Lorenzo Da Ponte: from Don Giovanni libretto to first U.S. opera company
About that "probably unrivaled" claim in Baron's book (item above), specifying New Orleans' uniquely pioneering role "when the major cities on the East Coast... had none [of regular repertory operas]," here is a response from Mark Schubin:
Although operas were performed in various venues in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia earlier in the 19th century, the first major opera house that lasted in New York was the Academy of Music, which opened in 1854, and the first in Philadelphia was the still-extant Academy of Music there in 1857. The Boston Theater (later their Academy of Music) did its first opera in 1854, too.
Wikipedia says Mozart librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, at age 84, founded the New York Opera Company, the first opera house in the U.S. in 1838: "Owing to his lack of business acumen, however, it lasted only two seasons before the company had to be disbanded and the theater sold to pay the company's debts. It was, however, the predecessor of the New York Academy of Music and of the New York Metropolitan Opera." The building itself burned down soon after Da Ponte's death in 1838.
Urban planner John Greiner contributes this:
I wouldn't be at all suprised that New Orleans was probably one of if not the major cultural center not only in the 1840s and 1850s, but even later into the 1890s.
Jake Lee's painting of a Chinese opera house in San Francisco
Big cities now were not big cities then. New Orleans was the third largest city in the country in 1840, after New York and Baltimore, and was the fifth largest in 1850, after New York, Baltimore, Philadephia, and Boston. It was still in the top ten as late as the 1880s. The big midwestern cities (Chicago and Cincinnati) didn't really start to rise until the 1870s with the expansion of the railroads.
In addition, there are other factors, first wealth. New Orleans was a wealthy city, and a "party" city of long standing. There was a lot of money from the shipping trade up and down the river, and from overseas as a major port. Second, before the railroads — certainly in the 1840s and 1850s — it was who/how you could get somewhere.
It was easy to get to New Orleans on the river or by the sea, much harder to travel to some other cities until the railroads expanded (hence Adelina Patti having a private rail car for touring from the 1870s on). Players/performers/singers could get to New Orleans when they couldn't get to other cities.
In addition, another factor was who immigrated and where. New Orleans was always multi-cultural and was quite cosmopolitan for its time. The spread/populatarity of opera in a lot of cities came with the immigration of German and Italian immigrants who bought that culture with them. That didn't happen in places like New York (or Boston of some of the other cities) until the 1870s and 1880s. The eastern cities had bigger populations, but until the 1870s-1880s it was primarily the Irish and Scots who had immigrated and who did not have an opera and/or classical music tradition like we think of today.
Lastly, most of what we consider the big cultural institutions in the East didn't come about until the 1870s and 1880s, when community leadership pulled together to address the slum conditions in Eastern cities, where the majority of people were poor or even extremely poor.
And finally, a tenuous but irresistible bit of information: Chinese opera companies first visited San Francisco in 1852. Within a decade or two, there were four more-or-less permanent theaters in Chinatown. A PBS documentary tells how "as San Francisco became a recreation center, the Chinese seized opportunities to provide festive activities. In addition, an entire theater building was imported from China and erected in Chinatown to house the Chinese theatrical troupe."
