ABSTRACT
The Great American Opera, like the Great American Novel, is inimitable: a deeply problematical masterwork, epic and epochal, that both inspires and frustrates emulation. It is an agenda that conjoins specific narrative and aesthetic characteristics with questions of national character that have animated and bedeviled American high-cultural discourse from its earliest beginnings. This chapter examines that agenda in a pair of distinguished and problematical recent operas: Andre Previn's Streetcar Named Desire and John Adams's The Death of Klinghoffer. Previn's opera reproduces a top-drawer icon of American theater and film, one of those rare works that have become the source of images and phrases familiar to people who have never seen or read them. After Streetcar, men's under-shirts were never the same again. Such works are universalized by their reception, which assimilates their local and historical detail to privileged models and prototypes.
