The opera audience as an ‘emotional community’

My paper for the USyd History PG Conference. Just an idea which may or may not fit into my thesis. I'm just going to push it out and see if it floats; if it doesn't, we'll sink it.

During Nellie Melba’s Australian tour in 1911 the writer of the women’s page in the Sydney Morning Herald recorded this comment:

Said one girl who was filling her ‘Thermos’ for her fifteenth visit… ‘Every time I see Melba I just feel as if I want to shout out “Thank you, thank you, thank you;” but when she comes on I can’t say a word, for feeling it here,’ with two hands pressed eloquently to her throat. (‘A Page For Women’, Sydney Morning Herald, 25 October 1911, p. 5.)

This girl was not some unusually highly-strung individual amongst an audience of polite and restrained people. Consider this description of a performance of La Boheme a few years later:

Saturday’s audience gave itself up whole-heartedly to the love-making in the first act,… and to the Christmas Eve revelry of the second, became engrossed in the quarrels and reconciliations of the third, and, in the last act, was obviously deeply touched by the sad death of Mimi, which is given such poignant emphasis by the music. There were not many dry eyes at the fall of the curtain. (G. De Cairos-Rego, ‘Grand Opera Season. Impressive Gala Performance. Melba Triumphs In “La Boheme”’, Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 23 June 1924, p. 4.)

In this paper I want to look at the concept of the opera audience as an ‘emotional community’. As a case study I will focus on the audiences of the 1924 Melba-Williamson Grand Opera seasons in Melbourne and Sydney.

(Read the rest here.)