Opera Everywhere: Joseph Winogradoff and Overlapping Cultural Spheres in Early Twentieth-Century America

• In Event: Opera, Cantors, and Yiddish Language Culture

Abstract

We typically think of opera as possessing a distinctive style with an aesthetic entirely its own, incompatible with most other genres and musical styles. But in early twentieth-century America, opera and operatic themes could be found in a tremendous variety of cultural contexts, both high and popular, sacred and secular. Jews in particular experienced opera in a great many places. In the secular sphere, this included opera houses and regular theaters, as well as concerts of highbrow and popular music. They also heard opera in Yiddish theaters, both fully staged opera productions and interwoven into theater performances. Operatic topics also appeared in popular songs, disseminated via recordings and sheet music. Additionally, Jews experienced the operatic style in the sacred sphere, hearing cantors perform in synagogue as well as in concert.

Opera’s ubiquitous presence was made possible by the movement of performers among these different spheres. The career of one such musician, the Russian-Jewish opera singer and cantor, Joseph Winogradoff (1866-1936), reveals how opera’s aesthetic, far from being considered separate, was in fact compatible with a great number of these cultural environments. Winogradoff’s performances of opera, folk songs, Yiddish theater music, and liturgical music, as revealed through recordings, concert programs, and coverage in the Yiddish- and English-language press highlight the shared aesthetic characteristics as well as the distinctive elements of these genres and performance contexts. This research extends the work of Jeffrey Shandler and Mark Slobin on cantors’ crossover between the sacred and secular spheres, showing that this musical eclecticism manifests itself on an even broader scale: Winogradoff’s career suggests that a similar musical aesthetic pervaded many cultural contexts, despite differentials in their cultural status and/or target audiences.
Ironically, although in theory the categorizations of genres as highbrow or popular had become relatively fixed and widely recognizable by the turn of the twentieth century, in practice, these genres mixed freely in multiple cultural spheres, suggesting that cultural divisions were perhaps based more on ideology and context than aesthetics.

Author

• Daniela Smolov Levy