Choice 评论

This thoroughly researched study traces the emergence and success of opera in 19th-century New York. This reviewer had trouble deciding which aspect of the book is most impressive: its detailed factual information or its evaluation of opera's progress as a social, economic, and musical phenomenon. Ahlquist (George Washington Univ.) documents all New York theatrical venues in which opera was performed, noting as well the extramusical reasons why certain works or performers succeeded or failed. She thus clarifies the connection between stage and audience. Nor is this connection faceless, for Ahlquist offers insights into the effectiveness of key players, the most interesting of whom is the young Maria Malibran. Ahlquist's prose is dense, and she often repeats the same points in different words. She is also too quick to attribute large audiences to increases in opera's democratic appeal and too slow to acknowledge the place of the city's intellectual elite (not necessarily synonymous with its economic elite) in opera's successes. Detailed musical analyses seem to have wandered in from another book, but there are only occasional errors of fact (e.g., only the third act of Rossini's Otello conforms to Shakespeare). All in all, a fine study that deserves a place in every general, undergraduate, and graduate music collection. K. Pendle; University of Cincinnati