Verdi at the Golden Gate: Opera and San Francisco in the Gold Rush Years [Hardcover]

George Martin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 17, 1993

Opera is a fragile, complex art, but it flourished extravagantly in San Francisco during the Gold Rush years, a time when daily life in the city was filled with gambling, duels, murder, and suicide. In the history of the United States there has never been a rougher town than Gold Rush San Francisco, yet there has never been a greater frenzy for opera than developed there in these exciting years.
How did this madness for opera take root and grow? Why did the audience's generally drunken, brawling behavior gradually improve? How and why did Verdi emerge as the city's favorite composer? These are the intriguing themes of George Martin's enlightening and wonderfully entertaining story. Among the incidents recounted are the fist fight that stopped an opera performance and ended in a fatal duel; and the brothel madam who, by sitting in the wrong row of a theater, caused a fracas that resulted in the formation of the Vigilantes of 1856.
Martin weaves together meticulously gathered social, political, and musical facts to create this lively cultural history. His study contributes to a new understanding of urban culture in the Jacksonian-Manifest Destiny eras, and of the role of opera in cities during this time, especially in the American West. Over it all soars Verdi's somber, romantic music, capturing the melancholy, the feverish joy, and the idealism of his listeners.

Editorial Reviews

From Kirkus Reviews

A meticulously researched history of operatic music as performed in San Francisco from the Gold Rush to the Civil War. The subtitle saves this admirable volume from a truth-in- advertising charge. Martin (Aspects of Verdi, 1988, etc.) sees the Bay City's growing acclaim for Verdi's music as a paradigm for the development of musical taste in a town that grew from frontier outpost to cosmopolitan bastion in little more than a decade--but this argument seems beside the point. The author's more substantial--and more interesting--story is how 19th-century European opera became a local mania in a city built by roughnecks and miners on the other side of the world from Milan and London. As Martin notes, if today's New Yorkers shared the same enthusiasm for opera as San Franciscans in the years 1851-60, the demand would require 20 additional Met-sized opera houses, all playing every night. Against this background of frenzied enthusiasm, Martin presents a detailed, scholarly history of the singers who came to San Francisco (many of them from South American opera troupes), what they sang, where they sang, and how they were received. In doing so, he provides a potent look at American cultural history: the audiences who spat and filled the theater with cigar smoke, who broke into cheers before the music ended, and who engaged in fistfights and duels, bringing the grand gestures of romantic opera into real life. The time and place championed democratic populism, but also saw itself as ``larger than life''--and opera, with its appeal to the emotions, was ideal entertainment. New operas, hot off the presses of European music publishers, were received with the same intense, lively interest that today greets Hollywood movies. A genuine contribution to the history of art and society during the tumultuous years of this country's adolescence. Its primary appeal, though, is to students of operatic history and those who have permanently left their hearts in you-know-where. (Illustrations) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review

"The book gripped me from the start, and held me: an exploration into eventful decades of American musical history that had been for too long uncharted." -- Andrew Porter, music critic, The Observer

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 344 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1st Ed. edition (August 17, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520081234
• ISBN-13: 978-0520081239
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,738,607 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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