Hammerstein, Oscar, I b. May 8, 1847 (?); Stettin (Pomerania), Prussia d.August 1, 1919; New York City
German American opera impresario, composer, and producer; builder of numerous opera houses and vaudeville theaters. Hammerstein was the oldest of five children of a German-speaking Jewish middle-class family.
His mother encouraged his musical interests, and he learned to play several musical instruments. Opera became his great passion at an early age. When his mother died, he ran away from home to Hamburg and sailed to New York in steerage, arriving there in 1863 or 1864. He began to work in a cigar factory and in 1874 he founded the U.S. Tobacco Journal, a tobacco trade publication. The machines he invented for the tobacco industry earned him a large fortune. These inventions, the trade journal, and successful investments in real estate yielded the proceeds necessary to finance a succession of opera houses and opera companies that he founded in New York, Philadelphia, and London. His theater building laid the foundation for Times Square and New York City’s theater district. Hammerstein staged the usual Italian opera repertoire, but he also introduced the United States to contemporary, sometimes controversial, opera and performances by the most important opera singers of his time. He bankrolled his opera productions with the profits from vaudeville shows and Broadway productions like Victor Herbert’s operetta Naughty Marietta (1910). It was Oscar Ham- merstein’s aim to present opera at affordable prices. As he paid his employees high salaries, his efforts proved financially disastrous again and again, and he died almost bankrupt.While still in the tobacco industry, Hammerstein had moonlighted managing different German theaters before he built the first theater of his own, the Harlem Opera House, on 125 Street in 1889. In all he founded eleven opera houses and vaudeville theaters during the next twenty-five years, most notably the Manhattan Opera House (1906), meant to compete with the Metropolitan Opera for the best opera productions in New York City.
Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera House—opening with Vincenzo Bellini’s I puritani (1906)—held its own with the Metropolitan Opera for four years. However, in 1910 Hammerstein sold his shares to the latter for $1,200,000, promising not to produce opera in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, or Chicago within the next decade. He moved to London and invested the money in creating the London Opera House, challenging the established Royal Opera at Covent Garden. After only two seasons his opera theater went bankrupt, and Hammerstein returned to New York.
Oscar Hammerstein composed music himself, but his operettas The Kohinoor (1893) and Santa Maria (1896) were not lasting successes. Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960), the lyricist and producer who collaborated with Richard Rogers in creating numerous successful Broadway musicals, was his grandson.
Marina Arnold
See also Kunwald, Ernst; Muck, Karl; Music (American), German Influence on
References and Further Reading
Cone, John Frederick. Oscar Hammersteins Manhattan Opera Company. Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1966.
Hammerstein, Oscar, III. “Oscar Hammerstein (1847-1919).” Jewish Virtual Library. At http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/biography /hammerstein.html (cited August 27, 2003).
Sheean, James Vincent. Oscar Hammerstein I: The Life and Exploits of an Impresario. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956.