The Middlebrow Musical
Between Broadway and Opera in 1940s America
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP USA
- Date of Publication 30 September 2025
- ISBN 9780190265212
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages272 pages
- Size 237x167x23 mm
- Weight 549 g
- Language English
- Illustrations 10 B&W figures 700
Categories
Short description:
In a country divided by war and racism, a group of middlebrow critics believed that art could heal society by blending high art, folk, and popular culture, thereby uniting the separate audiences for each genre. Their work culminated in a new kind of musical theater that appeared on Broadway during the 1940s, including Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma!, Duke Ellington's Beggar's Holiday, and Kurt Weill's Street Scene. Ultimately, The Middlebrow Musical unsettles seemingly familiar concepts such as high art and pop culture, and invites readers to reconsider how past writers and musicians have invoked these categories toward civic ends.
MoreLong description:
Rattled by two world wars, ongoing discrimination, and economic calamity, a group of critics in 1940s New York sought to promote art that would do nothing less than heal the world. The primary obstacle to this project, they believed, was that American culture had splintered into factions, which in turn divided American audiences: highbrow art, which these writers regarded as obscure and elitist; folk art, which they found provincial and alienating; and popular culture, which they considered merely commercial. Blending these kinds of art, they argued, could draw together a fractured society into mutual understanding (if not necessarily agreement) by situating the most sophisticated ideas within longstanding expressive traditions, accessible to all. Their contemporaries called this culture ?middlebrow? and believed that its culmination appeared on Broadway.
The Middlebrow Musical straddles the study of popular musical theater and opera, and in so doing charts a new path through modernism. Through detailed archival work, this book uncovers the crucial critical networks that originally theorized a middlebrow approach to culture, beginning in the literary circles of Van Wyck Brooks and Archibald MacLeish, and radiating outward to major theater and music critics including Brooks Atkinson and Olin Downes. Their broad influence on theater becomes clear as this book follows three shows from their earliest conceptions to their opening-night reviews: Richard Rodgers's and Oscar Hammerstein II's Oklahoma!, Duke Ellington's and John Latouche's Beggar's Holiday, and Kurt Weill's, Elmer Rice's, and Langston Hughes's Street Scene. Each chapter features behind-the-scenes communications, which reveal how these Broadway writers explicitly deployed middlebrow theories to negotiate high-art aspirations toward operas, symphonies, and experimental theater; toward contemporary folk-music studies; and toward popular-culture accessibility, all with civic intentions of pulling disparate audiences together into a thoughtful reflection upon the modern, war-torn world.
While The Middlebrow Musical focuses on Broadway, it also offers new strategies for understanding the relationship between popular and highbrow culture during the early decades of the twentieth century. Compared to the experiments of high modernism, many of the works featured in this book have struck previous scholars as conservative or cautious. The Middlebrow Musical invites readers to take another look, to consider the forgotten principles that inspired these works, and to recognize them as equally daring and controversial contributions to twentieth-century art.
Situating the Broadway musical of the 1940s in the context of Van Wyck Brooks's 'middlebrow modernism,' Jamie O'Leary's lively The Middlebrow Musical considers how the amalgamation of 'folk art, high art, and popular culture' in Oklahoma! reverberated in three notable musicals produced later in the decade: Beggar's Holiday, Street Scene, and Finian's Rainbow. This thoughtful and ingenious a study marks an important contribution to our understanding not only of the aesthetics of the mid-century Broadway musical but of the time's larger cultural landscape.
Table of Contents:
"Damnably American": Defining the Middlebrow
Authentic, Autonomous, Popular: An Institutional Approach to Middlebrow Culture on Broadway
Heightened Realism
Jazz, Opera, and "In Between": Duke Ellington's Beggar's Holiday (1946) and the Black Middlebrow Tradition
"A More Human Development": Kurt Weill's Street Scene (1947) and the Integrated Musical
Conclusion: Further Steps Toward a Middlebrow Modernism
