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Starting the New Semester, Uh, Season

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To many, fall means going back to school. But for me, it’s returning to live opera after companies’ traditional summer break. On September 7th, I did both, attending my first opera of the new season, Copland’s The Tender Land, at my alma mater, Hunter College.

As its story unfolded, about a farm girl who runs away from home on the dawn of her graduation day, I wondered: We hear a lot about keeping music in education – but how has education figured in music?

Not surprisingly, schooling does not feature strongly in operas predating the late 19th century, when formal instruction was more a privilege than a given in people’s lives. Precisely because it was a privilege – opera was largely a public, not elitist, entertainment then – education was often ridiculed onstage. Lesson scenes were vehicles for heroines to trill or for characters to bumble dance steps; teachers and tutors, usually depicted as doddering or malevolent obstacles to the true love of young protagonists; students were typically specified to be poor students. Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia (1816) contains all these popular elements: Count Almaviva pretends to be a humble student to win Rosina’s heart, and then infiltrates her home disguised as a music teacher. Her genuine instructor, creepy Don Basilio, inopportunely enters but is bribed to leave, and the scene becomes a voice lesson during which the lovers conspire. Another famous work of that period is Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment (1840), set in 1815: Marie, reared by rustic soldiers, rebels against music and dancing exercises meant to mold her into a proper lady.

Gilbert & Sullivan repeatedly mocked education…of women. The little maids from school in The Mikado (1885) make their entrance gleefully anticipating marriage now that they have left their ladies’ seminary. In Princess Ida (1884), the very notion of a ladies’ college is parodied, from extremist views on feminist politics (e.g., chessmen are forbidden there), to the professors’ austerely spinsterish personalities, to the students’ girlish squeamishness regarding any concrete application of their teachers’ theories. The lesser-known Utopia Limited (1893) concerns what havoc results when a king’s eldest daughter, just returned from Girton (a women’s college located in Cambridge), imposes her education upon her languid tropical island.

Once the century turns, though, suddenly scholarship is no longer a shameful subject for the opera stage. Granted, the students at Heidelberg in Romberg’s The Student Prince (1924) seem to spend most of their time drinking beer and hazing (perhaps then as now a realistic take on college life for some folks); but, for the most part, education is now advanced as an honorable enterprise. Consider Joplin’s Treemonisha (composed in 1911), set in 1884. Lacking a schoolhouse, the title character’s foster parents asked a white woman to become her teacher in return for their manual labor...with the result that Treemonisha is the only educated child in their backwoods community. The opera concludes as her townsfolk demand that, now that she is eighteen and the only qualified leader amongst them, Treemonisha guide them toward a better life. She accepts, singing, Ignorance is criminal in this enlightened day; and everyone joins in the ragtime A Real Slow Drag whose step-instructional lyrics urge, while one may progress slowly, one must never stop listening for that music beckoning one onward. Treemonisha’s theme is astoundingly avant-garde for 1911, vis-à-vis our own contemporary movements for successful residents to mentor their childhood communities.