Abstract
Who has the power to institutionalize culture? How is it that cultural forms become legitimated and appropriated by certain groups? And what are the organizational forms that guarantee the continuity of the interlocks among classifications, etiquette, and resources in the long run? This article explores these questions by observing the struggle over the institutionalization of opera as high culture during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century in Buenos Aires, a region of the world understudied by cultural sociologists. It contends that to answer these questions we need to observe the contested dynamics though which the process of institutionalization happens. It also shows how this contestation affects, in the long-term, the processes of evaluation and legitimation of the classification upheld, and the consequences it has in terms of audience stratification. In the Discussion section, I present a novel framework for the study of pathways to high culture institutionalization that highlights how the role of the state and competing stakeholders can introduce variable relationships among the elites, the arts, and social closure.
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Notes
As Margaret Cohen (2002) emphasizes, the role of “the waterways of Modernity” is crucial to understanding the patterns through which modern European culture traveled, changed, and reproduced itself throughout the globe. Opera in Argentina is an obvious case of this, as the circuit was organized by impresarios following the possibilities of maritime travel, from Rio to Montevideo and from the Uruguayan capital to Buenos Aires and then Rosario, Argentina’s second city. The opera companies in Buenos Aires were sometimes composed of musicians and singers from the Rome Opera, others from La Fenice in Venice, and in just a couple of seasons from la Scala from Milano. A second American circuit united New York, New Orleans, Havana and—sometimes—Mexico City.
Dowd et al. (2002) continue in time this analysis showing the process of consolidation of classical music in the United States and the paradoxical conditions for the production of innovation. The segregation of classical music from other musical materials meant not as DiMaggio predicted the sacralization of canonical composers but rather that the process of “purification” of repertoires and the expansion in orchestra performance capabilities led to a wave of innovation early on as the nonprofit organizational form became institutionalized: as orchestras had to replace popular pieces with classical works and perform more often, their repertoires had to expand and to include works of new composers.
Among this group, the work by historian William Weber (1975, 2001) is pioneer, showing how earlier on patrons of music emphasized contemporary works by living composers rather than works by dead composers. As elites consolidated, musical gatherings followed a similar process to the one followed in the United States for the consolidation of classical music, dividing strictly art from entertainment via a process through which concert programming became more homogeneous, leaving aside miscellaneous and less programmatic performances (see Storey 2006; Weber 2006; DeNora 1991).
The most dramatic example of this was the “Astor Place Riot” in New York in 1849, where popular groups bombarded a theater and were stopped by militia.
This only happened after Alvear made sure to break the previous contract with the impresario, changing the terms for the exploitation of the house, making the Municipality the owner of the seats, and the impresario the mediator in placing them among the audience.
Some of the consequences of this are fully intentional, like giving the Municipality complete budgetary control over the house, either by taxing the income produced by the tickets, by charging rent to the impresario, and by expropriating the boxes owned by the elite at the previous building of the Colón in order to sell them to the highest bidder; some others—like the opening of the house to the poorer sectors of the population—had unintentional consequences. For example, nobody could know in 1884, when the Legislative Body demanded that the impresario “reduce the entry price to Paraiso (the standing room for men only) and fix the prices to cazuela (the room for single unaccompanied women)” that Italians migrants would fill those seats and stalls in the 1910s and 1920s.
Under law number 1969, the National State and House of Representatives authorized the Municipality of the City of Buenos Aires to sell the Colón in order to build a new municipal opera house to also be named “Colón” (De la Guardia and Herrera 1933). A year later, Congress passed law number 2381 and called for an international competition to build the new house. In 1899, the Congress passed law number 3797, which expropriated the surrounding properties of where the Colón would be located.
Those who were not were homini novi, who had made their wealth themselves, or were traders in rural products who had a residence in the city but made their fortune somewhere else in the country.
According to Bower (2003) the encounter of the provincianos with the world of porteño high society confirmed that in large measure literate provincials were tied to the federal government and dependent upon the access of the provinces to its resources. Although they did subscribe to standards of civilization established by the porteño elite, their spouses, with one exception, were not invited to participate in the Sociedad de Beneficencia and their representation in the Jockey Club was disproportionately low.
A council member declared in 1900, “It is nothing new that municipal governments try to help their cities to achieve the highest level of civilization; therefore, we should do all we can to foment the opera and in this way to contribute to the culture of our people.” Concejo Delibertante, June 15, 1900. Cited by McCleary (2002).
Rosario, the country’s other big port, had three opera houses: the Olimpo, which opened early on in 1871, and the Opera and the Colón, which both opened in 1904. A fourth theater, the Nuevo Politeama opened in 1899, but was short lived and replaced in 1927 by the Odeon. Operatic activity in Rosario was comparable in the 1910s with that in Buenos Aires as it was fed by the same troupe of impresarios that managed the Colón, the Coliseo, and the Politeama. It included international stars like Caruso, Galli-Curci, Tetrazzini, and the Tita Ruffo-Maria Barrientos pairing.
Included in Sanguinetti (2002, p. 169).
In Salta, in the northern most part of the country, both El Libertad and the Victoria had opera as did the Mitre in La Rioja. The enumeration continues with houses in Santa Fe, Cordoba, Santiago del Estero, and Tucuman, all of which were inaugurated during the first 15 years of 1900s.
Local elites had an easier time appropriating opera in smaller cities with less social mobility, fewer migrants, more control over the box office and the impresario, and a more intense surveillance of the proper etiquette for consumption.
In a peculiar way, this is another sign of the cosmopolitan character of Buenos Aires, as other anarchist attacks during the late nineteenth century and first few years of the twentieth century had killed the President of the United States, William McKinley, the President of France, Sadi Carnot, the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, the Italian King Humberto Primo, and Russian Czar Alexander II.
The second attack occurred 15 years later in 1925 as part of a protest of the gala to honor the 24-year reign of Italian King Vittorio Emanuelle II. The explosives used in this attack were lighter than those used in 1910 and were found with anarchist propaganda attached to them.
Cited in Pasolini (1999, p. 248).
La Vida Moderna, Year 1, Number 2, 23-5, 1907.
In almost 60 years of existence (1903–1960), only 54 titles were performed, although some seasons included up to 16 titles. Among the comic operas, only Barbiere was performed, and titles such as Andrea Chenier and Manon Lescaut were discarded because of their complexity or large casts. After 1934, there were 16 major scores: seven by Verdi, three by Puccini, and one each by Donizetti, Rossini, Mascagni, Leoncavallo, and Ponchiello; the remaining title was the Italian version of Bizet’s Carmen. All this information comes from Dillon, Cesar, and Juan A. Sala (1997).
Posters announcing performances began appearing in languages other than Spanish, and some houses became known by other names such as the “Teatro della Vittoria” and even the “Theatre Colón” (Diego 1983, p. 143).
According to Gramsci (1951), the fact that opera worked as the popular culture of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth in Italy is what caused the absence of serial romance novels like those that can be found in France and England.
Other than opera, the city council concerned itself mostly with the safety of the audience. Until the opening of the Colón, the city had not subsidized the construction or operation of any other theater. It did grant a tax exemption to the theater that hosted some of the official celebrations while the Colón was being built (McCleary 2002). A second kind of intervention was the censorship it imposed to a few zarzuelas that made fun of local politicians.
Taxation increased as the Unión Cívica Radical, the first plebeian mass party of Argentina, won the first fraud-free election in 1916. They were in power until 1930, when a military coup ousted it. The President designated the city mayor in agreement with the Senate, since 1886, when the city became the country’s capital and a federal district.
Memoria de la Municipalidad de Buenos Aires. 1886, p. 32.
Un Año en el Teatro Colón. Su explotación en 1928, p. 33.
Using different languages was a common occurrence in opera houses around the world. However, while the other big non-European opera house, New York’s Met, premiered Tanhauser in German in November 1884, it took Buenos Aires almost 40 more years to break away from the hegemony of the Italian language.
In 1908, the most expensive seated tickets cost 13 to 17 times more than the cheapest seating ticket, a trend that continues today. This was expected during the nineteenth century, when theaters depended on market returns for their survival and usually mixed opera with other less prestigious cultural practices (DiMaggio 1982a; Levine 1988; Weber 1975).
Unlike what happened, for instance, in New York City (Baily 1985), Italians incorporated themselves into the life of the city by spreading into many different areas and interacting in a new public space, which became known as the barrio or “neighborhood,” created by local cultural and political associations (Gorelik 1998; Romero 1983). Research on literacy and culture (Gutierrez and Romero 1995; Sarlo 1988, 1991) has shown how the networks that produced a plebeian, integrating culture extended all the way into the 1940s. These networks—press houses that published cheap mass translations of classic books, innovative newspapers, and science and radio clubs that popularized science and technology—were behind the expansion of cultural goods during the 1920s and 1930s. Unlike what happened with these cultural products, throughout the twentieth century opera became too expensive to be developed on the cheap by a group of amateur enthusiasts in any way that would compete with the Colón; case in point being the aforementioned experience at the Marconi.
A quick comparison of the relationship between the most expensive and the cheapest tickets prices on the first season (1908) and on the last season studied (2006) shows how the proportion of the prices has sustained itself over time. The price of the most expensive seat has been from 55 to 80 times more than the cheapest standing room ticket.
Thus the Colón has three distinctive entries for the boxes and orchestra seats, for the middle floors where there are still seats, and for the standing room areas.
For Bourdieu high cultural products are the most “classed” kind of objects, as they have inscribed in them the kinds of knowledge necessary to decode them, interpret them properly, and appreciate them.
Current work by Calhoun (2012) puts Bourdieu’s work in perspective as a historical scholar of French modernity, helping us think about the limitations that come from trying to generalize and extrapolate those particular conditions to other societies.
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Acknowledgments
Support for this research came from a Small Grant awarded by the University of Connecticut. I owe the stimulus to write this article to Gaye Tuchman and to an invitation by Paul DiMaggio to present my work on opera in Buenos Aires at the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Center at Princeton University. Previous versions were presented at ASA and SSHA annual meetings, at the UC Davis Culture Workshop, and at the Yale Center for Comparative Research workshop. Marco Santoro corrected some of my overly simplistic assumptions about the organizational sociology of culture. Pablo Palomino made sure this study was conducted with historiographical rigor. Owen Whooley, Gabi Abend, Andrew Deener, Peter Stamatov, Alison Gerber, Pierre Kremp, Lisa McCormick, Phil Smith, Julia Adams, Nick Wilson, Matt Mahler, Rene Almeling, Tim Dowd, Michael McQuarrie, John Hall, Rob Jansen, and Mariana Heredia gave pointed criticisms and advice. Horacio González, the National Library Director, and Ezequiel Grimson, the Director of the Music Department of the National Library of the Argentine Republic made sure I had access to all the documents the Library had on the Colón—to them my deepest gratitude. I’d also like to thank the Theory and Society Editors and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable advice during the editorial process.
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Benzecry, C.E. An opera house for the “Paris of South America”: pathways to the institutionalization of high culture. Theor Soc 43, 169–196 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-014-9214-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-014-9214-7