Popular opera

In his Highbrow/Lowbrow , Lawrence Levine writes that “it is hard to exaggerate the ubiquity of operatic music in nineteenth-century America. In 1861 a band played music from Rigoletto to accompany the inauguration of President Lincoln. In the midst of the Civil War a soldier in the Twenty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment wrote home: ‘I don’t know what we should have done without our band. Every night about sun down [bandmaster Patrick S.] Gilmore gives us a splendid concert, playing selections from the operas and some very pretty marches, quicksteps, waltzes and the life.’ In the mining town of Virginia City, Nevada, a singer had to include in her repertory not only popular ballads and familiar old favorites but also ‘several operatic arias which might exhibit the flexibility and range of her voice’ . . . . A friend of the Boston music critic John Sulivan Dwight wrote him from Newport in the 1870s, ‘To-day I have heard ‘Casta Diva’ seven times; four times with the monkey [played on the hand organ], and three times without (i.e., sung in houses); on the whole I prefer it with the monkey.”