MID-TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICAN OPERA AND THE RISE OF THE UNCONVENTIONAL LEADING MEZZO-SOPRANO

Abstract

The lecture recital focuses on selections from leading mezzo-soprano roles from four mid-twentieth century American operas: Regina by Marc Blitzstein, Trouble in Tahiti by Leonard Bernstein, The Ballad of Baby Doe by Douglas Moore, and The Crucible by Robert Ward. I discuss how each of these operas features a leading mezzo-soprano lady and how those roles compare and contrast to mezzo-soprano leads from European opera of previous centuries. Specific arias from each role are highlighted in order to display why each character displays unconventional characteristics. This paper provides an in-depth character analysis of these four roles and show that there are definite similarities in how they break away from standard mezzo-soprano tropes and also brings to light the connection between mezzo-soprano roles in operas by mid-twentieth-century American opera composers and contemporaneous transformation in the American society, most specifically the genesis of Second Wave Feminism in the 1960s. The hope is to draw a connection between these four operas in providing unconventional representations of strong female leads with the mezzo-soprano voice type and establish this feature as a predominant characteristic of mid-twentieth century American opera.