Samuel Chotzinoff, David Sarnoff, and the NBC-TV Opera Theatre, Talk by Daniela Smolov Levy

The Silent Jewish Underscoring of Abridged English-Language Opera: Samuel Chotzinoff, David Sarnoff, and the NBC-TV Opera Theatre, Talk by Daniela Smolov Levy at Sonic Representations of Jewishness on Screen and Off at UCLA, April 19-21, 2026 The following narrative seems complete: the NBC-TV Opera Theatre (1949-64)—a television program offering abridged English-language versions of mostly well-known European operas and newly commissioned operas in English designed for TV—promoted a new type of accessible entertaining opera (Barnes, Rose, Ward-Griffin). The NBC Opera can thus be seen as part of the mid-century “cultural explosion” driven by Cold War politics as well as a continuation of the longstanding American tradition of “opera for the people.” But this is not the whole story. There was another important, but hitherto almost entirely overlooked, influence on the existence and methods of the NBC Opera: the Jewish background of its main personnel, including Samuel Chotzinoff and David Sarnoff. Drawing on memoirs, archival sources, and contemporary scholarship, I show how Chotzinoff’s experiences with the Yiddish theater and opera, as well as both his and Sarnoff’s upbringing in a Jewish (and Yiddish) cultural and political sphere, informed their motivations for, and approach to, adapting prestigious culture to maximally appeal to audiences. I thus argue that the NBC Opera’s overall aesthetic has a silent—but significant—Jewish underscoring. The transformation of the operatic sound of cantorial singing into the operatic voices of television opera in English can also be heard as a sonic representation of Jewish cultural and social aspirations, a metaphor for the assimilation of Jewish immigrants in America as they translated Old World traditions for a New World context. Daniela Smolov Levy is a musicologist who studies Jewish immigrants’ engagement with opera in the twentieth century, trends in the history of the democratization of opera in America, and the evolution of the Yiddish operetta. She is a Research Fellow at UCLA’s Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience, in addition to teaching at UCLA as well as at the University of Southern California and Occidental College. Daniela has given invited talks at UCLA, the California Institute for Yiddish Culture and Language, and the Jewish Music Forum. From 2021 to 2023, Daniela was part of the DYBBUK project, an interdisciplinary collaboration based at Tel Aviv University exploring turn-of-the-century popular Yiddish theater. Daniela is currently working on a book about the significance of opera for Yiddish speakers in early twentieth-century America. She holds a doctorate in Musicology from Stanford University, a Master’s degree in Piano Performance from New York University, and a Bachelor’s degree in Comparative Literature and Music from Princeton University. Her work has been published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of Musicology (forthcoming), Musical Quarterly, Journal of Synagogue Music, and Wagnerspectrum.