Blackness in Opera ed. by Naomi Andre, Karen M. Bryan, and Eric Saylor (review)

Arguably the greatest African American concert composer in the twentieth century, William Grant Still (1895-1978), as Gayle Murchison tells us here, once declared, “My love has always been opera—the theater. This love of operatic music, stimulated in my early youth by listening to operatic records, was the thing that first aroused the desire to compose. All my other work has been a means to this end” (141). Such a statement demands close attention. What has opera meant for black folks in general? What has it done to them and for them, and what has black opera meant for everyone else? Blackness in Opera sets out to address these questions.

Ann Sears, in her chapter on Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha, lends a keynote for the whole volume by citing a passage from Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk (1903): “Here [to America] we brought our three [African] gifts and mingled them with yours: a gift of story and song …; the gift of sweat and brawn …; the third, a gift of the spirit.… Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation” (112). Most of the other authors here join with Sears to illustrate the wide variety of contributions among Du Bois’s woven weavers—black composers, writers, directors, singers, actors.

This collection of essays has evident roots in an academic setting (all fourteen of the contributing authors hold professorships in colleges or universities, while only one, George Shirley, has achieved an international reputation as a performer), and forms a part of the larger, continuing—perhaps perpetual—discussion about race consciousness within the performing arts, both lowbrow and highbrow, within the United States. The olio of “black” works and “black” performers discussed here is examined through many lenses, with attention given to dominant class or subaltern images, social and stage constructions of race, various understandings of opera as an American genre similar to but different from its European parents (although a few non-American works are included), various musical metaphors, period conventions, physical signs, and verbal markers for ethnicity, and the economic power dynamics implicated in theatrical productions everywhere.

In his introduction, Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. asserts, “The present collection … attempts to identify and theorize the various ways in which the idea of blackness has worked as a practice—as a complex of representational strategies in the genre of opera.” Ramsey acknowledges that “these essays do not present a unified theoretical voice, but like the practice of blackness itself forward complex ideas about race, humanity, and creativity … [derived from a] notoriously unstable set of assumptions, ploys, signs and compositional strategies” (ix).

The themes expounded upon here range widely—from the meaning of blackface in a seventeenth-century Jacobean court entertainment (Schmalenberger, “Hearing the Other in The Masque of Blackness”) to an allegoric Weimar Republic fantasy about a black American violinist in a “jazz opera” with hardly any actual jazz music (Wipplinger, “Performing Race in Ernst Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf”) to the stimulus to black artistic consciousness and creativity provided by the U. S. invasion of Haiti in 1915 (Bryan, “Clarence Cameron White’s Ouanga! in the World of the Harlem Renaissance”) to gender-conscious studies of female characters created by such male writers as George Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein II, and Scott Joplin.

The poet Vijay Seshadri once described William Carlos Williams as “moralistic, pragmatic, and quixotic in his search for an American measure to match the American voice.” The chapters of this collection are also aptly described by this diverse set of adjectives. All twelve chapters tackle in various ways the inherently gnarly challenge of distilling meaning from a genre encrusted with assumptions about its contemporary status (and for which sophisticated analysis is of uneven quality). The critical place of individual operatic works over time—the first ones appeared in Italy around 1600—has come down to us more or less correlated to the posthumous reputation of the composers or librettists...