ABSTRACT
Chapter 1, “Introduction” presents the book’s major claim that the early twentieth-century concern over the development of an American musical identity motived much of the initial negative criticism about the opera, while cosmopolitan nationalism drove much of the positive criticism. Both the opera’s modernism and its Americanism received mixed reviews based on complex reasons that reached beyond the opera’s score. It argues that the systematic analysis and contextualization of a larger body of criticism reveals a range of nuanced responses to the opera and deepens the current understanding of it. It names the newspapers and magazines that the study analyzed: New York Age, New York American, New York Herald, New York Press, New York Post, New York Sun, New York Telegraph, New York Times, New York Tribune, New York World, The Independent, The Nation, Harpers, Current Literature, Musical America, and Musical Courier. It also identifies the most significant critics in the study, including Richard Aldrich, Marc A. Blumenberg, Reginald De Koven, Arthur Farwell, Henry T. Finck, John C. Freund, Lawrence Gilman, William J. Henderson, Henry Krehbiel, Charles Meltzer, Albert Mildenberg, Max Smith, Algernon St. John Brenon, and Lester A. Walton. The study is founded on theories of reception, nationalism, and cultural production by Hans Robert Jauss, Benedict Anderson, and Pierre Bourdieu, respectively.
