American opera 1900 to 1940.

Abstract

Opera was established in the colonies as early as 1765. To be sure, it was the light English ballad opera which found its way to the New World and which first was successful. Various traveling companies provided entertainment up to the time of the Revolution, when all theater entertainment was curtailed. Following the Revolution, the serious opera of Italy and France gradually became popular. From then through the influx of German romantic works in the nineteenth century, the operatic growth in the United States can be studied in each major city as a civic development.

American musicians became interested in writing an "American" opera soon after the Revolution, but since the majority of musicians went abroad for study and did so until the twentieth century, no works were produced which were free from obvious foreign elements until after 1930. [TRUNCATED]