Blackness in Opera

4. Race, "Realism," and Fate in Frederick Delius's Koanga

4 Race, “Realism,” and Fate in Frederick Delius’s Koanga eric saylor On May 30, 1899, London concertgoers had the opportunity to witness Frederick Delius’s professional compositional debut. The performance, held at St. James Hall in Piccadilly, was notable for being entirely dedicated to his own works, a rare event for English composers of the day.1 The first half of the concert featured several different pieces (symphonic poems, choral works, and an orchestral song cycle, among others), but the second half was devoted to excerpts from a single work: his new opera, Koanga.2 Koanga must have seemed extraordinarily unusual to an English audience more familiar with Covent Garden’s Italianate repertory, not least because of its twofold novelty: it was one of the first serious European operas to feature black characters as its protagonists and the first to prominently showcase examples of African American folk music.3 Based on an episode from George Washington Cable’s novel ἀ e Grandissimes, Koanga’s antebellum Louisiana setting tapped into the late Romantic fascination with the exotic, allowed for attractive local color in the form of African American work songs and folk tunes, yet avoided the clichés of those vernacular styles in the musical depiction of the opera’s protagonists—Koanga, an enslaved West African prince and voudon priest, and Palmyra, a quadroon maidservant. Yet despite the presence of black protagonists and African American folk music, Koanga’s characters, plot, and musical language are less reminiscent of Louisiana than Louisiana as Leipzig might imagine it; in fact, Koanga is a typical nineteenth-century story of love, jealousy, and betrayal enriched with local color. However, this otherwise familiar approach to late Romantic opera is complicated by the way Delius and his librettist, Charles Keary, imagined their African American subjects—in Delius’s case, from his experience living among blacks in Florida during the 1880s, and Keary from his study of African culture and religion. Although their creative intent does not seem to have been maliciously racist, the dramatic portrayal of Koanga and Palmyra reflects period beliefs about the Otherness of blacks generally. At the same time, the compositional team treats the exoticism of “blackness,” both physical and musical, as an attractive quality integral to achieving their dramatic and musical aims. It is this contradiction that makes Koanga such a problematic work, manifested most clearly in the disjunction between Keary’s racially formulaic libretto and Delius’s musical treatment of the protagonists, but also in Delius’s struggle to resolve the demands of then contemporary operatic conventions—especially in the Wagnerian tradition—with his own interest in African American music. Koanga: Genesis and Text Delius began working on Koanga in 1895,completing it two years later. Unsurprisingly , his approach to opera was strongly influenced by the works of Wagner and Verdi, particularly the former. By the time he started writing Koanga, Delius had attended performances of Lohengrin, Tristan und Isolde, Tannhauser, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, the full Ring cycle, and Parsifal; he saw most of these multiple times, including several performances at Bayreuth. His admiration for the German master was also revealed in a letter he wrote to his American colleague Jutta Bell in 1894: “I should . . . like to give all my works a deeper meaning. I want to say something to the world very serious & music & poetry are my only means. . . . I want to tread in Wagner’s footsteps and even give something more in the right direction. For me dramatic art is almost taking the place of religion. People are sick of being preached to. But by being played to, they may be worked upon.”4 For Delius, the “right direction” that Wagner pioneered was the dramatically effective unification of music and poetry. Done correctly, he believed this could elicit a level of emotional expressivity so intense that it bordered on the spiritual. Wagner’s influence is discernible in much of Delius’s music, vocal and instrumental alike, and Koanga is no exception: it features highly chromatic musical language, rapidly shifting key areas, flexible arioso delivery (that is, “endless melody”), enormous vocal and instrumental ensembles, and long symphonic interludes that evoked atmospheric effects separate from the singers’ text and actions. Yet Delius did not uncritically appropriate all of Wagner’s techniques. Although it appears that he was trying to replicate the expressive effect of works like Tristan or Parsifal (describing the latter as “magnificent: the finest work of Wagner”), he clearly wanted to do so within his own musical idiom...