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Genre, Class and Gender in a Suffragist Operetta: Melinda and Her Sisters (1916) at the Waldorf-Astoria
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 August 2023
Abstract
Alva Belmont and Elsa Maxwell's Melinda and Her Sisters (1916) is a little-known work promoting women's suffrage, which was publicly performed only once in New York City. It was advertised as an operetta, a decision which minimised its overt stylistic and functional similarities to other genres of popular musical theatre from the period, namely, musical comedy and pageantry. Framed through Jeffrey Kallberg's concept of genre as a ‘gesture of labeling’, this article asks what could be gained – artistically, financially and politically – by Belmont and Maxwell's invocation of operetta and by their disavowal of other appropriate genre alternatives. I argue that the strategy reflects their fundraising priorities, the attitudes of their intended audience, and the social, political and artistic climates that constrained women's activities. This case study offers genre as a productive lens through which to interpret gynocentric musical production and performance.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
1 This article is the product of postgraduate research conducted at Tufts University (Medford, MA, USA) under the direction of Stephan Pennington. I presented earlier versions of this research at the Darkwater Women in Music Festival (Pembroke, NC, USA, March 2020) and the virtual meeting of the Southeast Chapter of the American Musicological Society (October 2020). I am grateful to the attendees at these events for their generative questions and discussion. I extend special thanks to Annegret Fauser, Melinda Latour, Stephan Pennington, Kristen Turner and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their generous suggestions and comments on this article.
2 Mrs O.H.P. Belmont, Melinda and Her Sisters (New York, 1916), 8.
3 ‘Crossed the Ocean to Compose an Operetta’, New York Times (23 January 1916).
4 Belmont began cultivating her celebrity not long after her first marriage to William K. Vanderbilt in 1875; see Hoffert, Sylvia, Alva Vanderbilt Belmont: Unlikely Champion of Women's Rights (Bloomington, 2012), 24–9Google Scholar. Newspapers from many major East Coast cities – Boston, New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, DC – and as far west as Detroit reported on the project. The New York Times showed the greatest interest, printing articles about Melinda roughly twice a week from December 1915 to February 1916.
5 In 2003, the Preservation Society of Newport County (PSNC) in Rhode Island, USA mounted a notable public revival of the work as part of its 75th anniversary celebrations. Additionally, an unknowable number of private performances may have been given following the publication of the score, which was available for purchase for $2.10 (USD) from the Congressional Union. The recurring advertisement in its weekly publication, The Suffragist, declared that ‘Every Suffragist should possess a copy of this enchanting work.’ In 2020, Melinda and Her Sisters was among the many works of suffrage drama scheduled for revival to commemorate the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution. The PSNC, this time in collaboration with the League of Women Voters, and the Parlour Opera Players in Boston, for example, were both planning to perform the work. Unfortunately, the global COVID-19 pandemic halted these plans.
6 Kallberg, Jeffrey, ‘The Rhetoric of Genre: Chopin's Nocturne in G Minor’, 19th-Century Music 11/3 (1988), 238–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 239.
7 Melinda was called a play only under very specific circumstances: when discussing the 1915 version, to refer to the script separately from the songs, or as a synonym for plot when discussing the characters or narrative events.
8 Because King makes no reference to Melinda elsewhere in his column, it is unclear whether the text of the photo's caption should also be attributed to him. King, Richard, ‘With Silent Friends: America and the War’, The Tatler and Bystander 59/766 (1916), 272Google Scholar.
9 Preston, Katherine, ‘American Musical Theatre Before the Twentieth Century’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, ed. A., William Everett and Paul R. Laird (Cambridge, 2008), 3–28Google Scholar, at 3.
10 Belina, Anastasia and Scott, Derek B., ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Operetta, ed. and, Belina Scott (Cambridge, 2019), 1–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 3, emphasis added.
11 Orly Leah Krasner, ‘Birth Pangs, Growing Pains and Sibling Rivalry: Musical Theatre in New York, 1900–1920’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, ed. Everett and Laird, 54–71, at 54.
12 Belina and Scott, ‘Introduction’, 3, emphasis added.
13 For examples, see Friedl, Bettina, ed., On to Victory: Propaganda Plays of the Woman Suffrage Movement (Boston, 1987), 343–61Google Scholar; Leslie Elizabeth Goddard, ‘“Something to Vote for”: Theatricalism in the United States Women's Suffrage Movement’ (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2001), 85–6; and Wood, Elizabeth, ‘Performing Rights: A Sonography of Women's Suffrage’, The Musical Quarterly 79/4 (1995), 606–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 637n21.
14 Sam Staggs, Inventing Elsa Maxwell: How an Irrepressible Nobody Conquered High Society, Hollywood, the Press, and the World (New York, 2012), 75.
15 Maxwell's composition has all the makings of a rag: the tempo, metre, abundant syncopation, chromaticism and four 16-bar strains that modulate to the subdominant in the third strain. Her ABCB pattern and the lack of repeats for each strain are unusual, however.
16 See Elsa Maxwell, R.S.V.P.: Elsa Maxwell's Own Story (New York, 1954), 64–8.
17 There appears to be no connection between Belmont's Dr Doolittle and author Hugh Lofting's Dr Dolittle, the children's book character appearing in 1920.
18 ‘Suffrage Opera Scores Immediate Success’, The Suffragist 4/9 (1916), 6.
19 Belmont, Melinda, 24.
20 ‘Mrs Belmont Hits Society in Operetta’, New York Times (28 December 1915).
21 All calculations of buying power throughout the article have been made with April 2023 data using the United States’ Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index Inflation Calculator, https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm.
22 ‘Suffrage Opera Tonight’, New York Times (18 February 1916).
23 A single ticket to the Metropolitan Opera's performance of Richard Wagner's Das Rheingold on the same evening cost between $3 and $7, while tickets to non-opera entertainments in New York City ranged from about $0.15 to $1.
24 United States, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, 1975), 168, D 779.
25 For exact figures on the wealth and poverty of Americans (nationally and by state), see United States Treasury Department, Office of Internal Revenue, Statistics of Income (Washington, 1918), 20–1, Table 2; 29, Table 5; and 79, Table 2a. For information on population density in New York state and the New York City Metropolitan Area, see United States, Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910: Number and Distribution of Inhabitants (Washington, 1918), 56, Table 36; and 74, Table 50.
26 ‘Mrs Belmont Hits Society’, New York Times (28 December 1915).
27 Staggs, Inventing Elsa Maxwell, 76.
28 For the development and evolution of operetta, see Richard Traubner, Operetta: A Theatrical History, rev. edn (New York, 2003).
29 Maxwell, R.S.V.P., 32.
30 ‘Crossed the Ocean’, New York Times (23 January 1916).
31 This was in Europe, not necessarily in the USA, where operettas were readily performed by opera companies throughout the nineteenth century. Preston, ‘American Musical Theatre’, 22–5.
32 Marion Linhardt, ‘Local Contexts and Genre Construction in Early Continental Musical Theatre’, in Popular Musical Theatre in London and Berlin: 1890 to 1939, ed. Len Platt, Tobias Becker and David Linton (Cambridge, 2014), 44–61.
33 Scott, Derek B., ‘Early Twentieth-Century Operetta from the German Stage: A Cosmopolitan Genre’, The Musical Quarterly 99/2 (2016), 254‒79Google Scholar.
34 Raymond Knapp, ‘Camping along the American Operetta Divide’, in The Cambridge Companion to Operetta, ed. Belina and Scott, 120–34.
35 Michela Niccolai and Clair Rowden, ‘Introduction’, in Musical Theatre in Europe: 1830–1945, ed. Michela Niccolai and Clair Rowden (Turnhout, 2017), ix.
36 Krasner, ‘Musical Theatre in New York’, 64.
37 Ralph P. Locke and Cyrilla Barr, ‘Patronage – and Women – in America's Musical Life: An Overview of a Changing Scene’, in Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons and Activists Since 1860, ed. Ralph P. Locke and Cyrilla Barr (Berkeley, 1997), 15–45.
38 Elsa Maxwell would later become one of the hotel's permanent residents. See her autobiography, Staggs, Inventing Elsa Maxwell, and Ward Morehouse III, The Waldorf-Astoria: America's Gilded Dream (New York, 1991), 92–106.
39 Len Platt, Musical Comedy on the West End Stage: 1890–1939 (New York, 2004), 2, emphasis original.
40 Platt, Musical Comedy, 20.
41 See ‘Interventions in the Politics of Gender and Sexuality’, in Platt, Musical Comedy, 104–25.
42 Belmont, Melinda, 27.
43 For New Woman caricatures in theatre, see Dassori, Emma, ‘Performing the Woman Question: The Emergence of Anti-Suffrage Drama’, American Transcendental Quarterly 19/4 (2005), 301–19Google Scholar.
44 Platt, Musical Comedy, 116.
45 C.M.S. McLellan, quoted in Platt, Musical Comedy, 116–17.
46 Belina and Scott, ‘Introduction’, 5.
47 Knapp, ‘Camping along the American Operetta Divide’, 125.
48 Belmont's audiences assuredly would have recognised each of these characters as borrowed from eighteenth-century plays. Mrs Malaprop is a well-to-do character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's 1775 play, The Rivals, who frequently mispronounced or misused words to comic effect. Mrs Grundy originated as an unseen but famously disapproving character in Thomas Morton's 1798 play, Speed the Plough.
49 Belmont, Melinda, 13.
50 The song in question is undoubtedly Mrs Malaprop's solo, ‘If “Ad's” Were True’, but the verse quoted was deleted before publication of the score.
51 ‘Whitman Suffrage Patron’, New York Times (12 January 1916).
52 Christopher Capozzola, ‘Charles Seymour Whitman’, in The Encyclopedia of New York State, ed. Peter Eisenstadt (Syracuse, 2005), 1699.
53 For biographical information on Belmont, see Hoffert, Alva Vanderbilt Belmont.
54 ‘Suffragists Make a Hit in Mrs Belmont's Opera’, New York Sun (19 February 1916).
55 A.P., , ‘Society and Stage in a Suffragette Operetta’, The Theater 23/181 (1916), 127Google Scholar.
56 Davol, Ralph, The Handbook of American Pageantry (Taunton, MA, 1914), 11Google Scholar.
57 Karen Blair, The Torchbearers: Women and Their Amateur Arts Associations in America, 1890‒1930 (Bloomington, 1994), 118. For additional discussion of pageant structure and style, see Taft, Linwood, The Technique of Pageantry (New York, 1921)Google Scholar, and Davol, The Handbook of American Pageantry.
58 Cameron, Rebecca, ‘From Great Women to Top Girls: Pageants of Sisterhood in British Feminist Theater’, Comparative Drama 43/2 (2009), 143–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
59 For further discussion and biographical information, see Blair, Karen, ‘Pageantry for Women's Rights: The Career of Hazel MacKaye, 1913‒1923’, Theatre Survey 31 (1994), 23‒46Google Scholar. See also National American Woman Suffrage Association, ‘Hazel MacKaye’, Official Program: Woman Suffrage Procession, 15–17.
60 Alice Paul, founder of the CU, may have been the link between Hamilton and MacKaye. She was a principal organiser of the Procession and had personally invited MacKaye to write the pageant, and she had also been active with the WSPU in London in 1909. When Hamilton's pageant premiered on 10 November, Paul did not attend because she had been arrested the previous evening for disrupting a banquet in the Lord Mayor of London's honour.
61 MacKaye, Hazel, ‘Pageants as a Means of Suffrage Propaganda’, The Suffragist 2/48 (1914), 6‒7Google Scholar. Shortly after publishing this essay, the CU convened a Committee on Plays and Pageants and appointed Hazel MacKaye as its chair.
62 ‘Marie Doro in Melinda’, New York Times (31 December 1915).
63 ‘Amateur Stars from Society, with Professional Assistance, Give a Operetta, Merry, “Melinda and Her Sisters” in the Cause of Suffrage’, Vogue 47/7 (1916), 148Google Scholar.
64 Dollie, the tragic actor, identifies as Iphigenia, whose legendary sacrifice to the gods at the hands of her father, Agamemnon, was dramatised by the Athenian tragedian Euripides in the fifth century BCE. Pollie, the social dancer, is called Orchesteria, a personification of the orchestra, ‘dancing space’ of Greek theatres. Belmont appears to have invented this identity to solve the problem of having only one Greek Muse of dance, Terpsichore, whom she had already paired with Nellie, the ‘Classic dancer’. What is meant by the remaining pairings is harder to interpret; Annie, the operatic singer, invokes Symphorosa, a Catholic widow martyred during the Roman emperor Hadrian's reign, and Bessie, the ‘silly’ musical comedy star, is Ariadne, the mythological Cretan princess, scorned lover of Theseus, who slew the Minotaur (with her assistance).
65 Belmont, Melinda, 33–4.
66 ‘$1,000 Gift to Suffrage: Mrs Belmont Helps to Finance Campaign for New Party’, The Washington Post (18 March 1916).
67 MacKaye, ‘Pageants as a Means of Suffrage Propaganda’, 7.
68 Blair, The Torchbearers, 139–40.
69 MacKaye, ‘Pageants as a Means of Suffrage Propaganda’, 7.
70 ‘Suffragists Make a Hit’, New York Sun (19 February 1916).
71 Even the insightful A.P. of The Theater, quoted above, dedicated three-quarters of their review to quoted dialogue, the cast and attendees.
72 ‘Society Satirized in Suffrage Opera’, New York Times (19 February 1916).
73 Woodworth, Christine, ‘“Equal Rights by All Means!”: Beatrice Forbes-Robertson's 1910 Suffrage Matinee and the Onstage Junction of the US and UK Franchise Movements’, Theatre History Studies 37 (2018), 209–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 212–14.
74 New York World (19 February 1916), quoted in ‘Suffrage Opera Scores Immediate Success’, The Suffragist 4/9 (1916), 6.
75 For discussion, see David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of the Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, 1990).
76 ‘Hazel MacKaye’, Who's Who in American Pageantry (Boston, 1914), 10.
77 The programme announces the zero-sum stakes in no uncertain terms. ‘Th[is] Pageant represents a battle between the working class and the capitalist class … It is a conflict between two social forces – the force of labor and the force of capital.’ Reprinted in Kornbluh, Joyce L., ed., Rebel Voices: An I.W.W. Anthology (Ann Arbor, 1964), 210–14Google Scholar.
78 Fishbein, Leslie, ‘The Paterson Pageant (1913): The Birth of Docudrama as a Weapon in the Class Struggle’, New York History 72/2 (1991), 197Google Scholar.
79 Krasner, David, ‘The Pageant is the Thing: Black Nationalism and The Star of Ethiopia’, in Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theatre, ed. C., Jeffrey Mason and J. Ellen Gainor (Ann Arbor, 1998), 106‒22Google Scholar.