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

The topic of race is not often discussed in the world of opera. However, the characterization of dark-skinned individuals by composers, librettists, and production designers throughout the history of opera reveals a remarkably stable set of dramatic traits, including (among many) brutish intelligence, savage violence, over-sexualized behaviour and opportunistically driven action by non-Christians. Musically, these traits are often defined with low voices, exotic (i.e. non-European) orchestration, primal rhythms, and vocal melodies that are supported by harmonies foreign to the surrounding musical environment. This so-called ‘blackness in opera’ begins to be called into question as the creators of operatic works move further away from the allegorical representations of power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the romantic idealism of the first half of the nineteenth century, to more natural reflections of modern life found in early twentieth-century modernism. Therefore, the characterization of the heroic, tragic, ironic, and/or sympathetic are seen in the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century to evolve into a more immediate reflection of the changes occurring in democratic society. Just the very notion of increasing the number of minorities (the exotic ‘other’) as either characters or performers on the operatic stages of Europe and the USA throughout this period (e.g. Les Peêcheurs de perles, L’Africaine, Lakmé, Carmen, Aida, Otello, Madama Butterfly, Turandot, etc.) is reflective of this development, which culminates in the 1920s and 1930s with works that even call for an all-black cast (e.g. Porgy and Bess). The topics of race, music, and the visual rhetoric of the operatic stage are exactly what the writers in this collection seek to address in a wonderful combination of well-defined research and frank, honest discussion concerning the minority voice in essays on five well-known works—Otello, Aida, Porgy and Bess, Treemonisha, and Carmen Jones—and six lesser-known works, Koanga (1899, Frederick Delius), Jonny spielt auf (1927, Ernst Křenek), Ouanga! (late 1920s, Clarence Cameron White), Blue Steel (1934, William Grant Still), Denmark Vesey (1938, Paul Bowles), and an early masque-play, The Masque of Blackness (1605, Alfonso Ferrabosco II).

In many of the twentieth-century works discussed, the role of Haitian culture, both the syncretic religion of vodou (voodoo and voudun are often interchanged with the term) and the revolutionary politics of colonialism, serves as a ‘rich source of material for writers and composers interested in basing their works on indigenous themes’ (Bryan, p. 116). The fact that Haiti was seen as ‘the first independent black-ruled state in the Western Hemisphere’ (Bryan, p. 116) and became a locus for fear and exoticism by whites and a source of pride for blacks, highlights the dramatic characterization of various works written during the early decades of the twentieth century (the so-called Harlem Renaissance) by African-American composers such as William Grant Still, Scott Joplin, and Clarence Cameron White. Equally curious is the use of such narratives to support anti-establishment ideology by white composers such as Frederick Delius in Koanga, a work that projects Wagnerian notions of redemption through selfless love and a neglect of the status quo, or the use of Marxist political philosophy to undergird the revolutionary desires of the black characters in Paul Bowles’s Denmark Vesey, or even still, Ernst Křenek’s use of a modernist ideology to highlight the embrace of a new artistic age in the music of jazz following the ravages of the First World War in Jonny spielt auf.

When the collection examines operatic works before the twentieth century (three of the eleven works discussed), the issue of blackness becomes less defined by revolutionary politics and more reflective of the genre of opera and its ability to portray black identity on stage. In the essay by Sarah Schmalenberger, ‘Hearing the Other in The Masque of Blackness’, the author states that...