The “Undesirable” in Box 14: Jewish Men and the Making of the Metropolitan Opera House, 1880-1940

Society for American Music Annual Meeting (online)

March 11-13, 2022

Abstract (Updated): In their meeting minutes of March 21, 1900, the board members of the Metropolitan Opera and Real Estate Company vowed to keep their opera boxes out of “the hands of undesirable persons.” Yet, in 1917 when the board awarded ownership of Opera Box 14 to financier Otto H. Kahn, they acted in direct opposition with the bylaws they had earlier codified. Though Kahn came to own eighty-four percent of the operating company’s stock by his retirement, he was a man of Jewish descent – a fact which relegated him to the category of an undesirable. Kahn was also not the only Jewish man to dedicate himself in an influential way to the Metropolitan Opera House.

Archival and press findings reveal that men of Jewish descent proved instrumental to the Met’s daily operations between its autocratic incorporation in 1880 and its democratization in 1940. Taking on roles from impresario and conductor to photographer and box office treasurer, these men became fixtures of labor, voluntarism, and patronage at all levels of the organization. Following Jewish historian Susannah Heschel’s call to seize the inherent potential of treating Jewish history as “counter-history” (1998) and embrace retelling stories of Christian origin from a Jewish perspective, this paper revises the Met’s historical record from a Jewish lens. Centrally, I set out to illuminate what Jews believed the opera house could do for them and what they, in turn, could do for the opera house, even as they contended with ongoing anti-Semitism. Attending to the experiences of these dual “undesirables” and “essentials” at the Met, I argue, can help us to better understand the fraught nature of minoritarian interactions with American cultural institutions.

A Tradition of Talent: Jewish Opera Singers and the Patterns that Shaped their Careers

Dr. Sophie Bookhalter Graduate Fellowship Public Lecture

Center for Jewish History

May 5, 2021

Abstract: Due to their unique mediation between the score, the stage, and their audiences, singers are one of the most indispensable elements of opera’s performance and reception. Although opera singers have often inspired scholarship about their geographical, social, and ethnic backgrounds, few studies have designed methods for comparing the experiences of large numbers of singers at the same time. What is more, beyond biographies of individual performers, Jews are rarely understood as significant contributors to the American opera scene. Yet examinations of their presence in the Center for Jewish History’s archives confirms that there is merit in undertaking devoted study of their vocal careers.

In this talk, Samantha M. Cooper (CJH Dr. Sophie Bookhalter Graduate Fellow in Jewish Culture 2020-2021, NYU Ph.D. Candidate in Historical Musicology) presents the first extended investigation into the patterns that shaped the trajectories of numerous men and women of Jewish descent who pursued careers are opera singers in New York between 1880 and 1940. Drawing on a wealth of archival resources, she unearths over 50 European- and American-born singers from Jewish families who sang in the citadel of the American opera scene: New York City. Specifically, she attends to how the outsized frequency of name-changing, connections with the synagogue cantorate, performances for Jewish organizations, recordings in Jewish languages, networking with other Jewish musicians, impact of the Holocaust, and dedication to the State of Israel shaped these singers’ professional lives in particularly Jewish ways. Ultimately, Cooper finds that the statistically significant presence of extraordinarily talented Jewish performers in the American opera industry constituted a much more ordinary reality than scholars of American Jewish history have previously realized.

Falling off the Roof and into the Opera House: Jews, Opera, and Anxiety in Twentieth Century America

American Musicological Society Annual Meeting (online)

November 7-8 and 14-15, 2020

Abstract: When the Marx Brothers interrupt the prelude of Verdi’s IL TROVATORE with “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” in A Night At The Opera (1935), they are following a comic script about Jews and opera that can be traced at least as far back as B. Kovner’s 1914 “Yente in Metropolitan Opera-Hoys” (“Yente at the Metropolitan Opera House”). This short story features Yente Telebende, who goes to the Metropolitan Opera to see Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, but gets unceremoniously thrown out when she falls asleep, and has such a terrible nightmare about her son falling off the roof that she wakes up screaming. Findings from the Florida Atlantic University, Dartmouth, and University of California Santa Barbara sound archives reveal that sending a Jewish immigrant on a disastrous visit to the opera became a popular comic device for American Jewish humorists. By the time this plot reached the Marx Brothers, it had already enjoyed two decades of development in Jewish dialect records and talkie films.

The following study traces the evolution of this plot and explores the reasons it resonated with Jewish creators and audiences. Intertwining comedy, Jews, and opera, it is premised upon the reality of a complex American Jewish relationship with opera in the early twentieth century, one that musicologists have not yet explored. My paper assesses the plot’s precedents, and follows its transformation across the lines of media, language, and gender from 1914 through 1935. Throughout, I draw on studies of American Jewish humor, opera popularization, and technological advancement to argue that the expansion and perpetuation of this plot emerged from deeply-rooted Jewish anxieties about gaining acceptance in America during a period of heightened xenophobia. I further suggest that, in the process of employing the opera as a subject in Jewish popular culture products, the genre became a stand-in for the institutions where many middle- and lower-class acculturating Jews felt like imposters. By embracing rather than refusing the role of disruptive outsiders in the imagined opera house, American Jews at once acknowledged and laid bare their own cultural difference for the pleasure of their community.