The European Templates for American Opera Festivals

The mid-twentieth century saw the rise of the American opera festival as a counter-proposition to the civic opera model. Festivals in locations as far-flung as Central City, Colorado (where a festival was established in 1933) and Sarasota, Florida (which formalized a festival format in 1984) drew on existing models and principles from three archetypal European festivals: the Bayreuth Festival (founded 1876), the Salzburg Festival (1920), and the Glyndebourne Festival Opera (1934). These were the most durable examples that American opera festival founders had in mind as they developed their own institutions.

This paper analyzes particular conceptual aspects of these three precedents and shows how key ideas were transposed to new American contexts. Bayreuth, for example, set the precedent that festivals create a geographic and architectural space definitionally counter to standard practices. It also demonstrated the potential for festivals to enable the creation of radically new work, which several American festivals pursued. Salzburg’s reputation for musical excellence made it an admired tourist destination; American festivals aimed to imitate Salzburg’s international prominence in hopes of replicating the salutary effects on the host location’s prestige, not to mention its economy. Salzburg’s relationship to Mozart (with its rhetoric of ownership, celebration, and ritual) also highlights the tendency of opera festivals to claim specialized territory within the operatic repertoire. At Glyndebourne, the festival model had taken a pastoral turn (later seen at Glimmerglass in New York), with idiosyncratic class relations and an unusual intimacy. This cultivated insularity correlates to a certain conservatism, in particular in the ways in which Glyndebourne expanded the operatic canon not through novelty but through a specialization in pre-Romantic works. By correlating these aspects to analogues in their American counterparts, I show how European festivals laid the historical and conceptual groundwork for interpretations of the festival model in the United States.