Renee Lapp Norris, "Opera Parody Songs of Blackface Minstrels (1844–1860)" (A-R Editions, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network

Episode: Renee Lapp Norris, "Opera Parody Songs of Blackface Minstrelsy (1844–1860)"
Host: Kristin Turner
Guest: Renee Lapp Norris
Date: December 10, 2025

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Overview

This episode of the New Books Network features Dr. Renee Lapp Norris discussing her critical edition, "Opera Parody Songs of Blackface Minstrelsy, 1844–1860," published by A-R Editions. The book compiles 40 opera parody songs performed by blackface minstrels in pre-Civil War America. The discussion explores the complex cultural, racial, and class dynamics of minstrelsy and its intersection with opera, offering insight into a challenging, foundational, and deeply problematic American performance tradition.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins and Motivation for the Project

• Renee was drawn to opera parodies in minstrelsy after encountering a scholarly gap and was initially surprised at the intersection of these two seemingly disparate genres.
• She emphasizes the strategic aspect of opera parodies, used to expand minstrelsy’s audience beyond its early working-class male base to the middle and upper class.
  • "I think it was a gentrification of minstrelsy and that opera was part of that process. ... It was a very strategic move on behalf of the minstrels." (04:52 – Renee)

2. Structure of Minstrel Shows in the Antebellum Era (05:15–08:26)

• White men in blackface performed stereotypical representations of Black people.
• A typical minstrel show included music, dance, theater, and a variety/finale act.
• Troupes evolved over time, from four performers with simple instruments to large ensembles with horns and piano.
• By the postbellum era, some Black performers participated but still under the blackface minstrel format.

3. Distribution and Purpose of Sheet Music (09:13–11:34)

• Sheet music was published for home performance and as souvenirs, mainly in middle- and upper-class homes.
• There’s little evidence of amateur minstrel show troupes before the late 19th century.
• Profit from sheet music sales varied; sometimes benefiting troupes, more often benefiting publishers.

4. Timeframe of the Study: 1844–1860 (12:13–16:12)

• The focus on 1844–1860 reflects the evolution from single-song parodies to larger parody skits after 1860.
• The peak was 1848–1852, when "caricature parodies" relied heavily on blackface stereotypes, shifting thereafter to less caricatured or merely translated operatic works.

5. Critical Edition vs. Monograph: Why Publish the Music? (16:12–21:42)

• The critical edition allows scholars direct access to the music, not just description.
• Printings retain original, often highly offensive language for authenticity and scholarly accuracy, despite discomfort.
• "Publishing a book of minstrel show music was not an easy decision because it is so racist. … But I decided to do it because… without seeing the music… we’re getting an incomplete picture of what was happening in popular culture." (17:12–Renee)
• The series maintains an "urtext" approach—replicating originals exactly unless otherwise noted.

6. Performance Practices of Opera Parodies (26:38–29:50)

• Variations between troupes in vocal style and approach.
• Some troupes employed singers who could convincingly perform in ‘operatic’ style, complete with falsetto or soprano roles.
• Ensemble choruses were often added to operatic melodies.

7. Choice of Operas and Cultural Impact (29:58–35:49)

• Parodied works were largely popular at the time but are often obscure today.
• The Bohemian Girl was especially prevalent, with themes of class distinction and outsiderness resonating strongly.
• Minstrel parodies typically transplanted operatic plots into racist and derogatory contexts, e.g.:
  • "They’ll just take the original operatic lyric and then apply blackface stereotypes to it." (36:44 – Renee)
• Sometimes operas or their parodies were so simplified they may have served as beginner piano pieces, indicating broad domestic use.

8. Lyric Adaptation and Musical Simplification (39:54–43:41)

• Many parodies paralleled the original phrase structure and rhyme but used "minstrel dialect," an invented, exaggeratedly uneducated style.
• Occasionally, parodied lyrics were completely unrelated to the original, but this was rare.

9. Reception: The Need for Operatic Knowledge (44:23–46:10)

• Many parodies required audience familiarity with the original opera for the humor to work.
• Nonetheless, some parodies gained popularity independent of their source material, often due to broader cultural relevance (e.g., dance scenes).

10. Race, Class, and Politics in Operatic Parodies (46:50–50:31)

• Beyond race, opera parodies played into class aspirations and nativist sentiment, positioning minstrelsy as both a marker of "respectability" and a site of cultural Americanization.
• Songs were re-released as dance music, becoming part of mainstream, middle-class domestic culture.
• Parodies referenced other popular musicians, further embedding themselves in 19th-century popular culture.

11. Americanization and Irony (50:41–51:45)

• Minstrel performers explicitly and implicitly positioned themselves as creators of a new American musical style—ironically, by adopting both European opera and derogatory Black caricatures.
  • "The irony is that… they were using parodies of African Americans… to make their music sound American." (51:27 – Renee)

12. Challenges and Future Scholarship (52:55–55:01)

• Renee plans to study figures who crossed genre lines between minstrelsy, parlor song, and opera, as well as to explore 19th-century music publishing practices.
• The difficulty of accessing archival information and press coverage on non-famous figures remains a barrier.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the cultural strategy behind opera parodies:

  • "I had always thought of minstrelsy as sort of in a different social sphere than opera. But what I came to see… is that minstrels were being very strategic… attempting to widen their audiences." (03:23 – Renee)

• On the ethics of publishing racist material:

  • "There is no song that positively portrays black people or black culture. It’s uniformly derogatory… But without seeing the music… we’re really getting an incomplete picture of popular culture at the middle of the 19th century." (17:12 – Renee)

• On “respectability” and class aspiration:

  • "Minstrels were intentionally… advertising themselves as respectable. There's nothing offensive that happens in our theaters, and women and children are welcome." (48:35 – Renee)

• On the Americanization of European culture:

  • "They were using parodies of African Americans who were… this despised minority, oppressed minority to make their music sound American." (51:27 – Renee)

• On the persistent presence of problematic performance traditions:

  • "This is a particularly, I think, important and foundational aspect of American culture, but also is like, really American culture, you know, and it in all of its ugliness, you know, is definitely on display." (25:33 – Kristin)

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Important Timestamps

• 01:31–02:43 — Introductions; summary of book & goals (Kristin)
• 03:07–05:15 — Origin of Norris's interest; minstrelsy & opera overlap
• 05:48–08:26 — Anatomy of the minstrel show; evolution and reach
• 09:13–11:34 — Sheet music: purpose, presence, distribution
• 12:13–16:12 — Why end at 1860? Shifts in parody style and repertoire
• 16:12–21:42 — Decision to publish a critical edition; handling racist content
• 26:38–29:50 — Performance practice: singing styles and vocal types
• 29:58–35:49 — Operas chosen for parody; significance of The Bohemian Girl
• 39:54–43:41 — How lyrics and music were adapted/simplified
• 44:23–46:10 — Did parodies rely on opera knowledge?
• 46:50–50:31 — Class, respectability, and politics in opera parody songs
• 50:41–51:45 — Americanization and its ironies
• 53:21–54:26 — Next research directions: genre-crossing composers and publishers

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Conclusion

This episode offers a nuanced look at the strategic, class-conscious, and deeply racist practice of opera parodies in blackface minstrelsy, as well as the difficult scholarly work required to present, critique, and contextualize these materials. Both host and guest stress the continued relevance of this music for understanding American cultural history, while openly confronting its painful legacies.

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Transcript

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[Renee Lapp Norris]

Welcome to the.

[Kristin Turner]

New Books Network.

Hello, my name is Kristin Turner and this is New Books.

In Music, a podcast of the New Books Network.

Minstrelsy is often called the first American popular entertainment form. Minstrel shows presented musical, dance, and entertainment styles that continue to resonate in US.

Culture, and they also reflected the complex.

Contradictory, deeply prejudiced attitudes towards race that characterized antebellum America and are still part of American political and cultural discourses. Despite the voluminous scholarship on minstrel shows, there's relatively little work that deeply investigates the music of minstrelsy today. I'm talking to Renee Lapp Norris about her critical edition called Opera Parody Songs of Blackface Minstrelsy 1844-1860, published in 2025 by AR Editions as part of the Music of the United States of America series, which aims to help remedy this absence. Norris gathers 40 opera parody songs, originally published as sheet music, that illustrate different approaches to opera parodies by minstrel performers. She analyzes how minstrels parodied opera, what political and cultural agendas the music supported, and contextualizes the parodies within the history of antebellum minstrel shows. Thank you so much for joining me.

[Renee Lapp Norris]

Today, Renee thank you for having me. I appreciate the opportunity.

[Kristin Turner]

Well, I'm excited to talk to you about this project. So this is a difficult one. Anytime you talk about minstrelsy and deal with minstrel shows, it's tough. So why did you decide to do a critical edition? Songs that Appeared in minstrel Shows?

[Renee Lapp Norris]

My initial exposure to minstrel shows was through a graduate course in American music history. And I read an article for that class by Winans, who's a well known minstrel scholar, banjo player.

In which he mentioned the opera parody songs and said, you know, no one's really looked into these. And so that was sort of my first exposure to the topic. And I ended up writing my dissertation on the opera parody songs at the University of Maryland. I think initially I was taken in by the apparent incongruity between minstrelsy and opera. I had always thought of minstrelsy as sort of in a different social sphere than opera. But what I came to see through doing this edition is that minstrels were being very strategic and it wasn't an accident that they were parodying opera and they were attempting to widen their audiences. Many minstrels show scholars describe minstrelsy's earliest audiences as being working class and male. But by the middle, and that would have been in the 1820s, 1830s, by the middle of the 19th century, minstrel troops were performing for a full evening's.

Event and they were attempting to attract a middle class and upper class audience. And they were doing that because they knew that they needed to do so to ensure their longevity and to be competitive in a very competitive performance market. So.

Essentially, I don't like this word, but I think it was a gentrification of minstrelsy and that opera was part of that process. And so it was not an accident and it was not some sort of strange juxtaposition. It was instead a very strategic move on behalf of the minstrels to widen their repertory and therefore attract a larger group of people to their shows.

[Kristin Turner]

So why don't we start with talking a little bit about minstrel shows in the abstract, just to make sure that anyone who's listening to this, you might not be as familiar with this form, particularly as you are looking at it in the pre Civil War years. So can you just give us like sort of an overview of like, what did a minstrel show look like? Who went like you said, they were trying to bring a bigger audience by the 1840s, but who goes, what's the reputation? Sort of just give us that kind of overview.

[Renee Lapp Norris]

Yeah, we need to begin by saying that minstrelsy was created by. Usually it was white men who would paint their faces black and then act out stereotypes of black people and black culture.

There are minstrels, show scholars, who do a good job of showing, at least from the perspective of music, A certain hybridity between black culture and white culture at the beginning of minstrelsy. But as far as the lyrics and the visual depictions, Blackface was almost always very oppressive and discriminatory.

And that certainly continued into the 1840s. The Minstrel show itself was sort of invented early in the 1840s. And so it was sort of the standard description of four performers playing banjo, fiddle bones, which are castanets and tambourine instruments, that were somehow associated with black culture in many ways.

And then they would perform a show that began with a series of songs. And then in the middle would be some kind of, like, a variety act, Often maybe in front of a curtain. So that behind the curtain, the troupe was setting up for a final, Like a little short play or a farce that would occur for the final act of the show. And so there was dancing, there was singing, there was theater, all sort of wrapped into the minstrel show. Always performed in blackface, usually by white men in blackface.

And so there sort of are the standard narrative of n men and interlocutors. So there was the interlocutor, which was a sort of straight character, and then the n men, who would make fun of the interlocutor. That evolved over time. I don't see much mention of those characters in antebellum materials, But I think later on, they became standardized. And then also by the middle of the 19th century, we had the ensemble itself would expand to include horns and piano and more performers. And then in the post belem period, the ensembles became quite large, with dozens of performers. And in the postbellum period, there was also then more African American individuals who decided to join a minstrel troupe. Often it was sort of the only way to be a performer and to be on stage, but still maintaining the blackface stereotypes.

[Kristin Turner]

And these troops traveled widely, is that correct? All over the country. And I know Imwara specialist as you get to the end of the century. And a lot of minstrel troops by that time were concentrating on touring in the South. Was that always true, or was it more of a nationwide sort of phenomenon? Prior to the Civil War, most of.

[Renee Lapp Norris]

My work has been in the northeast, cities in the Northeast. So I actually haven't followed the tours as much. My materials are more the publications that Came from the minstrel troops. And they were largely based in New York and Philadelphia and Boston. But as you're saying, they did tour, and they toured as far west as San Francisco right after the gold rush, and then also in the South.

[Kristin Turner]

So that also brings up. You were talking about. Your sources were mostly sheet music. So why did they even publish sheet music? What did people do with it when they got it? Were they sitting at home performing these? Was this part of like an amateur minstrel show tradition? Like, what's going on with that sheet music?

[Renee Lapp Norris]

That's a great question, and it's difficult to know for sure. I believe.

That people did who owned pianos, which means that they had some wealth, you know, that they did purchase the sheet music and they did perform it at home, or at least they had it as maybe a souvenir at home. So there is some debate over, for example, in binders volumes, which are collections of sheet music that individuals would have. They would have their sheet music collection bound into a book. And many of the binders volumes don't include many minstrel show songs. But I guess it depends on, and this is another issue that minstrel scholarship needs to develop, is what exactly is a minstrel show song? Is it any song that uses dialect? Does it have to be comic? Can sentimental songs be minstrel show songs? So whether these binders volumes or any collection of sheet music that someone would have had in their home includes minstrel show songs depends in part on how you define a minstrel show song. But anyway, especially because of my work with these opera parodies, I really think that there was some presence of minstrel show songs in family parlors in middle class and upper class family homes.

I do not see in the middle of the 19th century much evidence for amateur troops. That seems to be a later 19th century phenomenon. But again, it's possible. Of course it's possible. And it's possible that people would have purchased the sheet music. Anybody who is literate, of course, would maybe purchase a sheet music to use in a bar or just for entertainment purposes outside of the theater. So I guess the best answer to that question is it's very difficult to know exactly who was buying this music and what they did with it after they bought it.

[Kristin Turner]

Did the receipts, like the profits from that sheet music, did it all go to the publisher, do you know? Or is part of this a way to make money for the individual minstrel troupes?

[Renee Lapp Norris]

There was a connection with the minstrels. So if a lot of the times a sheet music will advertise a minstrel troupe. So at least there was advertisement and there were some connections with publishers where the minstrel troupe or a minstrel manager would get some profit from a sheet music sale. But a lot of the sheet music was sold with just a title and no mention of a troupe. So I think probably each song was negotiated differently.

[Kristin Turner]

And why did you decide to stop in 1865 since there's definitely a continue to parody opera after 65?

[Renee Lapp Norris]

It's actually 60 that I set. There are opera parodies after 1860, but they seem to be more.

Parodies of like entire scenes or they're like opera parody skits rather than these discrete individual songs. The discrete individual songs continued. But if you look say at Kelly and Leon's minstrel Troupe, which was a postbellum troupe, they were performing entire operatic scenes or like little abbreviated versions of an entire opera. And there were other troupes that were doing that too. And so that's something a little bit different than just kind of doing a one off parody of an aria or a chorus, which is more of what my addition is.

I also just stopped at 1860 for the sake of convenience. I just needed to have an ending point. So 1843 I think is the. The beginning, which was the beginning of the minstrel show itself. And then 1860 just seemed to be a convenient stopping point. But the number of we have the most these discrete opera parody songs, which are again parodies of arias or choruses. There's a real prevalence of them from 1848 to 1852. Most of the songs in my edition were published during that four year period. And then after that there are just fewer of them. So I think that there must have been a trend, a sort of popular trend of opera parody right at mid century. In fact, some people in the press started to complain about it. They thought that the opera parodies were getting really silly and worn out. And so minstrel troops just sort of stopped doing that as much. And then also the parodies that I have found after between 1852 and 1860 are quite different in their approach than the ones between 1848 and 1852. So the ones between 1848 and 1852 I call caricature parodies in the edition because they parody an opera by using the blackface context, which is this oppressive portrayal of people of color as being. It's almost uniformly primitive, agrarian, animalistic. Sometimes, you know, the people are almost described in terms that would be used to describe animals and you know, the use of dialect to make the people appear uneducated so those kinds of portrayals are normal in opera parodies between 1848 and 1852. After that, the caricature becomes less used. And some of the opera parody songs I found are actually just an English language translation of the opera aria. And they're published by blackface minstrels. So they must have been performed by, I would assume, by blackface minstrels in blackface, but they don't use dialect. And they are just like the sheet music that you would see for the opera aria, but they're published under the name of a blackface minstrel troupe. And then there are other kinds of parodies as well. Like there's a song called Il Trovatore, which is from Verdi's opera Il Trovatore, but instead of parodying a song or an aria or a scene from that opera, it just makes fun of the Italian language by using Italianate sounding words. And so it's quite different from the caricature parodies that I described earlier. So I'm not exactly sure why or what happened, but it seems like there was a real change in how minstrels interacted with opera after 1852.

[Kristin Turner]

So, as you have demonstrated with your answers, and if anyone goes to look at this critical condition, they'll see you have, like, voluminous.

Big introduction, lots of notes, lots of critical commentary and stuff. Really, you could take it all and it could. It is a book, right? It just is surrounded with this, the. With music, and more music than you would get in a typical book. So why did you decide to do a critical edition rather than just writing a book with the same information?

What does the critical edition give you or scholarship about minstrel shows? Do you think that a book would not.

[Renee Lapp Norris]

So I've always felt, since the time that I wrote my dissertation, that writing about the music without looking at the music just doesn't make sense for this repertory. We needed to actually see the music. And so that's how I came to decide to do a critical edition instead of a typical book.

I have a lot to say about that. So let me just. If you don't mind, I'll just kind of break it down into a couple different topics. So, first of all, the decision to publish a book of Mitchell show music was not an easy decision because it is so racist. And there is no song that positively portrays black people or black culture. It's uniformly derogatory. And so to publish a collection of music that repeats the racism of the scores, it was a. It took me a long time to decide that that was okay. Well, and maybe it never is, okay? But it just took me a long time to decide to do it. But I decided to do it because, again, without seeing the music and just talking about what was happening, we're really getting an incomplete picture of what was happening in popular culture at the middle of the 19th century. And I wanted to give future scholars some tools, some resources to continue the research. And so that was a real motivator for me to publish the edition. Also, a lot of the parodies exist only as song lyrics, and so I needed to take the lyrics and set them to the music of the operatic aria. And so, obviously, that would require setting it in score so that we could see how the parody actually worked.

Another aspect that I'd like to mention at this moment is the decision that we made, myself and Musa, which is the series of critical editions that this book is published under. Musa is supported by the American Musicological Society. And within that society, there's a committee called the Committee on the Publication of American Music that works together to create this series of editions on American music. And everyone recognized that we needed a minstrel show edition because minstrelsy is such an important part of our history. But as you began this interview, you mentioned how complicated minstrelsy is and how complicated a subject is. And so.

We decided to present the language, even though it's deeply offensive today, as it was in the original sources, without any changes to the language in some current scholarship, for example, a word will be spelled with asterisks instead of letters to represent.

The racist word. We decided not to do that. So the language in the scores is as it is in the original sources.

And I thought about trying to.

Change the language a little bit to avoid repeating these deeply offensive terms. But it was just such a gargantuan task because there's so many offensive terms, and it was difficult to know which ones to change and which ones to keep. Musa as a series typically has a sort of ertext approach, which means reprinting exactly what the original score looked like. And if any changes are made, you need to note them in the critical report. So the critical reports would have gotten really unwieldy if I had, you know, change all those words. Now, maybe it would have been, you know, maybe if somebody else works with these materials, they would treat it differently. But this was the decision that we made for this edition.

Another, you know, issue is that not only the language but also the situations themselves are racist. So, you know.

A typical approach to parodying an opera would be to take, say, an. An operatic princess, someone who's a princess in the original opera, and then turn her into an enslaved person who works in a kitchen. So just that sort of recontextualization in itself is of course very racist, and so it's difficult to know.

Where to begin with changing the language and where to stop. And so anyway, all that is to say that I think we made the best decision that we could. And like I said, I do hope that the edition is useful for people researching in the future, in which case accuracy is important.

So.

I think that those are all reasons why and the process for publishing the music of Minshelsea.

The last thing I'll say is that the parody processes themselves are quite interesting. And despite the racism of minstrelsy, we also need to recognize that the minstrels were clever in their parody techniques and that each song has a different approach to parody within the, you know, boundaries that I've already mentioned as far as caricature parodies versus other types of parodies. So just being able to see those various processes of creating new versions of well known opera excerpts is interesting and I think we need to look at the music in order to really appreciate the variety of parody techniques that minstrels are using.

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[Kristin Turner]

I think you have really laid out the challenges of all minstrelsy scholarship, really all scholarship about race in the 19th century and early 20th century. The language is just. It's always a huge barrier. And it really doesn't get any better during the course of the 19th century. The black dialect that's used in minstrelsy is used in vaudeville, it's used in musical theater, you know, when you get into the later part of the century. So it's. And I think when you're talking about an addition like this, it's particularly difficult because there's not as much sort of scholarly language around it to kind of be able to pull it away and say, well, maybe I could.

You know, like you were saying, take some words out and replace them with sort of markers for those words when you're writing about it in a large scale monograph sort of format. But that's. It's really. Would be unwieldy and difficult and would not be part. Would not be in keeping with the Ortex ethos of a critical edition to do that in this context. So that makes those decisions all the more difficult and all the more.

Sort of difficult for the reader, for the person looking at. It's very much sort of reader beware, like, check your trigger warnings kind of thing, your content notes. Because.

This is a particularly, I think, important and foundational aspect of American culture, but also is like, really American culture, you know, and it in all of its ugliness, you know, is definitely on display in this. And I think that certainly my experience in talking to people who don't know about minstrelsy or even 19th century sort of approaches to high culture, to know that opera and minstrelsy was happening at the same time is a surprise to a lot of people. And so I think.

Looking at this particular repertoire really gives you an insight into minstrelsy that's different than if you had decided to do, I don't know, foster songs or.

Other kinds of minstrel songs that were not this sort of sub genre, these opera parodies.

So before we move on to talk about some of the individual songs that you worked on and sort of exactly what you're doing, I had.

I wondered.

You sort of bring this up sort of tangentially in your last answer. But I was wondering if you have a sense of what these sounded like. Like, what kind of voices did these people have? I mean, when they were singing these parodies, were they also parodying operatic vocal chambers? Were they. Were they being serious about what they were doing? Like, do you have a sense of that sort of, I guess, what you would call the performance practice of this work.

[Renee Lapp Norris]

Not much.

There are some press reviews and reports that describe some of the opera parodies. And I think it just depended on the overall aesthetic of the troupe. So not all troops sounded the same or performed with the same goals. And.

Some troops would have.

Like Christie's Minstrels, which was probably the most successful minstrel troupe at mid 19th century, really tried to walk a line, I think, between.

Being respectable and authentic, but also being silly and making fun. And so Christie's had a female impersonator, George Christie, in their troupe who was particularly well known to imitate female dancers that were touring the United States. Usually they were European dancers touring the United States. I don't know much about Christie's minstrels as far as their vocal approaches to the opera parody songs, but most Troops had a falsettist, you know, someone who would sing in a high range, and that person might have been performing if it was a soprano, or usually it would have been a soprano aria transposed down a little bit, perhaps. But there was one minstrel performer, his name was Maximilian Z O R E R and he came to the United States with a group called the Moravian Singers. And so they were not a minstrel troupe, it was just a concert troupe, a vocal concert troupe. But he left that troupe and joined a minstrel troupe and became well known as a prima donna. So he sang soprano roles in these opera parody songs, and he was well known to sing them well.

So there are a few reports of.

People who were singing in a higher range in an operatic style.

Generally speaking, though, I think it's quite possible that they would have transposed the melodies into a range where they could sing them, and they typically would add a ensemble chorus somewhere at the end. So the beginning of the opera aria would just, you know, someone would be singing the operatic melody, and then the parody song would end with an ensemble chorus that the minstrels themselves created and arranged. So that. And that was just their typical practice. And so they sort of adapted the opera aria to their own typical practices.

[Kristin Turner]

So when you're looking across them, like all 40, I think there's 40 pieces in this about.

Do you see that? I don't know, are there commonalities to the types of operas they are choosing to parody? Are there commonalities in, I don't know, plot lines, you know, all of that stuff, or, you know, how do you think they chose what to parody?

[Renee Lapp Norris]

Yeah, I'm so glad you asked that question. Because the operas themselves are very interesting and they could be a whole study on their own. They're not operas typically that are well known today, and they're not. They're by.

Composers who also are perhaps not well known today. And so they've kind of fallen out of the repertoire. And I have to wonder if the operas that were parodied would have had a similar place in antebellum culture as musicals do today. That's a difficult thing to sort of know for sure, but Verity's operas were such a shock to audiences in Europe and in the United States because they were and just kind of a whole different sound than what listeners were used to hearing as far as not only the plots but also the singing styles. And so we kind of think of Verity as being like normal, but it wasn't. So in the 19th century, the singing was, like I said, perhaps more like we would consider a musical today. So some of the operas were a wonderful one called the Bronze Horse, Le Cheval de Bronze by Auber, another one by Aubert's Fra Diavolo. And they have sort of wonderfully imaginative plots. The Bronze Horse is about.

It takes place in China, so the heroine is Chinese and she rides a bronze horse to Venus where she meets her lover.

It's a happy ending. So just that kind of plot is not unusual for 19th century opera.

It's called a fairy opera. And so these fairy operas, I think, were pretty popular.

Among the sort of standard Italian opera repertory for the time period. Only Bellini's La Sonambola was parodied. And as well known.

Or was very well known in the United states in the 19th century. Another opera that was parodied frequently on and off the Minstrel show stage was Michael William Balfe's the Bohemian Girl.

So as far as how minstrels chose these operas, I think that they chose what was popular, and so they were looking at sheet music sales and what people were listening to, and then chose to parody that again. I think that their goal was to sort of ride on the coattails of an opera's success, to suggest their parity with opera, that they could do this too, and to help to widen their audiences.

[Kristin Turner]

Well, I would love to talk about Bohemian Girl. That opera is great. It is ubiquitous. It is everywhere throughout the 19th century. I've often said I need to write an article about why that opera was so popular because it was huge. And now I don't know if anyone ever does that opera anymore, but certainly most people have never even heard of it. But I don't think you could be alive in the 19th century and not know that opera. And in fact, I think it's true that there's more parodies in your critical editions of something from Bohemian Girl maybe than in any other opera. So I would love to ask you, why did people like that opera so much? But also, perhaps you could use, if you could talk a little bit about, like, what did they do with this opera, with these numbers and these operas that they parodied? Like, what? Actually, you know, let's get into the nitty gritty. What's happening with these parodies?

[Renee Lapp Norris]

So to get to your first comment, one observation I make in the edition is that the Bohemian Girl.

So there's an aristocratic father. I think he's a count and he's a widower, and he has a daughter. And she's kidnapped by gypsies when she's 12.

And then she has a dream when she's maybe 18 where she remembers sort of her former life. Maybe she's younger than 12. She must have been younger than 12. But anyway, as a child, she was abducted by gypsies. And then she has a dream where she remembers her former life. It's probably the most famous song from the opera. It's called I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls.

And then while she is a gypsy, she falls in living with a gypsy, she essentially becomes a gypsy, falls in love with another gypsy named Thaddeus. It turns out that he's actually a commissioned officer in the Polish army. And so.

I think it's about class distinctions and how.

It was inappropriate for this aristocratic woman to marry a gypsy. But fortunately, he's not a gypsy. He's a commissioned officer in the Polish army. And so it just sort of repeats minstrelsy all over again within the context of that plot, where the gypsies would be the equivalent of the sort of outsider culture.

The people you don't want to be and then the aristocrats. And so it's just sort of repeating the hierarchy and the patriarchy of. Of the culture, which was comfortable at the time. And I guess that's partly why it was so well liked.

But, yeah, people have talked about how really horrible the lyrics are as far as, like, from a compositional perspective that the lyrics and the music aren't great. But there is something about the opera as a whole that just seemed to work really well. Okay, so as far as how minstrels would actually parody a piece of. So that piece is a great example because there are seven songs from the opera that are in the edition as parodies that were performed by minstrels. And typically what they do is exactly what I said earlier. So they'll just take the original operatic lyric and then apply blackface stereotypes to it. And so I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls was sung by the gypsy princess, and she becomes a house kitchen servant in the parody. And so instead of aspiring to.

Marble Halls and this beautiful environment, she just is happy that she lives and works in the kitchen. So it's this sort of recontextualization of the original in a blackface context. And that's applied to all seven of the parodies that I mentioned from the Bohemian Girl. And they would have been performed individually, especially I Dreamt I Dwelt in Kitchen Halls, which is the parody would have appeared in the beginning of a minstrel show, which, as I said earlier, was usually a series of songs. So, like a concert.

But there's also an entire, and this is unusual, early in the antebellum period, there's an entire.

Skit based on the Bohemian Girl called the Virginian Girl. And it was created another person like Maximilian Zorrer, who crossed between opera and vocal concerts and minstrelsy. His name was Nelson Knees, and he actually performed as the captain of the guard in the premiere of the Bohemian Girl in New York in 1843. I think that was in the fall. And then By March of 1844 the following year, he had mounted this skit of the entire opera called the Virginian Girl. And so all seven songs that appear individually in sheet music also appear on playbills for that show. But like I said, that's unusual. Usually I have just sheet music or songs or texts for individual songs, not for complete skits from the early from the antebellum period.

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[Kristin Turner]

So did all of these really keep the music completely intact? Or did they? Or do you see evidence that they maybe needed to make the music a little less difficult to sing or, I don't know, change arrangements, that kind of stuff? Or did they just take the piano vocal arrangements that were already out there for these operas and just slap new text into them?

[Renee Lapp Norris]

There's a mixture. So some are exactly like the operatic original, which we should mention. Katie Preston talks about this in her book Opera on the Road. A lot of times English language versions of European operas have already been arranged and so.

Recitative might be replaced with spoken dialogue, for example, for the English language version of an Italian opera. Or there could be some simplification where there are maybe there's some polyphony in the vocal lines that might just turn into homophony where just melody and accompaniment or a complex ensemble number where there's maybe eight different parts is simplified to just four different parts. So those kinds of arrangements already were happening as the opera aria or chorus was being arranged for the English language audiences. So sometimes minstrels just worked with that arrangement, but sometimes they made them even more simple. And in fact, the seven parody songs from the Bohemian Girl are so simple that I wonder if they might have been used for like beginning piano students or something. They really seem to I'm a pianist and so they seem to me to be pieces that are appropriate for someone teaching beginning piano lessons. For example, instead of a wide left hand arpeggio, all the pitches are put under the hand so you don't have to change your hand position. So if that's true and these parody songs were used for beginning piano students, that just again suggests who the audience was for this music and how ubiquitous it was and how people were not only buying it and performing it at home for an evening's entertainment, they might have been using it as teaching pieces as Sort of like the novelty pieces that piano teachers use to give their students something. Something sort of fun and popular to work on.

So it runs the gamut. There are these very simple arrangements of the Bohemian girl song. And then there's more complicated arrangements that are very much like the originals.

[Kristin Turner]

How about. Are there instances where the new lyrics, the minstrel lyrics, we might call them.

Completely stray away from anything resembling the original? Or are these mostly more closer parodies?

[Renee Lapp Norris]

Yeah, again, there's both. And I would say mostly they're close parodies. And so the phrase structure, the rhyme of the original, is maintained in the minstrel parody. And so it's really just like a contra facta that makes fun of the original by using the sort of uneducated language and minstrel dialect. And we should mention that minstrel dialect is not meant to.

Sound like.

Black vernacular English. It's simply an invented dialect that the minstrels use to sound uneducated. I think there's only one I can think of where the parodied lyrics have nothing to do with the original.

And that's a song that is an interesting song because it lasted into the 20th century. It's called the Virginia Rosebud. And it includes a quote from the Overture to the Bronze Horse, which is that opera I mentioned earlier. And it just sounds like horses galloping. But the actual song is about a father whose daughter has died. And which has nothing to do with the plot of the opera. But that's unusual. Usually the parodies will follow pretty closely. The melodies, the phrase structure and the meaning, the plot of the originals.

[Kristin Turner]

So from the point of view of the listener, do these parodies work if you don't know the original? I guess I'm trying to get at how educated do you think the listeners were in opera. Because it was a popular form of entertainment at the time. It was not this very sort of highbrow, extremely peripheral kind of art form the way it is now. So do you have a sense of that?

[Renee Lapp Norris]

Again, I think sometimes knowledge of the original is absolutely essential. Or the parody makes no sense at all. And then there are some for which the opera was not successful and not well known. But the parody was. And specifically, there were two parody songs that came from William Henry Fry's opera Leonora, which is a famous example of he's born in the United States, was writing an opera in an Italian sort of tradition. And it was sort of hyped up as being the first grand opera or one of the first grand operas. Unfortunately, it just wasn't successful.

But, yeah, These two parody songs were successful, and I think that's because they could be relevant outside the plot of the opera. So one of them in particular is about a ball. It's called the Fancy Ball. And balls were reported on in the press. They were like big events. And so if someone hosted a ball at their home or in their community, there would be a write up of it in the Herald, for example, in the newspapers.

And there's also evidence.

Within African American communities dancing being really important and encouraged and even in contexts that would mimic white dancing. And so this parody, the Fancy Ball, could be successful apart from the original opera because it had this other connection to popular culture through dance.

So I think most of the time it was very helpful to know the original, to really appreciate the parody or to get the parody. But there are exceptions to that where a song could be popular apart from, you know, knowledge of the original.

[Kristin Turner]

Minstrelsy is always about race to a certain extent, like it just is. But there's a lot of scholarship that talks about minstrelsy as being about class as well. There's scholarship that talks about how as you get closer to the Civil War, minstrelsy becomes more and more anti abolitionist.

In political character. And I'm wondering if, do you see that those other kinds of political currents in the opera parody songs as well?

[Renee Lapp Norris]

Yeah, I think to an extent the opera parody songs were an opportunity for minstrels to demonstrate parody, that they were as good as these European touring stars. And that had resonance in a society that was just.

Building itself and trying to distinguish itself as a US Society instead of a European based society. And in a time period when there was a lot of immigration, this sort of nativism was an important political ideology at the time. And so I think that that was part of the appeal of the parody songs. And then they do. Even though I describe the operas as being sort of well known and popular, they certainly inhabited a different social sphere than minstrelsy typically would have. And so I think minstrels knew and were intentional about doing some class crossing with the opera parodies. And they also used them to demonstrate that they were respectable. And respectable was a sort of buzzword at the time, and it was part of a middle class aspiration was to be perceived as respectable. And that could mean everything from the furniture in your. To the music that you bought and played at home to the sorts of events that you attended at night. So all of those things would build this respectability. And so minstrels were intentionally, and they use the word respectable in their advertisements, advertising Themselves as respectable. There's nothing offensive that happens in our theaters, and women and children are welcome. And so that kind of language was really common by the middle of the 19th century for minstrel troops that were successful. And I think that they did have that wider middle class audience.

And then the parodies also, they just sort of opened the door to many other aspects of society. So they're not just about, you know, parodying opera. So, for example, some opera parodies were so popular that they were also published as in dance arrangements, like in a quadrille set. And so social dancing, like I said earlier, was really a popular, respectable thing to do. Quadrilles would be part of a middle class, respectable experience. And so the fact that minstrel songs in general were published as quadrilles and that parodies were part of that again suggests this middle class ness that minstrels were trying to inhabit at the time. And then they also refer to other popular singers like Henry Russell's music comes up sometimes in minstrelsy. And.

Jullian, the conductor from France who took this huge orchestra to the United States, he's mentioned several times in minstrel show texts and parodies. So.

It'S not just minstrels parodying opera. It's sort of like a gateway into looking at many other aspect of popular culture in the 19th century.

[Kristin Turner]

Do you think that minstrels were thinking also in terms of, you know, in these parodies they were somehow kind of Americanizing opera or were at the beginning of creating an American musical style as well?

[Renee Lapp Norris]

Yeah, they actually said that. So, yeah, that is what they were trying to do. Yeah, yeah.

[Kristin Turner]

So, yes, there's this constant thing in the 19th century about American performers saying, and now this is American music. I have done it, I have found it, you know, and, and it was so often taking European music and doing something to it to, to make it American. And there was always someone there saying, it's too European, it's too American to this, it's too that. So, yeah, I'm not surprised that they were part of that.

[Renee Lapp Norris]

The irony is that they, they were using parodies of African Americans who were, you know, sort of this despised minority, oppressed minority to make their music sound American, you know, in quotes. And so it's just a bizarre cultural phenomenon.

[Kristin Turner]

Well, and that's what makes it so complicated, right? I mean, that it, it's, you know, if you were to go to Mars and talk to a Martian and say, this is how Americans worked out America, you know, white Americans worked out American culture, it really, you know, it's hard to explain.

And. But to Americans, it doesn't seem that way because we've been doing that, you know, for hundreds of years. I think most people are sort of acculturated to this is what it is. But if. If once you sit down and you look at some of this, you realize how. How in some ways it's. It is hard to square that circle of the way they're talking about enslaved people, black, you know, black people, and yet also talking about them as being sort of the fount of American style. Right?

Yeah. So it is incredibly complicated and difficult to talk about. And I think you do a great job in this, you know, trying. Trying to talk about those. Those issues while at the same time, you know, being true to the sources and not.

And not hiding what those sources are and what those sources say. So it's been great to talk to you about this. This enormous project, which I know, full transparency. I am on the committee of. On the publication of American Music. And I know that you've been working on this project for many, many years. So now that. That it is finally out in print, what are you working on now?

[Renee Lapp Norris]

Well, I'm interested in these individuals who seem to cross, you know, these genre barriers. So I mentioned Maximilian Zorrer and Nelson Kinise earlier. There are other people. Silas Steele appears as an arranger for sheet music for minstrelsy and for parlor song, and he's also a composer in both of those genres. So I'd love to know more about him. Alfred Sedgwick is another name I'd like to research. So I'm interested in these individuals who were very freely moving between these genres that today we tend to think as being so distinct, but they were being successful in all of them and creating new material and all of them. So I'd like to better understand that whole process. And also just the publication industry in the 19th century, which you alluded to earlier. How did it work? Work as far as, you know, who was the audience for purchasing sheet music and what did they do with it and who bought songsters and, you know, those kinds of questions I'm very interested in learning more about.

[Kristin Turner]

So, yes, questions that are incredibly difficult to answer because of the things the press does not cover so.

Well, I wish you good luck on those. I know from experience it can be very difficult to get information about.

Less prominent figures in the 19th century, particularly minstrelsy figures. They are not well covered in the press and we don't have a lot of archival evidence left. So I wish you great good luck. On that.

And I certainly perhaps one day we can talk about that research too, when it comes to fruition. But I really appreciate you being here. My name is Kristin Turner. This is New Books in Music, a podcast of the New Books Network. And I have been talking to Renee Lapp Norris about her critical edition called Opera Parody Songs of Blackface Minstrelsy 1844-1860, published in 2025 by AR Editions as part of the Music of the United States of America series. Thank you so much for being with me.

[Renee Lapp Norris]

Thank you, Kristin. It's been a pleasure.

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