Making an American Opera Career: Conductor May Valentine (1890–1974) and a Woman's Role(s) in the Business of Opera Available to Purchase

In October 1925, amid a twenty-six-week tour of Michael William Balfe's The Bohemian Girl, conductor and light-opera impresario May Valentine claimed to be a failure. “I am nobody,” she wrote to the production's financier in no uncertain terms, later adding: “I have played the game and lost.”¹ Though Valentine successfully managed multiple nationwide touring productions and received laudatory praise in the press following the establishment of the May Valentine Opera Company three years prior, mounting travel expenses, growing debts, and impending venue cancellations cast doubts on any future tours of the scale previously achieved. For Valentine, her financial ruin represented not only the potential end of her operatic endeavors, but also signaled the growing economic impracticalities of operating an independent, touring opera company in the 1920s. She continued: “When I started my first venture of promoting opera, I did it myself. . . . Performances I have given...