The Geography of American Opera at the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis

In its institutional self-fashioning, the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis has long foregrounded the company’s commitment to American works. Their premieres and revivals prioritize dramatic intelligibility, telling recognizably contemporary stories in moderate musical idioms. This talk argues that OTSL’s contributions to a distinctly American operatic canon are framed in ways that are both explicitly and implicitly concerned with geography: in the drive for a repertoire that better represents the demographic diversity of the local and global community, in the transferred prestige of premieres that find success on bigger stages, and in the tense relationship between the “regional” (sometimes used pejoratively) and the national imaginary of “American” opera.

About Emily Richmond Pollock

Emily Richmond Pollock is an Associate Professor of Music in the Music and Theater Arts Section at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her first book, Opera after the Zero Hour: The Problem of Tradition and the Possibility of Renewal in Postwar West Germany, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019. Her research has appeared in Twentieth-Century Music, Opera Quarterly, and the Journal of Musicology, as well as in edited collections. Her current project, “Opera on Uncommon Ground,” is a fieldwork-based study of five American opera festivals.