3 - Birth pangs, growing pains and sibling rivalry: musical theatre in New York, 1900–1920

Summary

It has been a matter of regret with many music lovers that we have had so few really good comic operas during the past few years … the so-called comic opera stage has degenerated hopelessly of late.

Critics in every generation lament the dearth of good material on the Broad way musical stage, but these lines, published in Musical America in 1906, do not actually sound the death-knell of a genre. The first two decades of the twentieth century were a period of great foment during which producers, performers, librettists and composers grappled with the notion of a single genre that could combine the best of all worlds into a unified, coherent whole. The problem of varied and inconsistent terminology, implied in the phrase ‘so-called comic opera’, was a legacy from the nineteenth century that continued to plague critics in the early decades of the twentieth. Musically well-educated writers often adopted a highbrow stance and treated anything lighter than opera with disdain while other critics, reviewing the same work, might praise it as a cut above similar fare. Composers in the dawning century struggled to reconcile their inheritance with the evolution of a new and uniquely American art-form: what we now blithely call the Broadway Musical. Several things had to happen in order to establish the book show as the norm. Librettists had to create plots that chimed with the rhythms and concerns of contemporary experience; this eventually caused a shift from the politically tinged satires of Gilbert and Sullivan and Offenbach to the sentimental romances of Herbert and Romberg. Composers had to discard or integrate remnants of hand-me-down imported musical vocabularies into a language that embraced American vernacular idioms in song and dance.