When I think of music and the Fourth of July, Sousa marches inevitably come to mind. While I was growing up, my family often attended free concerts during the summer by the Dayton Philharmonic or the Dayton Municipal Band at the Diehl Bandshell in Island Park. Often these concerts were followed by fireworks, and those were always particularly impressive on Independence Day. “Stars and Stripes Forever,” of course, always concluded the Municipal Band’s special holiday concerts.

As Sousa was such an iconic American figure, Hollywood had to get into the act with a 1952 biopic starring Clifton Webb as The March King entitled—what else?—Stars and Stripes Forever!
El Capitan, which features one of Sousa’s best-known marches, previewed in Boston followed by a Broadway opening in 1896. It ran for more than 100 performances and featured De Wolf Hopper in the title role of Don Errico Medigua. Hopper, a celebrated musical theater star of the time, had his biggest success, however, performing the much-loved baseball poem “Casey at the Bat“ thousands of times!
The fifth of six wives of De Wolf was Hedda Hopper, the actress and gossip columnist. They were married for nine years, and their son William too became an actor and earned television immortality as Paul Drake on the early Perry Mason television series.

Sousa—El Capitan

Minnesota Opera
5 January 1974
Broadcast

Estrelda: Janis Hardy
Princess Marghanza: Emma Small
Isabel: Ellen Vincent
Don Errico Medigua: Vern Sutton
Señor Amabile Pozzo: Yale Marshall
Dom Luiz Cazarro: Michael Riley
Count Hernando Verrada: Clifton Ware
Scaramba: Peter Strummer
Nevado: Paul Neslund
Montalba: Timothy Peterson
General Herbana: Philip Ross

Conductor: William Huckaby

El Capitan can be downloaded by clicking on the icon of a square with an arrow pointing downward on the audio player above and the resulting mp3 file will appear in your download directory

In addition, more than 400 other podcast tracks are always available from Apple Podcasts for free, or via any RSS reader.

The archive which lists all Trove Thursday offerings in alphabetical order by composer was recently up-to-dated.

Christopher Corwin

Christopher Corwin began writing for parterre box in 2011 under the pen name “DeCaffarrelli.” His work has also appeared in , The New York Times, Musical America, The Observer, San Francisco Classical Voice and BAMNotes. Like many, he came to opera via the Saturday Met Opera broadcasts which he began listening to at age 11. His particular enthusiasm is 17th and 18th century opera. Since 2015 he has curated the weekly podcast Trove Thursday on parterre box presenting live recordings.

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