American dreams: Opera and immigrants in nineteenth-century Chicago

Opera in the nineteenth century, through its associations with both European refinement and everyday musical practices in the United States, was a powerful force in emerging conceptions of American music and racial and ethnic identification. Writers distinguished between German opera, Italian grand opera, and French opera bouffe, but always cast "American opera" as a future ideal, yet to come. Works written in the United States were denied as American because of their foreign musical influences or the composers' immigrant heritage. The foreign national designations, most often Italian, German, French, and English, were tied up in complex ways with race and language, so that the labels variously referred to operas from those countries, in those languages, or exhibiting the inborn musical characteristics of those races.;Opera was typically cast in a larger discourse on national music which held that a truly legitimate music of a people must always be racially pure. Nineteenth-century notions of folk music rising up from the soil (that is, from the vernacularity of the homeland) were racially coded statements on national cohesion, and conceptions of an American school of classical music were built on these same racial-national ideas. Writers worried that the heterogeneous population of the United States could not produce folk music, and subsequently, no school of classical music (of which opera was a pinnacle) would be possible.;The city of Chicago in the years 1870 to 1900, with its diverse population and rising musical influence, played a critical role in these debates and performances of a hoped-for national music. Elites organized and attended operas to assert Chicago as a refined American city, even while naming those same operas foreign. Immigrants, some of whom were members of this elite, or were audience members or performers, were invested in these discussions of national musical characteristics that were so important in constituting relationships between different immigrant and socioeconomic groups of people. The symbolic hierarchies of opera performances and the people associated with them sanctioned a system in which poor immigrants suffered from metaphorical and physical conflict and violence.