Opera

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Opera

Since its inception in early seventeenth-century Florence, Italy, opera has been the dominant form of staged musical storytelling in the European musical tradition. During the last two centuries of its evolution, African Americans and persons of African descent have played an important role in its development as an art form.

African settings and characters were often included in the plots of early opera. Indeed, the first important opera, Claudio Monteverdi's Orfeo (1607), included a female Moor in the finale. Cleopatra was a common role in early opera, most notably in George Frideric Handel's Giulio Cesare (1724), as was the Carthaginian princess Dido in Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (1689), in numerous settings of Didone Abbandonata (as in Tommaso Albinoni's of 1725), and in later opera such as Hector Berlioz's Les Troyens (1858). Other operas from the standard repertory with an African setting or characters include Mozart's Die Zauberflöte (1791), Gioacchino Rossini's L'Italiana in Algeri (1813), Giacomo Meyerbeer's L'africaine (1865), and Giuseppe Verdi's Aida (1865) and Otello (1889).

African Americans have been active in opera as performers and singers since the early nineteenth century. In nineteenth-century America the boundaries between high and low musical cultures were not as rigid as they would later become. Like many of their contemporaries, black and white, trained singers often performed in minstrel and vaudeville shows, as well as in the concert hall or opera house. One of the first prominent African-American operatic singers was Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield. Born a slave in Mississippi but raised free in Philadelphia, Greenfield was known as "the Black Swan" and performed with a troupe of African-American opera singers in the United States, Canada, and England throughout the 1850s and 1860s. In 1854 Greenfield sang with tenor Thomas J. Bowes (1836–c. 1885), whom critics called "the American Mario" or "the colored Mario," after Italian opera star Conte di Candia Mario. Bowers, possibly the greatest American male singer of the period, chose "Mario" as his preferred stage name and refused to sing to segregated audiences or in concert halls from which African Americans were barred. Opera selections were also included in the program of the multitalented Luca family, a father and four sons who performed as vocalists, pianists, and violinists. After the deaths of the father, Alexander C. Luca, and one brother, tenor Simeon G. Luca, the three remaining brothers joined with the Hutchinsons, a famous abolitionist singing family, for a concert tour of the Midwest that advertised a program of "Humor, Sentiment, and Opera!" In the late 1860s and 1870s, the two Hyers sisters, Anna

Madah and Emma Louise, achieved renown for concerts featuring scenes from such operas as Verdi's Il Trovatore and La Traviata, and Gaetano Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. Another prominent singer, soprano Marie Selika Smith (c. 1849–1937), who named herself Selika after the African princess in L'africaine, performed in the United States and Germany during the 1870s and 1880s. One of the most important performers of this period was Sissieretta Joyner Jones, known as "the Black Patti"—after the great soprano Adelina Patti—whose celebrity was established in 1892 when she was asked to give a recital at the White House for President Benjamin Harrison. In 1896 Jones formed her own troupe, the Black Patti Troubadors, which featured her in operatic excerpts.

African Americans were barred from performing in major opera houses in the United States. As a result, many well-qualified singers either pursued careers in Europe or confined their performances to recitals and the concert stage. Newspapers and magazines from the late nineteenth century stated that black artists were frequently exploited by their white managers, who garnered their financial support from both the white and black communities. Generally, African-American singers could count on two or three years of concertizing before white audiences ceased to find them novel or exotic, which forced them to turn to studio teaching as a means of making a living. There were two notable exceptions to this rule: Jones, "the Black Patti," who, in founding her own troupe, extended her singing career by fifteen years; and Nellie Brown Mitchell (1845–1924), who debuted in New York and Boston in the 1870s and, after becoming the leading soprano for James Bergen's Star Concert Company, created the Nellie Brown Mitchell Concert Company in Boston in 1886. One of Mitchell's unusual achievements was her staging of a juvenile operetta called Laila, the Fairy Queen, with an ensemble of fifty African-American girls ages five to fifteen, at a Boston musical festival in 1876. Mitchell's concert company lasted approximately ten years, after which Mitchell turned to private teaching in the mid-1890s.

The first known African-American opera company was the Colored American Opera Company of Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., which staged Julius Eichberg's Doctor of Alcantara for enthusiastic audiences in both cities in 1873 and returned in 1879 with performances of Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore. Twelve years later Theodore Drury (1867–c. 1943), a highly trained tenor and impresario, founded his own company. Drury began by presenting operatic selections and expanded the company's repertory to include full operas at the turn of the century. From 1900 to 1910, as well as sporadically into the 1930s, the Theodore Drury Opera Company appeared in New York, Boston, Providence, and Philadelphia. Works performed included Georges Bizet's Carmen, Charles Gounod's Faust, Verdi's Aida, Pietro Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana, and Ruggiero Leoncavallo's I Pagliacci. The productions were advertised as social affairs attended by prominent social figures and concluded with supper and dancing to Walter F. Craig's orchestra.

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Mary Cardwell Dawson (February 14, 1894–March 19, 1962) was a teacher of voice, a pianist, and the founder and director of the National Negro Opera Company. She grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, her family having moved there from Meridian, North Carolina, early in her life. Her musical training included study at the New England Conservatory, in Boston, and at the Chicago Musical College. She taught voice, at first in a private studio and later at the Cardwell School of Music, which she established in Pittsburgh in 1927. In the 1930s, she toured as director of the Cardwell Dawson Choir, a prize-winning organization that made appearances at the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago and at the New York World's Fair. Dawson served as president of the National Association of Negro Musicians from 1939 to 1941.

After presenting Aida at a National Association of Negro Musicians convention in the summer of 1941, Dawson officially launched her National Negro Opera Company at Pittsburgh in the following October with a production of the same opera. The star was La Julia Rhea, one of many black singers who found with this company an otherwise unavailable opportunity to sing opera in the United States. Other cast members were Minto Cato, Carol Brice, Robert McFerrin, and Lillian Evanti. During its twenty-one years, the company had a difficult existence financially, but it mounted productions in Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. The Washington production of La Traviata starring Lillian Evanti drew audiences totaling more than thirty thousand and was favorably reviewed. Dawson spent her final years in Washington, D.C.

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One unique contribution that African-American singers made to vocal literature was the development of the concert spiritual, a fusion of melodies derived from African-American religious chanting with the harmonies of the European art song. For many African-American vocalists, the first exposure to classical singing occurred in church or while listening to a recital of sacred music and spirituals. Because they were not allowed on the opera stage, many classically trained African-American singers became primarily known as recitalists, and their repertories frequently included spirituals as well as European art songs and arias. One of the first recitalists to come to prominence in the twentieth century was the tenor Roland Hayes. Among those who followed in his path was contralto Marian Anderson. Initially barred from the operatic stage in the United States, Anderson became a peerless recitalist with a wide repertory of arias, songs, and spirituals. The most dramatic moment in her career occurred in 1939, when, after being barred from performing in a Washington, D.C., concert hall, Anderson gave an outdoor recital—introduced by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes—on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Nevertheless, major opera houses remained inaccessible to African Americans for another fifteen years. Other prominent African-American recitalists of the middle decades of this century included sopranos Inez Matthews (1917–1950), Ellabelle Davis (1907–1960), and Dorothy Maynor. Catherine Yarborough (1903–1986) appeared in the United States only in musical comedy but sang the role of Aida in Europe, where she was known as Caterina Jarboro. In the next generation, leading singers included Muriel Rahn (1911–1961), Carol Brice (1918–1985), and contralto Louise Parker (1926–1986), a favorite of both Leopold Stokowski and Paul Hindemith.

Outside the concert hall, African-American singers were often confined to operatic roles in works that had all-black casts such as Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts (1933) and George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1935) or "ebony" versions of Carmen and other opera classics. Bass Paul Robeson and baritones Jules Bledsoe and William Warfield (1920–), each used the character of Joe in Jerome Kern's Show Boat (1927) to launch their careers. Todd Duncan and Donnie Ray Albert (1950–) also began by singing the role of Porgy in the Gershwin opera. Other singers, such as Lawrence Winters (1915–1965) and Charles Holland (1910–1987), the first black principal to sing at the Paris Opera (he debuted there in Aida in 1954), performed extensively in Europe.

Although some major companies, such as the New York City Opera, cast African Americans as early as the 1940s, the Metropolitan Opera in New York City did not drop its color line until 1955, when Marian Anderson sang Ulrica (traditionally a dark-skinned role) in Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera. Louis Gruenberg's Emperor Jones, which calls for a character of African descent in the title role, had premiered at the Met in 1933; at the time, white baritone Lawrence Tibbett was cast over Paul Robeson, who was an obvious candidate for the part. Anderson's debut at the Met was soon followed by the appearances of baritone Robert McFerrin Sr., and coloratura soprano Mattiwilda Dobbs. In 1954 Dobbs, who had been signed two years earlier by La Scala in Milan, Italy, performed in Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos at New York's Town Hall before making her debut at the San Francisco Opera in 1955 and at the Met in 1956, where she sang Gilda in Verdi's Rigoletto. In 1958 soprano Gloria Davy (1936–) became the first African American to sing the role of Aida at the Met.

The engagement of African-American operatic singers without any limitation to a select number of traditionally dark-skinned roles did not fully occur with major opera companies before the 1960s. The career of Mississippi-born Leontyne Price marks the acceptance of the African-American diva by the operatic establishment in the United States. In 1955 Price's televised performance of the title role in Giacomo Puccini's Tosca caused a sensation; she debuted at the Met six years later, after having established a successful career in Europe. In 1966, Price opened the new Metropolitan Opera House at New York's Lincoln Center in a role especially written for her in the world premiere of Samuel Barber's Antony and Cleopatra. (The production was choreographed by Alvin Ailey.) From 1955 to 1965 ten African-American singers debuted at the Met: Price, Anderson, McFerrin, Davy, Dobbs, Grace Bumbry (1937–), George Shirley (1934–), Martina Arroyo (1939–), Felicia Weathers, and Reri Grist (1932–), who had appeared in the original cast of Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story in 1957. Other black singers who came to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s were Margaret Tynes (1929–), Betty Allen (1930–), Hilda Harris (1936–), Gwendolyn Killebrew (1942–), Esther Hinds (1943–), Faye Robinson (1943–), and Shirley Verrett.

The 1970s and 1980s witnessed the recognition of numerous African-American divas, among them Carmen Balthrop (1948–), Barbara Hendricks (1938–), Leona Mitchell (1949–), Roberta Alexander (1949–), and Harolyn Blackwell. The two most prominent African-American women singing in opera in the 1980s and early 1990s were soprano Kathleen Battle and dramatic soprano Jessye Norman. Battle, who rose to fame after starring in a 1975 production of Scott Joplin's Treemonisha on Broadway, debuted at the Met as the Shepherd in Richard Wagner's Tannhäuser in 1978; Norman sang in the major opera houses of Europe throughout the 1970s before her first appearance at the Met in Berlioz' Les Troyens in 1983. In 1991 the two singers performed together in a well-received concert of spirituals at New York City's Carnegie Hall.

African American mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves (1964–) has also been hailed as one of opera's most electrifying performers. Best known for sultry stage performances including the title role in Bizet's Carmen, with which she established her name, and Camille Saint-Saëns' Samson et Dalila, Graves enjoyed a meteoric rise in the 1990s.

Throughout the history of opera in the United States, male African-American singers have not enjoyed the same success as their female counterparts. Many believe that this can be attributed to a reluctance to have black male singers in mixed-race casting. Among those who have been active in opera since the 1970s are Seth McCoy (1928–), Andrew Frierson (1927–), and McHenry Boatwright (1928–1994). Musical theater has been the dominant genre for Rawn Spearman (1924–), while Thomas Carey (1931–) and Eugene Holmes (1934–) were primarily active in Europe. Bass-baritone Simon Estes, the first black male singer to star in the Wagner Festival at Bayreuth, Germany, also made his name in Europe in the 1970s before debuting at the Met in 1981. Two singers whose promising careers were cut short, respectively by cancer and AIDS, were baritones Ben Holt (1955–1989) and Bruce Hubbard (1952–1991). Among the leading singers of the current generation are Kevin Short (1960–), Antonio Green (1966–), and Vinson Cole (1950–).

By the beginning of the twentieth century, African Americans had also begun to compose opera, although the lack of financial support frequently made it impossible for their works to be staged. The first significant African-American composer was Harry Lawrence Freeman, who wrote fourteen grand-style operas including The Octoroon (1904), Voodoo (1911), and the early jazz opera The Flapper (1929). In addition to being one of the first African Americans to conduct a symphony orchestra in a rendering of his own work—O Sing a New Song, presented in Minnesota in 1907—Freeman founded the Freeman School of Music in 1911, the Freeman School of Grand Opera in 1923, and the Negro Opera Company in 1920. Among Freeman's contemporaries was Clarence Cameron White, whose opera Ouanga, set in Haiti in the early 1800s, was first presented in a concert version in New York City at the New School for Social Research in 1941. The opera was not staged until 1959, when it was performed at the Central High School Auditorium in South Bend, Indiana. Subsequently, it had a successful run with the Dra-Mu Opera Company in Philadelphia. Ragtime composer Scott Joplin never saw a performance of his three-act opera Treemonisha (1911) in his lifetime, although his first opera, A Guest of Honor, was staged in St. Louis in 1903 (its score is now lost). One of the most respected and prolific composers of the mid-twentieth century was William Grant Still, who collaborated with his wife, librettist Verna Arvey, and whose works include Troubled Island (1938)—which takes as its subject the Haitian revolt at the turn of the nineteenth century—Blue Steel (1935), A Bayou Legend (1941), A Southern Interlude (1942), and Highway No. 1, USA (1963). Ulysses Simpson Kay (1917–) came to prominence in the late 1950s with The Juggler of Our Lady (1956), which was followed by such works as The Capitoline Venus (1971), Jubilee (1976), and Frederick Douglass (1986). In recent years two major operas have been composed by Anthony Davis, the founder of the instrumental group Episteme. Davis's X (The Life and Times of Malcolm X) (libretto by Thulani Davis) premiered at the New York City Opera in 1986; Under the Double Moon, with a libretto by Deborah Atherton, premiered at the Opera Theatre in St. Louis in 1989. In 1992 Davis's Tania, about the kidnapping and subsequent exploits of newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst, was premiered in Philadelphia by the American Music Theater Festival.

The development of African-American operatic talent has been furthered by the establishment of educational programs and opera companies for aspiring singers. Fisk University, Hampton University, Morgan State University, Virginia State University, and Wilberforce College, all traditionally black schools, have produced major operatic talent. By the mid-twentieth century, several African-American opera companies emerged, including the Imperial Opera Company (1930), the National Negro Opera Company (1941), the Dra-Mu Opera Company (1945), and the Harlem Opera Company (c. 1950). The 1970s witnessed a flourishing of African-American productions with the establishment of two major companies, Opera/South (1970) and the National Ebony Opera (1974), founded specifically to create professional opportunities for African-American performers, writers, conductors, and technicians. In addition to European grand opera, Opera/South has produced such works as William Grant Still's Highway No. 1, USA and A Bayou Legend (which, though written in 1941, had its world premiere in 1974), and Ulysses Kay's Jubilee and The Juggler of Our Lady.

As opera has become more accessible to African-American artists, major opera houses have produced new works and also revived lost or neglected works by African-American composers. Leroy Jenkins's The Mother of Three Sons premiered at the New York City Opera in 1991. In 1993, Duke Ellington's (1899–1974) unfinished opera, Queenie Pie, was performed for the first time at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The Lyric Opera of Chicago and the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia have jointly commissioned a new opera by Anthony Davis, Amistad, telling the story of the 1839 capture of the eponymous slave ship and the liberation of its captors. Amistad was premiered during the 1997–1998 season. African-American singers are widely recognized both for their artistic excellence and popular appeal. However, male performers continue to claim that they are not cast as readily as women in European opera. African-American composers continue to encounter resistance to works about African-American subjects. "The opera world is looking for fresh blood," observed librettist Thulani Davis. "Does a black composer have the same shot? I hope the answer is yes."

Jessye Norman became the youngest recipient of the United States Kennedy Center Honors in 1997. Willie Anthony Waters became the first African American to serve as an artistic director of a major opera company when he took over the Connecticut Opera Association in 1999.