, Kansas
19–23 November	Unknown
25–30 November	Nashville, Tennessee?
2–7; 9–14 December	Unknown
16–19 December	Dallas, Texas. Dallas Opera House
20–21 December	Unknown. Houston?
23–24 December	Unknown. Galveston?
25–26 December?	Austin. Opera House
27–28 December	Unknown
30 December–1 January 1890	Houston. Tremont Opera House
2–4 January	Unknown. Baton Rouge?
6–11 January	New Orleans. Grand Opera House
14–15 January	Mobile, AL. Mobile Theatre
17–18 January	Montgomery, AL. Opera House
20–25 January	Unknown. Atlanta?
27 January–1 February	Unknown. Savannah, GA?
3–6 February	Unknown. Charleston?
7–8 February	Augusta, GA. Grand Opera House
10–15 February	Richmond, VA. Richmond Theatre?
17–22 February	Baltimore. Harris’ Academy
24 February–1 March	Washington, D. C. New National Theatre
3–8 March	Brooklyn. Amphion Academy
10–15 March	Philadelphia. New Park Theatre
17–22 March	Pittsburgh, Bijou Theatre
24–29 March	Cincinnati. Grand Opera House
25 April	Worcester, MA. Mechanics Hall
26 April	Springfield MA. Gilmore’s Opera House
30 April	Lowell, MA. Opera House

Over the course of eleven and a half years, Emma Abbott created a huge and incredibly loyal audience of middle- and working-class American theater-goers by providing them with musical narrative in the form of operas with melodramatic stories and familiar music. The productions were mounted with scenery and beautiful costumes, and hence satisfied Americans’ thirst for spectacle. Most important, they were affordable and functioned not as expressions of elitism but as pure entertainment. She had somehow transformed a European art form into an all-American style of theater. And she had accomplished this as a woman who, like many others, was willing to challenge social expectations that were increasing outdated. Through her independence, self-reliance, desire to spread culture, and quest for self-sufficiency and financial independence, Abbott was the very personification of “real womanhood,” as formulated by historian Frances Cogan.⁵²

Abbott’s troupe is also an excellent counterpart to our final ensemble, the Boston Ideals or Bostonians, the most popular and successful comic opera troupe of the 1880s. The founder and manager of the Ideals, widely known as “Miss Ober,” however, was neither a prima donna nor an artistic director, and her approach to management was not as a performer, but rather as a businesswoman. This makes her activity, and success, particularly interesting.

Apphia (Effie) Ober (1843–1927) was from Sedgwick, Maine. By 1865 she had moved to Worcester, Massachusetts and five years later was living in Boston.⁵³ Undoubtedly eager to exploit the expanded opportunities for independent women that had emerged over the previous decade, she began her career around 1872 as a “corresponding secretary” in a Boston lecture bureau that arranged engagements for speakers and performers on the national lyceum circuit.⁵⁴ Ober, later described as “a young woman of … sanguine, pushing temperament and eager intellect and ambition” who was not content to “quietly pursue the monotonous path of duty [as a] corresponding secretary,” decided in 1875 to strike out on her own by creating what may have been the first stand-alone concert management firm in the country.⁵⁵ She called it the Roberts Agency and ran it very successfully for six or seven years, managing the careers of her clients, who were mostly singers (Figure 9).

Figure 9. Undated photograph of Effie Hinkley Ober, from the Blue Hill (Maine) Historical Society. Personal collection of the author.

In spring 1879, the director of the Boston Theatre commissioned her to organize some of her artists into an ensemble to finish the season with that year’s blockbuster, Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta H.M.S. Pinafore. The work had premiered in America (in Boston) the previous autumn and had taken the country by storm. The Theatre’s new production was a sensation, and the planned two-week run stretched into six; some estimated that nearly 100,000 attended the performances (Figure 10).⁵⁶ After the show closed, the singers convinced Ober to keep the ensemble together and take it on the road as an opera company. For the first two years she managed the troupe, called the Boston Ideals, from her office; after the 1880–1881 season she put her management agency on hold and left Boston to travel with them.⁵⁷

Figure 10. Program from the first performance of the troupe that would become the Boston Ideal Opera Company, in H. M. S. Pinafore, 14 April 1879, at the Boston Theatre. Playbills and Programs, U. S. Theaters, Boston. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

Ober’s management style contrasted markedly with that of foreign impresarios, who ruled with top-down authority. This created a widespread impression that such troupes were contentious and competitive, for the constant bickering among singers and between management and performers was frequently covered by journalists. Ober’s approach was much more democratic, collegial, and cooperative; she clearly wished to foster a sense of bonhomie among troupe members. And even though the Ideals included some of the best English-speaking singers in America, her collaborative approach clearly worked: letters from performers indicate that conflicts were mostly settled amicably and behind closed doors.⁵⁸ In addition, the singers obviously liked and respected Ober, so there was little turnover among company personnel, which was unusual among opera troupes. She also adroitly used this image of camaraderie as a marketing tool with overtones of nationalism, boasting in one interview, for example, that the Ideals “are all ladies and gentlemen, and they all are Americans”; she further explained that “our home people are not as cross-grained as the Italians and Germans, who have been taught to hate and wrangle with each other.”⁵⁹ One of the Ideals’ singers later also wrote that the company’s “spirit of comradeship,” made it into “a jolly big family.” Whether exaggerated or not, this image was appealing to Americans.⁶⁰

At first the Ideals performed mostly operettas, such as those by Gilbert and Sullivan (Pinafore, Pirates of Penzance, Iolanthe, The Sorcerer, etc.) and others (Figure 11). But since several of the principals in the troupe had long experience as opera singers, they encouraged Ober to branch out into some of the lighter works mounted by the grand opera companies, including The Bohemian Girl, The Daughter of the Regiment, Fra Diavolo, and even The Marriage of Figaro. Audiences apparently recognized, however, that the Ideals’ repertory was different from that of Abbott, for the two troupes were never serious competitors; rather, they provided Americans with the two dominant styles of English-language opera that had emerged by the late 1870s.

Figure 11. Playbill from a performance of Fatinitza by the Boston Ideal Opera Company at the Grand Opera House (Chicago) in December 1880. The bill promises “popular English operas rendered in purest Anglo-Saxon.” Grand Opera House Playbills, Special Collections, Chicago Public Library.

Table 5. Boston Ideals Opera Company Itinerary, 1883–84.

Date	Venue
3 October (Wed) 1883	Worcester. Mechanics Hall
9 October	Boston. Boston Music Hall
10–11 October	New Haven. Peck’s Grand Opera House
12 October	Holyoke, MA
15–20 October	Boston. Globe Theatre
22–23 October	Unknown. Worcester? Rochester?
24 October	Albany. Tweedle Hall
25–27 October	Unknown. New York State venues
29 October–3 November	Unknown. Buffalo?
5–10 November	Cleveland. Opera House
12 November–1 December	Chicago. Grand Opera House
3–8 December	St. Paul, Minnesota. Grand Opera House
10–15 December	Minneapolis, Minnesota. Grand Opera House
17–20 December	Omaha, Nebraska. Boyd’s Opera House
24 December–5 January 1884	Denver. Tabor Grand Opera House
7–12 January	Kansas City. Gillis Opera House
14–19 January	St. Louis. Grand Opera House
21–26 January	Unknown
28 January–2 February	Pittsburgh. Library Hall
4–16 February	Washington, D. C. Ford’s Opera House
18–23 February	Richmond. Richmond Theatre
25 February–1 March	Philadelphia. Chestnut Street Opera House
3–15 March	Boston. Globe Theatre
17 March	Danielsville, Meriden, Hartford?
18–19 March	New Haven. Peck’s Grand Opera House
20–21 March	Danielsville, Meriden, Hartford?
22 March	Springfield, MA. Gilmore’s Opera House
24–29 March	Unknown
31 March–2 April	St Paul. Grand Opera House
3–9 April	Unknown. Minneapolis?
10–12 April	St. Paul. Grand Opera House
14–16 April	Unknown
17–19 April	Milwaukee. Grand Opera House
21 April–3 May	Chicago. Grand Opera House
5–10 May	Cleveland. Opera House
12–17 May	Buffalo, Rochester, Utica?
19–24 May	Boston. Globe Theatre
26–31 May	Washington, D. C. National Theatre

Note: Some of the dates/venues on this chart are from letters from company members to Effie Ober (in the Harvard Theatre Collection) or from music periodicals. I have added question marks when I have been unable to verify this information through local newspapers.

The Ideals toured under Ober’s management for six years, and consistently gave “excellent performances” to immense audiences, sometimes turning away “hundreds … unable to gain admittance” to their shows (For their 1883–84 itinerary, see Table 5).⁶¹ At the end of the 1884–1885 season Ober, who was forty-two and had become quite wealthy, retired as a manager and married a rich Cleveland attorney. The overall camaraderie that she had fostered and maintained among company members, however, survived her retirement, as did the troupe’s reputation as the most important comic opera company in America. Core members re-formed the company as the “Bostonians” in 1886, with three of the principals, all male, as co-directors. It remained intact with many of the same performers until disbanding in 1904, by which time newer forms of musical theater had eclipsed operetta. Ober’s retirement in 1885 from the helm of the company she had created, however, left management of the most successful comic opera company in the hands of men. As a result, Abbott’s sudden death five years later marked the end of a thirty-year run of successful English-opera companies directed by women in America.

The women covered in this article succeeded because of their foresight, ability, determination, ambition, and hard work. They were products of their time, and, like many other women of the post-Civil War period, astutely assessed their situations, seized opportunities, made strategic decisions, and ably negotiated the complex layers of class and gender identity that emerged in a changing American society. Before embarking on managerial activities, most of the women discussed in this article were already essential performers in a genre that required female participants–unlike, for example, instrumental ensembles. Many American singers who came of age in the 1850s and 1860s had difficulty breaking into opera in the United States, for the market was increasingly dominated by Italian-opera troupes whose impresarios were reluctant to employ American singers who lacked the éclat and drawing power of European celebrity divas. But the need to hire expensive foreign singers was driven by the desires of a growing demographic of wealthy theater-goers who wished to make operagoing into an elite and exclusive activity. The most important impresarios of foreign-language companies courted this portion of the audience and dismissed as unimportant the rest of the American operagoing public, who, in any case, had become disaffected by foreign-language opera because of the high ticket prices and trappings of elitism.

This situation, however, presented a real opportunity for these ambitious and enterprising women. Caroline Richings realized in the mid-1860s that many Americans were not disaffected from all opera, and believed that they might be lured back into the theater by a company that mounted affordable opera devoid of aristocratic trappings. English opera fit this bill. Even more appealing to these women was the prospect of completely circumventing the power of Italian-opera impresarios by managing the troupes themselves. As a result, they became cultural power-brokers by creating a huge audience base not just for translated continental opera but also for various kinds of operetta, comic opera, and, eventually, a new style of musical theater that began to emerge in the 1890s, American musical comedy. By that time, however, the golden period for American prima donna/managers had mostly ended. The power on the American stage, especially after the establishment of the Theatrical Syndicate in 1895–1897, was still, for the most part, vested in men. After women like Abbott and Ober had taken a niche style and made it into a popular theatrical form, men resumed control.

Knowledge of the activities and successes of these women, however, creates new insight not only into gender roles in the United States of this period, but also into an almost completely overlooked component of American popular culture. This is important to historians, in the same way that familiarity with certain aspects of popular culture today sheds light on contemporary American thought and values. Finally, an investigation of women working in the performing arts – dancers, actors, musicians, opera singers, and opera managers – will add another valuable layer to our understanding of the complex and changing world of late nineteenth-century America and how women navigated it.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katherine K. Preston

Katherine K. Preston is David and Margaret Bottoms Professor of Music Emerita at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. A Past-President of the Society for American Music, she has published widely on various aspects of music and musical culture in nineteenth-century America.

Notes

1 United States Census Bureau (https://www.census.gov/dmd/www/resapport/states/colorado.pdf, accessed 15 October 2014); “Perfection! Tabor’s Great Triumph Opened Last Night,” Rocky Mountain News, 6 September 1881, 8. See also Preston, Opera for the People, chapter 5 and Stewart, “The Opera is Booming.”

2 In this article, “English opera,” “English-language opera,” and “vernacular opera” all refer to opera performed in English, including both translations and works originally written in the vernacular. The latter term is used with the standard meaning, “the native or indigenous language of a country or district” (Oxford English Dictionary, online). During most of the period covered in this article, “Italian” opera (which also included translations of works originally written in French, German, and English) and “English” opera were the two most common descriptors used for opera companies in the United States, although there were also (fewer) troupes that performed in French and German.

3 “The Performance Last Night,” Denver Tribune, 6 September 1881, [1], “Perfection! Tabor’s Great Triumph Opened Last Night,” Rocky Mountain News, 6 September 1881, 8; and unidentified account from the Denver Tribune, 4 September 1881, quoted in Young, Famous American Playhouses, 1716-1899, 272–81.

4 Works performed by the company in Denver included Maritana, Lucia di Lammermoor, Fra Diavolo, Il Trovatore, Les noces d’Olivette, The Bohemian Girl, Martha, Faust, The Chimes of Normandy, Cecilia’s Love (Abbott’s adaptation of La Traviata), Paul and Virginia, and portions of Romeo and Juliet in the “grand testimonial concert” on the final evening. Performances were Monday through Saturday evenings and two matinees. “Grand opera” was a term adopted by many English-language troupes that mounted primarily a repertory of operas translated from the standard European repertory as well as works originally written in English. This term was particularly popular in the 1880s and distinguished these companies from troupes that mounted comic operas and operettas. Names of the operas are as they were used by English-language troupes – some translated and others in the original language.

5 The term “middle class,” of course, is fraught with ambiguity. I use it in this article to refer to professionals and their families: lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs, teachers, businessmen and -women, ministers, politicians, white-collar managers, and other workers who enjoyed the luxury of discretionary time and money.

6 I cover in detail all five of these women in Opera for the People.

7 Levine, Highrow Lowbrow, 101–4. Earlier in the book, Levine (relying in part on my scholarship) had described antebellum opera as “simultaneously popular and elite” (86) (his emphasis). But Levine’s conclusions about the place of opera in late nineteenth-century America echoed what Americanist musicologists of the 1980s believed – that opera was exclusive, aristocratic, and unpopular. But at that point, no one had yet thoroughly researched the role of English-language opera, so this conclusion was wrong. I discuss some of the reasons for this lacuna in Americanist music historiography in the brief Epilogue to Opera for the People.

8 I have written extensively about this topic, most notably in Opera on the Road and Opera for the People. Other important monographs include those by Ahlquist, Democracy at the Opera; Martin, Verdi at the Golden Gate and Opera at the Bandstand; Wilson, “The Impact of French Opera in Nineteenth-Century New York”; Turner, “Opera in English”; Bentley, New Orleans and the Creation of Transatlantic Opera; and Stewart, “The Opera is Booming.”

9 Quoted in Faner, Walt Whitman & Opera, 39 and 59. Alboni first visited New York in late 1852; see Preston, Opera on the Road, 343n20.

10 Roppolo, “Audiences in New Orleans Theatre,” 126.

11 “Dis am de Cullud Gallery,” Folio, 11:3 (July 1870), 9; illustration titled “French Opera House, New Orleans,” Every Sunday, 15 July 1871, clipping in the Historic New Orleans Collection.

12 For information about the variety of music in binder’s volumes, see my introduction to Emily’s Songbook; Meyer-Frazier, Bound Music, Unbound Women; and Bailey’s article in this issue and her numerous other works on binder’s volumes.

13 The connection between English-language opera and the theatre contrasted with an emerging belief that foreign-language opera should be considered part of the musical world. This was a change from the antebellum period, when even foreign-language opera was regarded as a component of the theater. Because of Richings’ identification as a singing actress, she best fits into the theatrical milieu explored by Mullenneaux in Staging Family. Some circumstances faced by operatic performers differed from those of actresses, but all women on the nineteenth-century American stage confronted the reality that their very presence in the public arena contradicted entrenched American expectations about female domesticity.

14 For information on the Seguin Opera Company, see Preston, Opera on the Road, esp. Chapter 5.

15 For more on the increasing aura of Italian opera as elite and a concurrent erosion in the image of English opera in the 1840s and 1850s, see Preston, Opera on the Road, especially chapters 3 and 5.

16 The reception of foreign-language opera in post-war America is covered in Graziano, “An Opera for Every Taste,” 253–72.

17 Louise Kellogg benefitted from the dearth of foreign prima donnas during the war years.

18 “Musical Gossip,” Watson’s Art Journal, v:25 (11 October 1866), 398.

19 For more information about these individuals, see Curry, American Women Theatre Managers, 19; Leach, Bright Particular Star, 107–14; Davis, Actresses as Working Women; Dudden, Women in the American Theatre, 123–4; Morgan, “Of Stars and Standards”; and Cooney, “Women in American Theatre.” See also Mullenneaux, who discusses Keene, Drew, Mowatt, Cushman, and many other actresses.

20 “National Theatre,” Daily National Intelligencer, 29 October 1866 [1]. Mullenneaux (Chapter 6) discusses how family members who travelled with actresses helped with respectability.

21 Richings Company playbills from December 1867, for example, are more specific than usual but still name only fifteen singers, including the principals. Boston Theatre playbills, December 1867, Opera Scrapbook Vol. 4, pp. 491–6, Harvard Theatre Collection.

22 “English Opera – Olympic Theatre,” vi:13 (19 January 1867), 200 and vi:14 (26 January 1867), 216, both in Watson’s Art Journal.

23 Descriptions are from Castle, “Reminiscences of English Opera,” 36–40 (39) and Upton, Musical Memories, 141.

24 Richings is frequently referred to as a “fair directress” in reviews. The other quotes are from “Our Musical Correspondence – Boston,” Whitney’s Musical Guest, iv:8 (August 1867), 124 and “Dramatic and Musical,” Daily Cleveland Herald, 20 December 1866 [1].

25 Hess, “Early Opera in America,” 151; Crosby family oral history is cited by Cropsey, Crosby’s Opera House, 231.

26 “Amusements,” Chicago Tribune, 21 May 1867, [4].

27 One review mentioned that Richings’ company had “no less than forty-six first-class people.” “The English Opera,” Georgia Weekly Telegraph & Georgia Journal & Messenger, 15 March 1870, 4.

28 Parepa’s choice of Carl Rosa, who would become the troupe’s conductor (and, after her death, the manager of the Rosa Opera Company) dovetails with attempts by other women performers “to balance professional and personal lives” (Mulleneaux, 218; see her discussion of marriages in Chapter 7).

29 “City and Vicinity,” Lowell [MA] Daily Citizen and News, 20 May 1869, [2]. For information on Kellogg’s mother as chaperone, see her Memoirs. Kellogg married her manager Karl Strakosch in 1887.

30 “Dramatic, Musical, &c,” [Philadelphia] North American and United States Gazette, 18 December 1872, 2.

31 Information about the Lucca-Kellogg tour is from Kellogg, Memoirs, 228–53.

32 Kellogg, 249; “Close of the Italian (in English) Opera,” Watson’s Art Journal, xxii:17 (20 February 1875), 199.

33 Kellogg, 254; “The Kellogg Opera Troupe,” Watson’s Art Journal, xix:20 (13 September 1873), 236.

34 Precise information about the size of Italian-language companies active in America during this time is almost impossible to find.

35 This nativism and xenophobia had an impact on Americans’ eventual abandonment of foreign-language opera, especially after the Panic, which quickly exacerbated the situation. I discuss this complex intermingling of social currents in some detail in Opera for the People, especially in Chapter 3, “Foreign-Language Opera is Exclusive; Vernacular is ‘For the People.’”

36 See, for example, “The Operatic Despotism,” Spirit of the Times, 15 November 1873, 324, which was reprinted all over the country.

37 “Amusements,” Cincinnati Daily Gazette, 19 October and 5 November 1873, 5 and 6; “The English Opera,” Chicago Sunday Times, 23 November 1873, 8; “Miss Kellogg in English Opera,” Watson’s Art Journal, xxii:13 (23 January 1875), 150; [no title], Song Journal, v:2 (February 1875), 42.

38 For the size of Kellogg’s company, see “An Exciting Ride,” Whitney’s Musical Guest and Literary Journal, vii:3 (March 1874), 94.

39 Wharton, Age of Innocence.

40 This modern view of opera, which is shared by most scholars, is predicated on the unstated assumption that English-language opera disappeared from the American stage at mid-century, which is clearly incorrect.

41 There is almost no mention of English-opera activity in surveys of American music history, most of which focus almost exclusively on American composers as opposed to performance history. If opera in the post-bellum period is mentioned at all, it is foreign-language opera. By the 1880s, foreign-language opera companies were almost completely dependent on the wealthy. But not all attendees of foreign-language companies (especially when they toured) were from that demographic. There is evidence, for example, that Leopold Damrosch’s German-language opera company (at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1884) also attracted some of the many German immigrants then living in New York. Critic Frederick Schwab, for example, noted that “Society” cared only for “Italian voices in Italian song” but that German opera pleased “the genuine lover of music,” presumably including operagoing residents of Kleindeutschland, the large German immigrant neighborhood on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. (“Opera at the Metropolitan,” New York Times, 17 August 1884, 6.) It is impossible to know, however, what portion of the audience for foreign-language opera was comprised of either Italian or German immigrants.

42 The term “grand opera” in this sense had nothing to do with the “grand opera” of Giacomo Meyerbeer, although both the foreign- and English-language troupes performed many of his works.

43 Susie Sweet, “Correspondence of the Citizen,” Lowell Daily Citizen, 31 October 1879.

44 ALS, Tom Karl to Effie Ober [1879?] from Philadelphia, Harvard Theatre Collection; “English Opera,” Rocky Mountain News (Denver), 18 March 1884, 5.

45 Performers and speakers are mentioned in advertisements in contemporary newspapers. Biographical information on any of these women is readily available in standard sources such as American National Biography.

46 “Emma Abbott’s Motto,” Washington Post, 20 April 1884, 4.

47 Throughout her book, Mullenneaux describes behavior of this nature (publicizing modest origins and working to create a “just-like-you” image) as among the techniques used by actresses to “normalize” their professional lives.

48 This was also the case for Black actors. As Mulleneaux writes, “Legitimate theaters barred black actors almost completely.” See 151–8; quote from 153.

49 There is solid historiography on these and other Black singers. See, in particular, Graziano, “The Early Career of the ‘Black Patti’”; and Southern, “The Hyers Sisters Combination.” I deal with these singers and provide additional bibliography in “‘A Rarefied Art?”. There were also amateur Black opera companies, for example in Washington, D.C. and in Denver. See Warfield, “John Esputa, John Philip Sousa, and the Boundaries of a Musical Career,” 27–46 and Stewart, “The Opera is Booming,” Chapter 5. See also André, Black Opera: History.

50 “Emma Abbott. The New Era of Abbott English Opera Coming,” Cincinnati Commercial, 21 September 1890, 12.

51 There was much conflicting information in the press about the size of Abbott’s estate, which was generally reported to have been roughly $500,000. This, in 2021 terms, is roughly $15.5 million. See “Emma Abbott’s Will,” American Art Journal, 17 January 1891, 210. Wetherell was an astute businessman and over the years regularly purchased real estate, which contributed to their wealth. For currency equivalencies, see Measuring Worth (http://www.measuringworth.com, accessed 15 September 2022).

52 Cogan, All-American Girl, Introduction (3–26), 66, 88.

53 Schamp Family Tree, http://www.ancestry.com.

54 Ober, The Boston Directory, 1876–77. She worked for the Williams Lecture Agency, a branch of the New York American Literary Bureau.

55 “Miss E. H. Ober,” [Morning Chronicle?], 1885. Uncited and undated article, Clipping File, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. For an in-depth examination of the context for Ober’s activities as a businesswoman, see the sections “Women in Management” (251–4) and “American Businesswoman in the Postwar Period” (254–9) as well as the preceding pp. 243–51 of my Opera for the People. See also Cogan and Kwolek-Follard, Incorporating Women.

56 “Dramatic and Musical,” 16 May 1879, [1], Boston Evening Journal.

57 The company’s name originated from its goal to perform an “ideal” version of Pinafore – as close as possible to the original. There was not yet an international copyright agreement between the United States and the UK, so the score was fair game and many American productions made significant changes. Henry Clay Barnabee, one of the Ideals’ singers, had seen a performance of the original show in London and had taken production notes.

58 No communications from Ober are known to be extant. But there are ca. 350 letters from principals of the company to her in the Autograph Letters File, Harvard Theatre Collection, catalogued individually under the name of each singer.

59 “Miss E. H. Ober” clipping.

60 Barnabee, Reminiscences, 314. Ober’s construction of an artificial “family” could also work in the press to counteract performers’ lack of fidelity to what Mullenneaux (86) calls “the middle-class domestic ideology” about family life in nineteenth-century America.

61 “Gossip of the World,” and “World of Music: Chicago,” both from Brainard’s Musical World, xxii:1 (January 1885), 7, 32.