The Middlebrow Musical: Between Broadway and Opera in 1940s America

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.

James O’Leary is the Frederick R. Selch Associate Professor of Musicology at Oberlin College and Conservatory.