There’s a scene in the 1935 Marx Brothers movie “A Night at the Opera” in which the orchestra is playing the overture to Verdi’s “Il Trovatore,” but unbeknownst to the musicians, Harpo and Chico have inserted a different song into their sheet music. When the players turn the page, they’re suddenly playing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” much to the dismay of the conductor and audience. The formality of the evening crumbles as the subsequent performance descends into chaos.
By the end, Groucho and the others have completely punctured the pretensions of the movie’s two antagonists—the snooty director of the opera company and the egotistical star tenor. The hero, a modest yet more talented tenor, comes on to rescue the performance, win the girl, and become a star.
What’s really being set in opposition here is not popular entertainment like baseball against high society opera. Instead, it’s the identity of opera as an art form geared toward the broader ranks of society against opera as the exclusive purview of aristocratic snobs.
A century earlier that opposition simply didn’t exist. What today are considered some of the highest expressions of the performing arts were then common currency. In an insightful book entitled Highbrow, Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, historian Lawrence Levine traces how cultural institutions like opera and the plays of William Shakespeare changed from being elements of a broad, popular culture to being only for a narrow, elite audience. Echoes of this transformation partially explain why opera, for instance, has all but vanished from mainstream cultural life today.
“It took a great deal of evidence to allow me to transcend my own cultural assumptions and accept the fact that Shakespeare actually was popular entertainment in nineteenth-century America,” Levine admits early in the book. But from all that evidence, it seems that at some point in the past there was less distinction between what the upper and lower classes thought of as art. The wealthy went to the opera but so did other people.
As another example, the distinction between orchestras and bands (which were wildly popular in America around the time of the Civil War) had far more to do with what kinds of instruments were involved than what the music was. A typical public band concert would feature music by Mendelssohn, Beethoven, and Verdi, interspersed with folk tunes, marches, and popular songs. An 1869 band concert in Boston featured Verdi’s “Anvil Chorus” accompanied by 100 burly firemen pounding anvils with sledgehammers. I wish I could’ve been witness to that.
A change was already in the wind, however. Soon one theater critic was complaining that if the country didn’t see a “decided separation of drama which aims at art from those theatrical performances which only aim at an amusement of a lower kind…the final disappearance of the art is near at hand.” Apparently some people were starting to think that to protect the decorum of art from rowdy, vulgar crowds there needed to be a greater difference in the content of performances.
And so the transformation occurred: the higher classes got “Art” and the lower classes got “entertainment.” It’s a shame, because by throwing in with entertainment—which so often amounts to little more than mere diversion—many people close themselves off to something worthwhile. Some of the most beautiful melodies ever composed, for instance, come from an opera, and are completely accessible. But now we labor under the assumption that if it’s opera it must not be for regular people. Those who accept that division do the cause of art no favors.
