Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Opera on television has often promised to democratize the art form by edifying adult viewers. And yet, some of the earliest operas on television focused on children, either as performers or audience members. One such work was Lukas Foss’s Griffelkin (1955), which was commissioned by NBC Television and told the story of a child devil who wreaks havoc on earth for his tenth birthday. This chapter examines how Griffelkin aligns with what the author calls the “family-friendly” ethos of early television, reinforcing idealized conditions of domesticity and family viewing inculcated in the 1950s. First, the chapter shows that, by focusing on mischievous fatherless children, Griffelkin served to reinscribe the traditional nuclear family by channeling postwar anxieties about male children’s agency and the subversion of traditional parent–child roles. Next, in its content and musical style, Griffelkin adopted a two-pronged mode of address, speaking to both children and adults in an attempt to develop a broad audience for opera gathered around the TV set. Finally, the chapter examines how, in being labeled a “fantasy,” Griffelkin bucked the trend for greater realism in both television and American opera, instead exploiting the medium’s technological possibilities to create impossible scenarios that both critiqued and reinforced societal norms. Ultimately, devoting attention to “family-friendly” operas on television may offer a new perspective on operatic historiography, seeing these works not as outliers, but rather central to both American opera and television history.</jats:p>