“For Evening and Opera Occasions”: Jewish Production and Consumption of Goods and Services for the New York Opera Business, 1880-1940

• In Event: New Perspectives on Jews and the New York Entertainment Business

Abstract

Between 1880 and 1940, New York became home to both a burgeoning opera industry, and a thriving network of goods and services that served the management and audiences of local opera houses. Research in archives, the press, and in memoirs substantiates that this city-wide network could largely be attributed to a number of Jewish immigrants, who owned and operated local opera-adjacent businesses and services. As an imagined walk-through of 1912 New York demonstrates, Jews sold tickets at the Met’s box office, purchased clothes for the opera from Jewish-owned department stores like B. Altman and Co., manufactured opera glasses, borrowed libretto translations from libraries, offered opera records at music stores, fed opera-goers in restaurants and cafes, and captured recent performances in photographs and music criticism.
Opera scholars have increasingly begun to consider the relationships of opera houses with their surrounding theater districts (Rao 2017) and recognized the role that geography plays in producing performances (Aspden 2019). Rather than primarily attributing “the opera business” to its singers, impresarios, or opera companies as past scholars have done (Martin 2009, Johnson and Scott 2016, and Fryer 2014), my paper investigates the plethora of businesses run by Jews in these opera houses’ immediate geographic vicinities, as well as evidence of Jewish consumerism of their commodities and services. Even as Jews in the production, publicity, sale, and consumption of opera-adjacent goods and services undertook essential work, their activities are rarely considered as part of larger musical practice or as part of American Jewish history.
This paper adds consideration of the many ordinary Jewish individuals involved in the opera business to American opera history, entertainment history, and Jewish history. It also critically evaluates how Jews navigated the power dynamics of working in service industry positions of their own making for and around non-Jewish musical institutions. For Jewish New Yorkers, engaging in the business of opera was deeply tied not only to personal economic necessity, but also to aspirations of attaining social mobility and striking a balance between Jewish and secular life in urban America.

Author

• Samantha Cooper