“America, Genre, and Opera, c.1893” (Dr Charlotte Bentley, Newcastle University)

Opera’s history is a history of mobility: this much has become increasingly clear from the transnational turn that opera studies has taken over the last decade. But that focus on mobility, circulation and transnationalism has revealed opera to be a surprisingly slippery subject for study. The transformation of works on the move, performers’ portfolio (or, in many cases, patchwork) careers, and the circulation of opera as an idea all preclude the drawing of a neat boundary around an operatic object.

My talk emerges from an interest in opera’s ‘blurred edges’ and what they can tell us about the circulation of cultural meanings ascribed to opera in the United States in the late nineteenth century. In particular, I’m going to probe one example of a work we might call ‘para-operatic’: Imre Kiralfy’s America, which premiered in Chicago during the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Described by Kiralfy himself as ‘operatic in form’, and hailed in similar terms in its press reception, the work was by no means straightforwardly an opera. In fact, it had grown out of a set piece written for the Barnum and Bailey Circus the previous year and brought together elements from a variety of different theatrical lineages.

What I want to ask, then, is what ‘opera’ came to mean in the context of this genre-defying spectacle, presented to the mass domestic and international audiences visiting the Columbian Exposition and, later, to New York’s opera-going elites. What can Kiralfy’s insistence upon the operatic form and status of the work tell us, first, about the position of opera in the cultural life of the United States in the 1890s and, second, about the entanglement of processes of national identity formation and international cultural diplomacy in the years around 1893?

Charlotte Bentley has been a Lecturer in Music at Newcastle University since 2021, having previously held a Research Fellowship at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Her recent research focuses on musical transnationalism, with a particular interest in the development of transatlantic and intra-American operatic networks in the nineteenth century. Her monograph, New Orleans and the Creation of Transatlantic Opera, 1819-1859, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2022 and won the American Musicological Society’s H. Robert Cohen / RIPM Award in 2023.