Opera

In Appalachia, opera is mostly limited to larger urban areas. Since cities do not usually figure in the popular conception of Appalachia as a largely rural region, opera has generally been excluded from assessments of the region’s musical culture.

Although opera was not unknown in larger Appalachian cities of earlier times, most currently operating opera companies were established or resurrected after the 1930s. Many older opera houses do exist, but they are used for other purposes. The Elkins Opera House in Elkins, West Virginia, for instance, has been a clothing store since 1919, while a theater company currently occupies the Old Opera House in Charles Town, West Virginia.

Pittsburgh hosts the oldest continuously running opera company (established in 1939) within Appalachia, though Cincinnati’s company, established in 1920, is the second oldest in the United States. Chattanooga, Tennessee, hosts the only combined professional symphony and opera company in the nation, as the Chattanooga Opera (founded in 1943) merged with the Chattanooga Symphony Orchestra in 1985. The acclaimed Tri-Cities Opera (established in 1949) of Binghamton, New York, collaborated with Binghamton University to offer the first Masters of Music program in the nation that offered specialization in opera. In Alabama, the Birmingham Civic Opera, founded in 1955, merged in 1986 with another opera company, the Southern Regional Opera, resulting in the formation of the Birmingham Opera Theater; in 1996 this company was rechristened Opera Birmingham. Opera came to Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1976 with the establishment of the Knoxville Civic Opera Company (shortened to Knoxville Opera Company in 1983). Other cities in the Appalachian region that feature opera companies are Winston-Salem, North Carolina (Piedmont Opera Theatre); Cooperstown, New York (Glimmerglass Opera); and Chautauqua, New York (Chautauqua Opera Company, which is affiliated with the Chautauqua Institution).

Opera luminaries from Appalachia have included Roland Hayes (1887–1976) of Curryville, Georgia, an African American tenor who performed internationally, and Grace Moore (1898–1947), who grew up in Jellico, Tennessee, and achieved fame as a star of New York City’s Metropolitan Opera, Broadway, motion pictures, radio, and recordings. Eleanor Steber (1916–1990), a Wheeling, West Virginia–born soprano, and Kathleen Battle (b. 1948), a multiple Grammy Award–winning African American soprano from Portsmouth, Ohio, likewise worked with the Metropolitan Opera. Impresario Francis Robinson (1910–1980), from Mount Pleasant, Tennessee, served in different capacities with the company, working at various times as head of ticketing, supervisor of the Metropolitan Opera Touring Company, and host of the Live from the Met television show.

Most opera companies in Appalachia have placed considerable value on opera education and community outreach in an effort to generate wider public support and appreciation for an art form often thought of among uninitiated listeners as being foreign and boring. For younger students, interactive programs in classrooms (such as one offered by Knoxville Opera) provide a fun-filled introduction to the world of opera. Other companies, including the Tri-Cities Opera and Opera Birmingham, perform children’s operas such as Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs in schools. The Pittsburgh Opera, as part of its Student Matinee program, provides free tickets to full-length opera performances for economically underprivileged students. Also important to many opera companies are the development of new operatic talent through artist residencies and the integration of opera programming with school and university music departments. Other efforts aimed at expanding the popularity of the art form in Appalachia have included Pittsburgh Opera’s introduction of simultaneous English translations of librettos projected above the stage.

Some composers have sought to chronicle the history of Appalachia through the medium of opera. Internationally ac- claimed classical composer Kenton Coe, of Johnson City, Tennessee, has written operas with Appalachian themes including Rachel (about the relationship between President Andrew Jack- son and his wife). Given its cultural and geographical distinctiveness, Appalachia has fueled the imaginations of numerous non-native composers attempting to create folk operas, a sub- genre of American opera that falls between opera and musical theater. Some prominent works of this type include German composer Kurt Weill’s Down in the Valley (1948), South Carolinian Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah (1956), and Donald Davidson and Charles Faulkner Bryan’s Singin’ Billy (1952), which concerns William Walker, the author of the influential 1835 shape-note singing book Southern Harmony. These folk operas not only explore Appalachian themes but also incorporate into their scores stylistic elements borrowed from traditional Appalachian music.