American Opera Company - Jeannette Thurber's American Opera Company

Jeannette Thurber's American Opera Company

The first American Opera Company was founded in 1886 by well known arts patron Jeannette Meyers Thurber who had just founded the National Conservatory of Music of America a few months earlier. Based in New York City, the American Opera Company was under the musical direction of Theodore Thomas with Gustav Hinrichs and Arthur Mees assistant conductors and Charles E. Locke was the business manager. It rented the premises of the Academy of Music in New York City for local performances during 1886. It also toured, playing in April, May and June 1886 in, among other cities, Boston, Indianapolis, Philadelphia and St. Louis. The repertoire included Verdi's Aida, Wagner's Lohengrin, and Gounod's Faust. In August, the company announced an ambitious plan to travel to Paris, a trip that never came about.

A succinct statement of Thurber's vision for the American Opera Company appeared in August, 1886, when she was cited as "... the fact that the true conception of a national opera is opera sung in a nation's language and, as far as practicable, the work of a nation's composers, …in time to develop and patronize American composers."

Financial difficulties led to a reorganization and name change to the "National Opera Company" in December 1887 and, ultimately, bankruptcy in March, 1887.

Read more about this topic:  American Opera Company

Famous quotes containing the words thurber, american, opera and/or company:

    The nation that complacently and fearfully allows its artists and writers to become suspected rather than respected is no longer regarded as a nation possessed with humor in depth.
    —James Thurber (1894–1961)

    The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.
    —J.G. (James Graham)

    Opera once was an important social instrument—especially in Italy. With Rossini and Verdi people were listening to opera together and having the same catharsis with the same story, the same moral dilemmas. They were holding hands in the darkness. That has gone. Now perhaps they are holding hands watching television.
    Luciano Berio (b. 1925)

    It’s given new meaning to me of the scientific term black hole.
    Don Logan, U.S. businessman, president and chief executive of Time Inc. His response when asked how much his company had spent in the last year to develop Pathfinder, Time Inc.’S site on the World Wide Web. Quoted in New York Times, p. D7 (November 13, 1995)