Opera at the Bandstand: Then and Now

In Opera at the Bandstand: Then and Now, George W. Martin surveys the role of concert bands during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in making contemporary opera popular. He also chronicles how in part they lost their audience in the second half of the twentieth century by abandoning operatic repertory.

Martin begins with the Dodworth bands in New York City from the 1850s and moves to the American tour of French conductor and composer Louis Antoine Jullien, bandmaster Patrick S. G...