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“A Joyous Star-Spangled-Bannerism”: Emma Juch, Opera in English Translation, and the American Cultural Landscape in the Gilded Age

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 June 2014

KRISTEN M. TURNER
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Abstract

Soprano Emma Juch (1860–1939), famous in the 1880s and 1890s, combined singing in concerts and festivals with a short English-language operatic career. Because Juch exemplifies a typical prima donna of the late nineteenth century, her life provides a perspective on the American cultural landscape that a focus on star performers cannot capture. Like all female singers, she had to negotiate between competing stereotypes about divas and the nineteenth-century distrust of women who led public lives. In response to these pressures, she constructed an image of a vigorous American singer who nevertheless understood her expected role in society. During the Gilded Age, opera's place in American culture was changing. Foreign-language opera became increasingly associated with wealth, the highest performance quality, and sometimes even cultural and moral uplift, whereas English-language opera suggested popular entertainment for the middle class and mediocre performance standards. The American Opera Company and Juch's own Emma Juch English Grand Opera Company attempted to fight against these assumptions and center opera in English performed by native singers as an important component of a distinctly American musical tradition. She was unsuccessful, however, and Juch's career, which began with great promise, lost momentum after her opera troupe folded and she slid into obscurity.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 8 , Issue 2: Musical Women in Nineteenth-Century America , May 2014 , pp. 219 - 252
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Music 2014 

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References

References

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The William Steinway Diary, 1861–1896. National Museum of American History. http://americanhistory.si.edu/steinwaydiary/.Google Scholar
Clipping Files. Music Division. New York Public Library.Google Scholar
Clipping Files. Harvard Theatre Collection. Houghton Library. Harvard University.Google Scholar
David Blakely Papers. Manuscript and Archives Division. New York Public Library.Google Scholar
Marcella Sembrich Collection. Music Division. New York Public Library.Google Scholar
Atlanta ConstitutionGoogle Scholar
Boston Daily AdvertiserGoogle Scholar
Boston HeraldGoogle Scholar
Brooklyn Daily EagleGoogle Scholar
Chicago Daily TribuneGoogle Scholar
Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago, IL)Google Scholar
Los Angeles TimesGoogle Scholar
Milwaukee SentinelGoogle Scholar
New York HeraldGoogle Scholar
New York Herald TribuneGoogle Scholar
New York TimesGoogle Scholar
New York TribuneGoogle Scholar
News and Observer (Raleigh, NC)Google Scholar
The North American (Philadelphia, PA)Google Scholar
Philadelphia InquirerGoogle Scholar
The Post (Boston, MA)Google Scholar
The Sun (Baltimore, MD)Google Scholar
St. Louis Globe-DemocratGoogle Scholar
St. Paul Daily GlobeGoogle Scholar
Washington PostGoogle Scholar
The World (New York City)Google Scholar
Appleton's JournalGoogle Scholar
The Art AmateurGoogle Scholar
Atlantic MonthlyGoogle Scholar
Harper's BazaarGoogle Scholar
Harper's New Monthly MagazineGoogle Scholar
MusicGoogle Scholar
Musical RecordGoogle Scholar
The North American ReviewGoogle Scholar
The Youth's CompanionGoogle Scholar
Beckert, Sven. The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Beckert, Sven, and Rosenbaum, Julia B., eds. The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.Google Scholar
Bledstein, Burton J. and Johnston, Robert D., eds. The Middling Sorts: Explorations in the History of the American Middle Class. London: Routledge, 2001.Google Scholar
Bomberger, E. Douglas. “The German Musical Training of American Students, 1850–1900.” Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland at College Park, 1991.Google Scholar
Borish, Linda J. “The Robust Woman and the Muscular Christian: Catharine Beecher, Thomas Higginson, and Their Vision of American Society, Health and Physical Activities.” The International Journal of the History of Sport 4/2 (1987): 139–54.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cone, John Frederick. First Rival of the Metropolitan Opera. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.Google Scholar
Cowgill, Rachel and Poriss, Hilary, eds. The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century. London: Oxford University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Curry, Jane Kathleen. Nineteenth-Century American Women Theatre Managers. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dale, Alan. Familiar Chats with the Queens of the Stage. New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1890.Google Scholar
Gienow-Hecht, Jessica. American Diplomacy: Music and Emotion in Transatlantic Relations, 1850–1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grant, Mark N.Maestros of the Pen: A History of Classical Music Criticism in America. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Harris, Barbara J.Beyond Her Sphere: Women and the Professions in American History. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978.Google Scholar
Haughton, John Alan. “Emma Juch Today: Beloved American Prima Donna of the ’Eighties Looks at Opera Then and Now.” Musical America (24 March 1938): 9 and 46.Google Scholar
Hopper, De Wolf and Winans, Wesley. Reminiscences of De Wolf Hopper: Once a Clown, Always a Clown. Garden City, NJ: Garden City Publishing Company, 1927.Google Scholar
Horowitz, Joseph. Wagner Nights: An American History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McPherson, Jim. “The Savage Innocents: Part 1, King of the Castle: Henry W. Savage and the Castle Square Opera Company.” Opera Quarterly 18/4 (Autumn 2002): 503–33.Google Scholar
McPherson, Jim. “The Savage Innocents: Part 2: On the Road with Parsifal, Butterfly, the Widow, and the Girl.” Opera Quarterly 19/1 (Winter 2003): 28–63.Google Scholar
Patterson, Martha H.Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895–1915. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Preston, Katherine K. “‘Dear Miss Ober’: Music Management and the Interconnections of Musical Culture in the U.S., 1876–1883.” In European Music and Musicians in New York City, 1840–1900, ed. Graziano, John, 273–315. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Preston, Katherine K.. “Encouragement from an Unexpected Source: Louis Antoine Jullien, Mid-Century American Composers, and George Frederick Bristow's Jullien Symphony.” Nineteenth-Century Music Review 6/1 (2009): 65–88.Google Scholar
Preston, Katherine K.. “‘The American Jenny Lind’ or an ‘Unfinished and Inartistic’ Singer?: The Perplexing Career of Emma Abbott.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society, Indianapolis, IN, 8 November 2010.Google Scholar
Preston, Katherine K.. “A Rarefied Art? Opera and Operatic Music as Popular Entertainment in Late Nineteenth-Century Washington City.” In Music, American Made: Essays in Honor of John Graziano, ed. Koegel, John, 3–46. Sterling Heights, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 2011.Google Scholar
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Rubin, Emanuel. “Jeannette Meyer Thurber and the National Conservatory of Music.” American Music 8/3 (Autumn 1990): 294–325.Google Scholar
Rubin, Emanuel. “American Opera in the Gilded Age: America's First Professional Touring Opera Company.” In Opera and the Golden West, ed. DiGaetani, John L. and Sirefman, Josef P., 78–93. Rutherford/Madison/Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Rubin, Emanuel. “Jeannette Meyer Thurber (1850–1946): Music for a Democracy.” In Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons and Activists since 1860, ed. Locke, Ralph P. and Barr, Cyrilla, 134–63. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Rutherford, Susan. The Prima Donna and Opera, 1815–1930. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Schabas, Ezra. Theodore Thomas. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Shadle, Douglas. “Music of a More Perfect Union: Symphonic Constructions of American National Identity, 1840–1870.” Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2010.Google Scholar
Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. “Puberty to Menopause: The Cycle of Femininity in Nineteenth-Century America.” In Clio's Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women, ed. Hartman, Mary and Banner, Lois W., 24–31. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1974.Google Scholar
Willard, Frances Elizabeth and Livermore, Mary A., eds. “Emma Johanna Antonia Juch.” American Women: Fifteen Hundred Biographies with Over 1,400 Portraits, vol. 2. New York: Mast, Crowell & Kirkpatrick, 1897.Google Scholar
Measuring Worth.com. http://www.measuringworth.com.Google Scholar
National Jukebox. Library of Congress. http://www.loc.gov/jukebox/.Google Scholar
The William Steinway Diary, 1861–1896. National Museum of American History. http://americanhistory.si.edu/steinwaydiary/.Google Scholar