New Orleans and the Creation of Transatlantic Opera, 1819–1859

264 Pages·2022·2.216 MB·English

by  Charlotte Bentley

New Orleans and the Creation of
Transatlantic Opera, 1819– 1859
Opera Lab: Explorations in History,
Technology, and Performance
A series edited by David J. Levin & Mary Ann Smart
ADVISORY BOARD
Carolyn Abbate
Gundula Kreuzer
Emanuele Senici
Benjamin Walton
Emily Wilbourne
ALSO PUBLISHED IN THE SERIES
Music in the Present Tense:
Rossini’s Italian Operas in Their Time
Emanuele Senici
Singing Sappho: Improvisation and Authority
in Nineteenth- Century Italian Opera
Melina Esse
Networking Operatic Italy
Francesca Vella
“Don Giovanni” Captured: Performance, Media, Myth
Richard Will
Charlotte Bentley
New Orleans
and the Creation of
Transatlantic
Opera
1819– 1859
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago & London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2022 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief
quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the
University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.
Published 2022
Printed in the United States of America
31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 82308- 9 (cloth)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 82309- 6 (e- book)
DOI: https:// doi .org /10 .7208 /chicago /9780226823096 .001 .0001
This book has been supported by the AMS 75 PAYS Fund of the American
Musicological Society, supported in part by the National Endowment for the
Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Bentley, Charlotte (Musicologist), author.
Title: New Orleans and the creation of transatlantic opera, 1819–1859 /
Charlotte Bentley.
Other titles: Opera lab.
Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2022. |
Series: Opera lab: explorations in history, technology, and performance |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022018125 | ISBN 9780226823089 (cloth) |
ISBN 9780226823096 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Opera—Louisiana—New Orleans—19th century. | Opera
and transnationalism—Louisiana—New Orleans. | Music—Louisiana—
New Orleans—French influences. | New Orleans (La.)—Civilization—
Foreign influences. | New Orleans (La.)—Civilization—19th century. |
BISAC: MUSIC / History & Criticism | HISTORY / United States / State
& Local / South (AL, AR, FL, GA, KY, LA, MS, NC, SC, TN, VA, WV)
Classification: LCC ML1711.8.N25 B48 2022 | DDC 782.1/40976335—dc23/
eng/20220427
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022018125
♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48- 1992
(Permanence of Paper).
Contents
List of Abbreviations vii
Introduction
1
One
“Un théâtre est une machine difficile à mouvoir”:
Developing a Transatlantic Cultural Institution
20
Two
Transatlantic Production and Transatlantic Reception:
Positioning New Orleans through Grand Opéra
54
Three
Audiences and Publics: Opera in the
Sociocultural Fabric of New Orleans
78
Four
Opera’s Material Culture and the
Creation of Global Intimacy
103
Five
Reimagining New Orleans in Operatic Travelogues
138
Epilogue
From the Transatlantic to the Global:
Beyond the Théâtre d’Orléans
166
Acknowledgments 171
Author’s Note 173
Appendices 175
Notes 185
Bibliography 231
Index 251
Abbreviations
HJA – Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans
HNOC – Williams Research Center, Historic New Orleans Collection,
New Orleans
LARC – Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University, New Orleans
LSM – Louisiana Historical Center, Louisiana State Museum, New O rleans
NONA – New Orleans Notarial Archives
NOPL – New Orleans Public Library
SCLSU – Special Collections, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge,
Louisiana

Introduction
This book is about nineteenth- century New Orleans and the people who
made it a vital part of an emerging operatic world. Musicians and nonmu-
sicians alike forged connections that led to the establishment of a transat-
lantic system of production and helped opera percolate into life beyond the
theater. By focusing on a variety of individuals, their extended webs of hu-
man contacts, and the materials that they moved along with them, in this
book I piece together what it took to bring opera to New Orleans and the
ways in which the city’s operatic life shaped contemporary perceptions of
global interconnection.
Opera had been a part of the cultural life of New Orleans since the late
eighteenth century, and also part of the city’s bountiful mythology. Legend
has it that the founding father of theater in the city was Louis Tabary, an
early refugee from the Haitian Revolution, who arrived in the autumn of
1791, along with his troupe of actors.1 Lacking a proper theater in which to
give their performances, this plucky band are said to have performed wher-
ever they could— in tents, in people’s homes, even out on the street— until
a theater was eventually built to house them. Attractive though this creation
myth is, a question mark remains over its veracity; what is certain, however,
is that Louis Alexandre Henry bought the deeds to a plot of land on St. Pe-
ter Street on June 4, 1791, and proceeded to build New Orleans’s first theater,
which opened late the following year.2
The date of the city’s first opera performance has been lost to history, but
operas had become fairly regular theatrical fare by 1796. In May that year, a
local landowner, the Baron de Pontalba, wrote to his wife (away on a trip
2 Introduction
to Paris) that he had attended a performance of André Grétry’s Sylvain, an
opera that the couple had previously seen together at the theater.3 From then
on, operas were a constant presence in New Orleans, although the theaters
at which they were performed were almost always in a precarious financial
and legal position. Nonetheless, by 1808, the city had two theaters, one on
St. Peter Street and another just three blocks away on St. Philip Street: quite
a feat for a town of only 15,000 people. These theaters, combined with innu-
merable balls, pleasure gardens, parades, and visiting circuses, established
New Orleans’s reputation as a city of entertainment.4
The beginnings of this book’s story, however, come a little later, when
John Davis (like Tabary a Saint- Domingue refugee) opened his new theater
in 1819. Located on Orleans Street in the middle of the French Quarter, only
a stone’s throw from the rear of St. Louis Cathedral, the new Francophone
Théâtre d’Orléans sat at the geographical as much as the cultural heart of
the city (see fig. I.1). This Théâtre d’Orléans was not the first venture of that
name in the city (its two previous incarnations under different owners, like
so many other buildings in nineteenth- century New Orleans, succumbed
to flames), but it proved to be the most ambitious and by far the most en-
during. The forty years between 1819 and 1859 were the Théâtre d’Orléans’s
“glory years,” during which the theater administration recruited a troupe an-
nually from Europe and poured huge sums of money into high- quality pro-
ductions of a wide variety of theatrical genres, from opéra- comique to grand
opéra, vaudeville to drame. It was the first, and for a long time the only, the-
ater in North America to have a permanent, resident opera troupe.5 So too
did it play an important role in introducing French opera to other American
cities, through the summer tours to New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and
Baltimore that John Davis organized for the troupe between 1827 and 1832,
and that his son Pierre continued in 1843 and 1845.6
The life of Davis’s theater— the activities of its management, perform-
ers, and backstage personnel, as well as its audiences, critics, and other
associates— underpins every chapter of this book and governs its chrono-
logical scope. It was not the only theater active in New Orleans in this pe-
riod, although it was by far the longest lasting and the only one to produce
opera regularly, and in various chapters I weave the activities of other the-
aters and social spaces in the city around its story. Particularly important are
the theatrical activities of James Caldwell, an English- born impresario and
actor, who went on to own theaters across the US South.7 Caldwell made
his mark on New Orleans’s theatrical life from his arrival in the city in 1820,
when he initially leased the Théâtre d’Orléans building on the French com-
pany’s “off nights.” Four years later, his company left the French theater to