International Opera in Nineteenth-century New York

2020 ◽  
pp. 244-269
Author(s):  
Karen Ahlquist
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
World War I ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Considerable Extent ◽  
World War ◽  
Metropolitan Opera ◽  
The City

This chapter charts how canonic repertories evolved in very different forms in New York City during the nineteenth century. The unstable succession of entrepreneurial touring troupes that visited the city adapted both repertory and individual pieces to the audience’s taste, from which there emerged a major theater, the Metropolitan Opera, offering a mix of German, Italian, and French works. The stable repertory in place there by 1910 resembles to a considerable extent that performed in the same theater today. Indeed, all of the twenty-five operas most often performed between 1883 and 2015 at the Metropolitan Opera were written before World War I. The repertory may seem haphazard in its diversity, but that very condition proved to be its strength in the long term. This chapter is paired with Benjamin Walton’s “Canons of real and imagined opera: Buenos Aires and Montevideo, 1810–1860.”

Black Song, Dance, and Theater in pre-World War I New York City

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
World War I ◽  
York City ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
Labor Union ◽  
Symphony Orchestra ◽  
Development Stage ◽  
World War ◽  
Performance Space

Between 1896 and 1915, Black professional entertainers transformed New York City’s most established culture industries—musical theater and popular song publishing—and helped create two new ones: social dancing and music recording. While Black culture workers’ full impact on popular entertainment and Black modernism would not be felt until after World War I, the Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age were decades in the making. Stage performers Williams and Walker and their musical director Will Marion Cook introduced full-scale Black musical theater to Broadway between 1902 and 1909; songwriters-turned-performers Cole and Johnson expanded the style and substance of ragtime songs along Tin Pan Alley; James Reese Europe created a labor union for Black musicians that got hundreds of players out of Black nightclubs into high-paying White elites’ homes, eventually bringing a 200-person all-Black symphony orchestra to Carnegie Hall for the first concert of its kind at the august performance space. James Europe’s Clef Club Inc. also caught the ears of Manhattan’s leading social dancers, the White Irene and Vernon Castle, in ways that helped disseminate Europe’s ragtime dance bands across America and, by 1913, became the first Black band to record phonographs, setting important precedents for the hit jazz and blues records of the postwar era. While James Europe would go on to win renown as the musical director of the Harlem Hell Fighters—the most-decorated infantry unit to fight in World War I—his prewar community of professional entertainers had already successfully entered into New York City’s burgeoning, and increasingly national, commercial culture markets. By studying some of the key figures in this story it becomes possible to get a fuller sense of the true cultural ferment that marked this era of Black musical development. Stage performers Williams and Walker and Cole and Johnson, behind-the-scenes songwriters Will Marion Cook and James Weldon Johnson, and musicians such as James Reese Europe’s artistic and entrepreneurial interventions made African Americans central players in creating the Manhattan musical marketplace and helped make New York City the capital of U.S. performance and entertainment.

“The Child Is Never Basically Bad”

2019 ◽  
pp. 13-38
Author(s):  
Carl Suddler
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
York City ◽  
Juvenile Justice System ◽  
Youth Crime ◽  
World War ◽  
Criminal Behaviors ◽  
Depression Era ◽  
The City

This chapter focuses on the juvenile justice system and its related efforts to address youth crime in New York City before World War II. From the 1930s to the onset of the war, there was a nationwide tension about how to address crime. In New York City, this debate had racial, political, and social implications that persisted beyond the period. On one side, there were those, such as New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who believed crime in the city was rampant and that an increased carceral sovereignty, including preventive policing, was critical to establish order. On the other side, there were those, such as Jane M. Bolin, who rejected such logic and aspired to advance a neo-Progressive rationale that emphasized the correction of social ills contributing to criminal behaviors—regardless of the numbers. This chapter provides a sketch of Harlem during the Depression era, with an emphasis on black youths and various crime-prevention effortsthey encountered.

A (Very Selective) Early History of Ballet in America

Ballet Class ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 3-24
Author(s):  
Melissa R. Klapper
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Young People ◽  
World War I ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early History ◽  
World War ◽  
Ballet Dancers ◽  
Metropolitan Opera ◽  
History Of

Ballet developed slowly in the United States and depended on European dancers and teachers at first, but by mid-nineteenth century a few American-trained ballet dancers were beginning to make their mark. The opening of the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School in 1909 and the tours of Anna Pavlova contributed greatly to popularizing ballet and inspiring young people to begin taking ballet class before World War I. Expansion continued from the 1920s through the 1940s with the founding of the School of American Ballet and the performances of the various Ballet Russe companies in every corner of the country. The Littlefield sisters and Christensen brothers helped make ballet American by establishing important homegrown ballet companies with primarily American dancers. The regional ballet movement fostered further growth. All these developments in professional ballet encouraged ever-increasing numbers of Americans not only to enjoy performances but also to take ballet class themselves.

Derailed: The Postwar End of New York City Subway Expansion

2019 ◽  
pp. 009614421989657
Author(s):  
Jonathan English
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Public Transportation ◽  
York City ◽  
Labor Cost ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Aging Infrastructure ◽  
Second World

New York City witnessed the construction of one of the largest subway systems in the world in the first four decades of the twentieth century. Expansion virtually ceased thereafter, and New York’s public transportation has since relied on a legacy of aging infrastructure. The explanation of this unexpected cessation is key to understanding the city’s current transit problems, and also offers valuable lessons for other cities experiencing infrastructure construction booms. Identifying the 1951 bond issue as a key turning point, this article argues that there are three convergent factors that brought about the end of subway expansion after the Second World War: political leadership distracted by disputes over administration and unable to plan for the long term; financial constraints imposed by construction and labor-cost inflation, the strained municipal budget, and declining ridership; and the New York transit authorities’ indifference to the growing demographic, political, and symbolic significance of the rapidly growing suburbs.

Broadway Nights: John Reed and the City

Prospects ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 273-294
Author(s):  
Christopher P. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War I ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
World War ◽  
Epic Poem ◽  
Big City ◽  
John Reed ◽  
First Time ◽  
The City ◽  
The Voice

Not so very long after John Butler Yeats prophesied that “fiddles” would be “tuning up” throughout American intellectual life in the years before World War I, the private musings of John Reed strike another, less hopeful set of notes. The lament emerges in an unpublished tale Reed wrote in 1913 entitled “Success,” about a poet named Alan Meredith, age twenty-two, who, like Reed, has just come from the country to New York to answer his vocation. “The whirling star of Literature revolves in the Big City,” Reed explains. “By force of gravitation the minor bards sooner or later fall within its orbit, and nine out of ten emit no sparks from that time forth.” Alan's project is an epic poem tentatively entitled New York, A Poem in Twelve Cantos-but he gets nowhere beyond his title. “You see,” Reed writes, “he was making the same mistake as you and I, when we heard the voice [of the city] for the first time and tried to translate it without knowing the language.” Reed elaborates:A poet writes about the things nearest to his heart-the things he does not actually know. As soon as he gains scientific knowledge of anything, the glamour is gone, and it is not mere stuff for the imagination. The bard of green fields and blossoms and running brooks is always a city man, and he who sings the Lobster Palaces and White Lights lives in Greenwich, Conn. Never do the stars seem so beautiful as to him who looks up between brownstone houses on a breathless night; all the magic of the city lies in the glow of lights on the sky seen thirty miles away.

Martha Dickinson Bianchi: War Poet

2007 ◽  
Vol 80 (2) ◽  
pp. 317-321
Author(s):  
Marcy L. Tanter
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
World War I ◽  
York City ◽  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
Red Cross ◽  
World War

The article recovers poet Martha Dickinson Bianchi, niece of Emily Dickinson, who served in the Amherst, Massachusetts, branch of the Red Cross and tended wounded soldiers in New York City at the end of World War I. Two previously unpublished poems reflect American despair in the aftermath of the war.

Reorienting Migrant Marketplaces in le due Americhe during the Interwar Years

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Zanoni
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War I ◽  
South America ◽  
Consumer Goods ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Export Market ◽  
World War ◽  
Economic Expansion ◽  
Immigration Restriction ◽  
Predominately Female

Chapters Five and Six focus on the interwar years, when a worldwide depression, intensifying restrictions against mobile people and products, and rising nationalisms changed the global geography of migrant marketplace connections. After World War I, U.S. economic expansion in South America and U.S. immigration restriction, which redirected Italians to Argentina, intensified North-South links between Italians in New York and Buenos Aires. Migrants in Buenos Aires expressed concern that the growing presence of U.S. capital and consumer goods threatened the Italian export market. After having targeted Italians as consumers in New York, U.S. food corporations like Armour and Company began targeting Italians in Buenos Aires as well. Meanwhile they capitalized on links between consumption and femininity made during the war to depict migrant marketplaces as predominately female.

Mercé y Luque, Antonia Rosa (Stage Name: La Argentina; b. 4 September 1888, Buenos Aires, Argentina; d. 18 July 1936, Bayonne, France)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ninotchka Bennahum
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War I ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Folk Dance ◽  
World War ◽  
Classical Dance ◽  
School Of Music ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
The Subject

Antonia Rosa Mercé y Luque, known by her stage name La Argentina, was the most celebrated Spanish dancer of the early 20th century. Greatly influenced by the modernist productions of the Ballets Russes who sought political refuge in neutral Spain during World War I, La Argentina fused the modernism of the Spanish School of Music to the Escuela Bolera, or Spanish Bolero School of classical dance, adding many rhythmic and choreographic stylizations from Romani flamenco and other complex regional styles of folk dance she had learned on ethnographic trips throughout Spain. This hybrid vision resulted in a polyrhythmic, African and Hispano-Arab-Sephardic fusion of musical and choreographic cultures whose artistic influence can still be felt along the Iberian Peninsula. With this rich and varied musical and choreographic vocabulary, and a full company of Romani, Spanish, and European dancers and musicians, La Argentina took Europe, the Americas and Asia by storm. Between her first tour to New York in 1915 and her final European performances in 1936, she introduced and cultivated global audiences by performing, touring, writing, publishing and giving afternoon lectures on the subject of the Spanish dance,

scholarly journals Immigration Politics

2011 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 501-503
Author(s):  
Jeffrey C. Isaac
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
World War I ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
Greek Orthodox ◽  
World War ◽  
The Us ◽  
Immigration Politics

“You are a Greek Jew? I thought all Greeks were Orthodox?” As a Jewish-American growing up in New York City, whose paternal grandparents were Jews who had emigrated from Greece in the 1920s, I was frequently asked this question by well-meaning—if confused—friends and acquaintances. Indeed, while “Greek Jew” has always been a central aspect of my multiply-hyphenated American identity, in fact my grandfather Morris Isaac, né Izaki, was from Salonika and, it turns out, he himself grew up as a Turkish Jew under the Ottoman Empire, only to discover after World War I that he was in fact (now) not a Turkish but a Greek Jew (which was not, in the parlance of his time, synonymous with being an authentic “Greek”). Greek (Orthodox) or Jewish? Greek or Turkish? Pogroms, wars, “ethnic cleansings,” and sometimes even genocides have been undertaken to resolve such questions, and indeed my ancestors experienced all of these things in the opening decades of the twentieth century. For my family, such traumas are part of the story of how my grandparents came to leave Greece and migrate to the US and become Americans and US citizens (alas, many of their relatives were not able to leave, and most ultimately perished at the hands of the Nazis).

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