Music at Columbia: The First 100 Years

Music Performance: The Middle Years > Opera Workshop

Opera Workshop rehearsal of Evangeline

Photograph by Warman, Columbia University, Spring 1948

Columbia University Archives, Rare Book and Manuscript Library

 

One of Columbia’s unique endeavors was its Opera Workshop. Organized in 1943-44, it took up residence in Brander Matthews Hall, whose small theater contained an orchestra pit. The workshop was offered as a four-point course for students, but it also drew widely from the outside musical and theatrical community. It came to resemble a repertory company, whose full productions presented both neglected eighteenth-century comic operas in English and new works by American composers, commissioned or sponsored by Columbia’s Alice M. Ditson Fund. In addition, students presented arias, scenes, and acts from the standard repertory to invited audiences.

Composer Otto Luening is seen here rehearsing the cast of his opera Evangeline. Jack Beeson, Assistant to Professor Luening, is standing in back of the cast member who is curtsying. The work’s premier performance, with Teresa Stich-Randall in the title role, was given in May, 1948.

 

Opera Workshop program

“Scenes from Operas,” 1946

Columbia University Archives, Rare Book and Manuscript Library

 

Department of Music composers were well represented in the Opera Workshop’s activities; Otto Luening, Jack Beeson (whose unpublished 1961 article, “Opera at Columbia 1941-1958” documents the Workshop’s history and repertoire), and Douglas Moore among them. World premiers included Benjamin Britten’s and W. H. Auden’s Paul Bunyan (1941), Gian-Carlo Menotti’s The Medium (1946), Virgil Thomson’s The Mother of Us All (1947), Luening’s Evangeline (1948), all commissioned by the Ditson Fund; and Moore’s Giants in the Earth (1951). In its flourishing years in the 1940s and ‘50s, the Opera Workshop made a significant contribution to the cultural life of both campus and city, and served as an influential voice for new music. In a July 1990 Opera News article, “Pioneers on Morningside Heights,” Steven B. Cerf recognized the Workshop’s “crucial role in the flowering of American opera.”

Opera Workshop program

“Scenes from Operas,” 1946

Columbia University Archives, Rare Book and Manuscript Library

 

“Scenes from Operas,” 1946, included segments from Gounod’s The Frantic Physician and Flotow’s Martha, along with Menotti’s The Old Maid and the Thief.

Opera Workshop program

“Shakespeare in Opera,” 1946

Columbia University Archives, Rare Book and Manuscript Library

 

“Shakespeare in Opera,” 1946, included acts from operas by Purcell, Gounod, Verdi, and Ernest Bloch, all with librettos based on Shakespeare plays.

Opera Workshop program

“Shakespeare in Opera,” 1946

Columbia University Archives, Rare Book and Manuscript Library

 

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