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Thoroughly Modern Middles

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AlexandraWilson, Opera in the Jazz Age: Cultural Politics in 1920s Britain. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 240pp.
ChristopherChowrimootoo, Middlebrow Modernism: Britten's Operas and the Great Divide. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. 244pp.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2019

Laura Tunbridge
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Extract

Young Millie Dilmount arrives in New York City during the jazz age, shingles her hair and looks for a job with a rich, handsome boss she can marry. The musical-film Thoroughly Modern Millie (dir. George Roy Hill, Universal, 1967) may have been a spoof of the 1920s but various twists and turns in its plot nonetheless reveal its middlebrow scaffolding. Social aspiration is written into the plot, as is the ambiguity of its signifiers: although Millie (Julie Andrews) falls for the penniless Jimmy Smith (James Fox), she sets her sights on the seemingly more appropriate Trevor Graydon (John Gavin) only to discover that, of course, Jimmy was a millionaire all along. This is a narrative as much about cultural and social as financial capital. Through its ‘second-order parody’ of racial, ethnic and gender stereotypes, Angelo Pao argues, Thoroughly Modern Millie – along with other American musicals – ‘has played a significant role in the formation of a national persona’. The middlebrow, though, is not necessarily about identity politics, storylines or style; it is also closely bound with modes of dissemination and their relative costs and, because of that, with questions of class. Indeed, the Broadway musical was (and continues to be) a mainly middle-class affair, from its makers to its consumers, who David Savran points out have long needed ‘a good deal of disposable income’, given that ticket prices have always outstripped cinema, spoken theatre – and, on occasion, opera.

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Review Article
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Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , March 2019 , pp. 118 - 128
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

*

Laura Tunbridge, University of Oxford; laura.tunbridge@music.ox.ac.uk

References

1 Pao, Angela C., ‘Green Glass and Emeralds: Citation, Performance, and the Dynamics of Ethnic Parody in Thoroughly Modern Millie’, MELUS 36 (Special issue on Asian American Performance Art) (2011), 35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 James O'Leary, ‘Broadway Highbrow Discourse and Politics of the American Musical, 1943–1946’, PhD diss. (Yale University, 2012); and Savran, David, ‘Class and Culture’, in The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical, ed. Knapp, Raymond, Morris, Mitchell and Wolf, Stacy (New York, 2011; Oxford Handbooks Online 2012)Google Scholar.

3 Best, Stephen and Marcus, Sharon, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, Representations 108 (2009), 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; drawing on the locution of de Grazia, Margreta and Stallybrass, Peter, ‘The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text’, Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (1993), 257CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Although Gounod's Faust was a constant presence on stage and there were performances of Charpentier and Offenbach, there are few mentions of Debussy in the book, save for the novelty of his Prodigal Son being done by the British National Opera Company (128). Pelléas et Mélisande had its British premiere at Covent Garden in 1909; Jann Pasler discusses the cultural and class politics of the opera's Parisian reception in ‘Pelléas and Power: Forces behind the Reception of Debussy's Opera’, 19th-Century Music 10 (1987), 243–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; there were performances in 1920s Britain, including in translation, that raise intriguing questions about the relationship between modern opera and the middlebrow (one such production took place in Birmingham, which The Musical Times described as ‘a great city which is probably outside the ken of aesthetic Paris’); ‘C.’, ‘Pelléas and the B.N.O.C.’, The Musical Times 65 (1 July 1924), 648Google Scholar.

5 Although there are gestures towards the operatic world outside of the capital, there is little information about the provinces or touring companies beyond passing references, with the exception of the British National Opera Company, which makes several appearances (on occasion, claims made on behalf of the BNOC about audiences, or about the popularity or otherwise of various productions and venues, could usefully have been contextualised by reference to financial holdings where they exist; as it stands there is a dependence on journalistic reports which can be vague or are unverified).

6 The newspaper pointed out that there were no banqueting scenes in the first batch of operas, but that the first act of La bohème ‘will remind diners that on occasion it is worthwhile to pawn one's coat for a sausage. A certain amount of eating is done in Louise but the best restaurant aria, suitable for closing time, occurs in Manon: “Adieu, ma petite table”.’ ‘Grand Opera Dinners. Musical Menus as an Aid to Appetite. Carl Rosa’, The Daily Express (19 October 1923), 3. Elsewhere, Wilson quotes Richard Capell's 1929 description of Faust, Rigoletto, Cav and Pag as ‘the ham and eggs of opera’ (127).

7 As reported by ‘World's Biggest Restaurant.’ Daily Mail Atlantic Edition [Berengaria, Eastbound] (30 June 1923), 2.

8 ‘Grand Opera Dinners. Musical Menus as an Aid to Appetite. Carl Rosa’, The Daily Express (19 October 1923), 3.

9 ‘World's Biggest Restaurant’; ‘Lyons New Corner House’, Daily Mail (19 July 1923), 1; and ‘The World's Largest Tea-Restaurant’, Daily Mirror (26 May 1923), 4.

10 ‘Grand Opera Dinners’, 3; and ‘Grand Opera at Lyons’, The Financial Times (25 October 1923), 8.

11 Dickinson, Peter, The Music of Lennox Berkeley, 2nd edn (Woodbridge, 2003), 36–7Google Scholar.

12 See Abravanel, Genevieve, Americanizing Britain: The Rise of Modernism in the Age of the Entertainment Empire (Oxford, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Mass culture – and its technologies – were vital for the construction and dissemination of the middlebrow, both ideologically and pragmatically.

13 Greenberg, Clement, ‘Avant Garde and Kitsch’, Partisan Review 6 (1939), 34–49Google Scholar.

14 The classic study, from an American perspective, remains Rubin, Joan Shelley, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Durham, NC, 1992)Google Scholar; see also Napper, Lawrence, British Cinema and Middlebrow Culture in the Interwar Years (Exeter, 2009)Google Scholar.

15 As discussed by Helen Richardson in ‘The Economics of Opera in England 1925–1939’, PhD diss. (King's College London, 2019). Wilson touches on gender issues throughout her book, noting for instance that in the run-up to the ‘Flapper Election’ the audience for Wagner was reported to have included more women, though there was some general anxiety about the feminisation of theatrical repertory (58–60).

16 Ellen McDonald characterised the major female roles in Britten's operas as ‘oppressive or destructive’; in ‘Women in Britten's Operas’, The Opera Quarterly 4 (1986), 83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Humble, Nicola, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity and Bohemianism (Oxford, 2004), 27Google Scholar.

18 On Bowen, see ‘Elizabeth Bowen: Realism, Modernism and Gendered Identity in Her Novels of the 1930s’, Journal of Gender Studies 4 (1995), 271–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Murdoch as middlebrow see Josipivici, Gabriel, What Ever Happened to Modernism? (New Haven, 2010), 1Google Scholar; as modernist, see Gasiorek, Andrzej, ‘“A Renewed Sense of Difficulty”: E. M. Forster, Iris Murdoch and Zadie Smith on Ethics and Form’, in The Legacies of Modernism: Historicizing Postwar and Contemporary Fiction, ed. James, David (Cambridge, 2011), 170–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 The reference is to Daniel Albright, Musicking Shakespeare (Rochester, 2007), 296.

20 See Felski, Rita, ‘Context Stinks!’, New Literary History 42 (2011), 573–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Abbate, Carolyn, ‘Overlooking the Ephemeral’, New Literary History 48 (Winter 2017), 75–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 He points as an introduction to Mao, Douglas and Walkowitz, Rebecca L., ‘The New Modernist Studies’, PLMA 123 (2008), 737–48Google Scholar.