New Orleans and the Creation of Transatlantic Opera, 1819–1859 by Charlotte Bentley (review)

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Reviewed by:

• New Orleans and the Creation of Transatlantic Opera, 1819–1859 by Charlotte Bentley
• Christopher Lynch

New Orleans and the Creation of Transatlantic Opera, 1819–1859. By Charlotte Bentley. Opera Lab: Explorations in History, Technology, and Performance. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Pp. [viii], 256. $55.00, ISBN 978-0-226-82308-9.)

The exponential growth that accompanied the transformation of New Orleans from a French outpost to a major U.S. center of commerce and culture in the nineteenth century was punctuated by disease outbreaks, social upheavals, war, economic crises, and challenges to Francophone hegemony. Focusing on this period of opportunity and precarity, Charlotte Bentley’s New Orleans and the Creation of Transatlantic Opera, 1819–1859 probes residents’ and visitors’ understandings of themselves and their constructions of the world by examining their encounters with European opera.

Chapter 1 analyzes the management of the Théâtre d’Orléans, uncovering a fascinating bilateral relationship between New Orleans and Paris. In some respects, the Théâtre d’Orléans resembled France’s provincial theaters, which similarly drew repertoire and performers from the French capital. Bentley delves into the managers’ journeys to Paris to consult with theatrical agents and operatic [End Page 426] trendsetters on production techniques and performer recruitment. But without the government subsidies enjoyed by French theaters, the Théâtre d’Orléans often ran at a loss, staying open because of its role in generating business for the adjoining ballroom, gambling house, and café. In chapter 2, Bentley places the New Orleans Francophone community’s allegiance to French culture in relief against its Anglophone counterpart. The French theater replicated Parisian opera productions more closely than did its primary competitor, the American Theatre, which favored substantial changes. As Francophone and Anglophone critics increasingly abandoned judging the execution of a performance in favor of assessing operas as works of art, Anglophone writers decentered France, and Francophone writers articulated Francocentric views.

In the third chapter, Bentley’s refreshing conception of the audience includes not only the racially diverse ticket-buyers but also the many enslaved and free people who “heard and caught glimpses of productions from spaces other than the auditorium, as they worked in the corridors, foyers, loges, and on the doors during performances and rehearsal periods” (p. 83). Bentley also contrasts the often small opera audience with the much larger opera “public,” which emerged from discussions of opera that exceeded the theater’s walls (p. 80). In 1843, for example, the local magazine La Lorgnette engaged a foreign correspondent to write original reports on the Parisian theater scene. “The purpose,” Bentley observes, “was to create a sense that the opera-focused press in New Orleans was an independent equal of Paris and did not need to rely on reprinting secondhand news” (p. 101). In such ways, public discussions of opera “helped weave the city’s intricate sociocultural fabric” (p. 102).

Bentley’s focus on material culture in chapters 4 and 5 illuminates “new social and cultural roles for opera both within and beyond the opera house” (p. 105). Sheet music arrangements of opera melodies enabled the performance of operatic music in the ballroom and home, contributing to the formation of a relationship between the theater and these spaces and creating a sense of “global intimacy” in which everyday experiences of consumers were linked to European practices and to exotic locales and characters (chap. 4). Souvenir sheet music and libretti contributed to canon formation in New Orleans in that they memorialized works that many were beginning to position as worthy of immortalization. In the final chapter, Bentley interrogates references to New Orleans opera in the writings of nonresidents. In the Frenchman Charles Jobey’s fiction, opera enables critiques of Creoles and French society. In contrast, New Englander Edward H. Durell described an evening at the New Orleans opera that opened him up to fashionable European notions of music as the highest of all the arts.

Throughout the book, Bentley draws on a tremendous array of primary sources. Unlike many books by musicologists, hers does not rely on excerpts from musical scores or technical musical jargon. Her focus is less on traditional concerns of musicology—“great” works, performance...