"The diary of Anton Reiff, Jr. (1840-1916) is one of only a handful of primary sources to offer insights into the difficulties faced by a traveling opera company in nineteenth-century America. Reiff, who went on to have a long and successful musical career, had been working at the Bowery Theatre in New York before being hired to serve as musical director and conductor by the Pyne & Harrison Opera Troupe, a company run by the English sisters Susan and Louisa Pyne and their business partner, the tenor William Harrison. The ...
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"The diary of Anton Reiff, Jr. (1840-1916) is one of only a handful of primary sources to offer insights into the difficulties faced by a traveling opera company in nineteenth-century America. Reiff, who went on to have a long and successful musical career, had been working at the Bowery Theatre in New York before being hired to serve as musical director and conductor by the Pyne & Harrison Opera Troupe, a company run by the English sisters Susan and Louisa Pyne and their business partner, the tenor William Harrison. The grueling tour began in November 1855 in Boston and then proceeded to New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati where, after a three-week engagement, the company boarded a paddle steamer bound for New Orleans. It was at that point that Reiff started to keep his diary. Diligently transcribed and annotated by Michael Burden, Reiff's diary presents an extraordinarily rare view of life with a foreign opera company aboard a nineteenth-century steamboat as it made its way down the Mississippi River. Surprisingly, Reiff comments little on the Pyne-Harrison performances themselves, although he does visit the theatre in the river towns, including that in New Orleans, where he saw both the French opera and an evening's worth of entertainment at the Gaiety. Instead, Reiff focused most of his observations on other passengers, on the mechanics of the journey, on the landscape, and on the river towns and their residents, including those enslaved, whom he encountered whenever the boat tied up. Running throughout the journal is a thread of anxiety, for apart from the typical dangers of a river journey, the winter of 1855-1856 was one of the coldest of the century, and the steamer had many difficulties with river ice. Several historians have used Reiff's journal as source material, but until now the entire text has only been available in its original state in the diary, which is archived in LSU's special collections in Hill Memorial Library. As a primary source, the published journal will have broad appeal to historians and readers interested in antebellum riverboat travel, high-brow entertainment, and the people and places along the Mississippi River"--
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