Women in American Operas of the 1950s

Undoing Gendered Archetypes

Professor Monica A. Hershberger

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English

University of Rochester Press
07 March 2023

Opera; Individual composers & musicians, bands & groups; Gender studies: women

Series: Eastman Studies in Music

"The first feminist analysis of some of the most performed works in the American-opera canon, emphasizing the voices and perspectives of the sopranos who brought these operas to life. In the 1950s, composers and librettists in the United States were busy seeking to create an opera repertory that would be deeply responsive to American culture and American concerns. They did not break free, however, of the age-old paradigm so typically expressed in European opera: that is, of women as either saintly and pure or sexually corrupt, with no middle ground. As a result, in American opera of the 1950s, women risked becoming once again opera's inevitable victims.

Yet the sopranos who were tasked with portraying these paragons of virtue and their opposites did not always take them as their composers and librettists made them. Sometimes they rewrote, through their performances, the roles they had been assigned. Sometimes they used their lived experiences to invest greater authenticity in the roles.

With chapters on The Tender Land, Susannah, The Ballad of Baby Doe, and Lizzie Borden, this book analyzes some of the most performed yet understudied works in the American-opera canon. It acknowledges Catherine Clement's famous description of opera as ""the undoing of women,"" while at the same time illuminating how singers like Beverly Sills and Phyllis Curtin worked to resist such undoing, years before the official resurgence of the American feminist movement. In short, they ended up helping to dismantle powerful gendered stereotypes that had often reigned unquestioned in opera houses until then."

By: Professor Monica A. Hershberger
Imprint: University of Rochester Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9781648250613
ISBN 10: 1648250610
Series: Eastman Studies in Music
Pages: 228
Publication Date: 07 March 2023
Audience: Professional and scholarly , College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate , Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

"Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1 American Opera at Midcentury Chapter 2 A Conniving Gold Digger: Elizabeth ""Baby Doe"" Tabor Chapter 3 A ""Really Vicious Monster"": Lizzie Andrew Borden Chapter 4 A Chaste White Woman: Laurie Moss Chapter 5 A Dangerous Jezebel: Susannah Polk Epilogue ""The World So Wide"": Beyond the Virgin or the Whore in the Twenty-First Century Bibliography Index"

MONICA A. HERSHBERGER is Assistant Professor of Music at SUNY Geneseo.