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Making the opera relevant to a larger audience, a new audience, is a practice happening around the states. Far from idle publicity stunts, in a real way, new performance and marketing innovations are about saving an art form that once belonged to the people, but somehow came to stand for the privileged and elite.
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Vienna saw the premiere of that most extraordinary work of genius, Mozart’s The Magic Flute, not at a court, palace or prestige venue. This seminal opera made its debut in 1791 at a theater that attracted both a high and lowbrow audience, and regularly featured broad theatre and comic performance. And in the 19th century Italy of the Risorgimento, Verdi’s music was on everyone’s lips – it was the soundtrack, so to speak, for the formation of the Italian state.

By the late 19th century, and into the earliest years of the 20th century, opera was popular culture, an art for the masses that also attracted the wealthiest to gleaming new opera palaces, even as .the growing tides of immigrants from southern Europe also were also humming along.

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E.P. Simon
About the Author
E.P. Simon is a NYC cultural historian, documentary filmmaker, and educator.