Samuel Barber’s A Hand of Bridge and Anxieties of the American Middlebrow

Abstract

Abstract This chapter examines Samuel Barber’s diminutive 1959 opera, A Hand of Bridge, as a case study of American operatic representations of the midcentury middlebrow. The piece’s status as an outlier in Barber’s oeuvre serves as the entry point for a close reading of the opera as an intentioned critique of mid-twentieth-century American culture and, more specifically, middlebrow intellectualism. To shed light on the opera’s particular musical style and au courant topicality, frameworks underpinning Weimar Era Zeitoper are applied to A Hand of Bridge and comparisons are drawn to other American operas that address similar themes. The chapter concludes by considering broader cultural trends of American midcentury anxiety relevant to the opera.