ABSTRACT
For most of the present century, symphony and opera have been viewed as cornerstones of America’s elite cultural establishment. The two genres achieved this status via widely divergent paths with roots extending well before the Civil War; neither had held so exalted a position even at the end of Reconstruction. Each was differently affected by the economic, social and political currents of the Progressive Era, and each played a role in contemporary contests involving ethnicity, class, and gender. Each took a place in America’s newly forming self-image after the turn of the century, emerging as a newly adopted emblem of an aspiring, characteristically “American” upper class. Both became parts of a new tradition, invented in the Progressive Era and accepted for several generations thereafter. This is a pair of stories about the institutionalization of two musical genres derived from nineteenth-century Western European cultural practice in the service of an American-born, white, capitalist, Protestant, English-speaking, male-dominated society, as well as for the aesthetic satisfaction of its participants.
