Black Opera

by Naomi Andre

  Taking a chance on an opera that is seen as being outside of the traditional canon is not something that happens very frequently, so the performance of any operas in the shadow culture is a momentous event. This is also somewhat true of all contemporary operas on any topic; new opera is considered to be an inherently risky venture. However, operas on controversial topics (such as those focusing on race or homosexuality) tend to be revived less frequently than operas written by white composers on nonblack heteronormative subjects.27 Known for its opulence and extravagance and requiring a complex combination of talents and skills needed for performance, opera is a genre unlike any other in the musical world. Even in a small-scale venture, fully staged operas include an orchestra, singers, sets, costumes, a production staff (music director/conductor, stage director), and a suitable venue that can accommodate space for an orchestra, lighting, and a stage. For this reason, the ticket prices tend to be more expensive than for performances such as solo recitals, chamber works, choral concerts, and even most orchestral works. The stakes are high for an opera performance, especially after the age of grand opera ended in the early twentieth century.28 New commissions have been rare and represent a risk for any artistic management. For these reasons, adding to the opera repertory (either by commissioning new ones or reviving lost works) is rare and precarious.

  Blackface and Black Bodies Onstage That Matter

  There is a complicated issue lurking behind the situation of color/race and casting. When a black person plays a “white” role or one that does not specify race, things are usually seen as being fine. In fact, it even could be said to show “progress,” as a playing field seems to have been leveled and black people are able to enter the canonic repertory. Things are not as easy with roles that are specified as being black (or Moorish or African or Caribbean). For a black person to portray such a role, there can be problems. If it is a role with lots of negative stereotypes (for example, Monostatos in The Magic Flute or the roles in Porgy and Bess), it can feel uncomfortable to have a black person portray such a character: it is as though this performance is somehow reinforcing negative stereotypes. Yet to have a nonblack person put on blackface makeup seems like an insensitive decision (and for Porgy and Bess it is not an option for staged performances in the United States due to specifications of the Gershwin estate). An added complication is the way that some roles in opera are for voice types that are quite difficult to find. At any given moment there are not a lot of Wagnerian Heldentenors or spinto and dramatic sopranos on the planet who can sing those roles at the top opera houses. The same is true for the title role of Verdi’s Otello—the subject of the two opening case studies here. While many voice types in opera are frequently available, there are a few roles that are notoriously difficult to cast: Otello is one of them. Indeed, this situation would be ameliorated if there were a better pipeline leading to the training and nurturing of young black singers—an endeavor that would surely involve a good deal of effort and resources.

  Finding black singers who can portray Otello is a noble, albeit limited, goal. The real issues involve altering the systems of education and access so that anyone in the United States can feel entitled to work hard, recognize if they have an exceptional talent, and expect a fair chance of having a career in the arts. As I write this in 2017, such a goal is not possible for the young children in Flint, Michigan, whose water supply has been contaminated over the past few years with lead and other toxic chemicals through the irresponsible decisions about infrastructure made by a white-dominated state government to save money. Flint, with its poor, predominantly black population, could have been home to a child’s voice with the potential to develop into an Otello, yet we will probably never know. Adequate educational opportunities (compared with those available nationally) are not accessible to many children in New Orleans, where they are still recovering from Hurricane Katrina, more than a decade after the storm. The children of New Orleans deserve a music education that could lead them to continue their phenomenal jazz tradition or the even older opera tradition: New Orleans was one of the first American cities to have multiple opera houses in the nineteenth century. The children in Detroit are also suffering. Their schools have operated under a series of emergency managers since 2009, yet they have an incredible recent musical legacy—within the past sixty years—of Motown, jazz, and a thriving music education system that produced world-class classical musicians such as Metropolitan Opera singers George Shirley, Maria Ewing, and Cheryl Studer and leading classical musicians Ruth Laredo (pianist) and opera conductor Thomas Schippers.29 Recognizing these social realities reveals how the representations of race and blackness in opera are set against a backdrop of lived experience for black and white citizens.

  Seeing and Hearing Blackness in Marian Anderson and Leontyne Price

  An engaged musicology acknowledges that there is an underlying falsity in the claim behind “colorblind” casting. There is no blindness today regarding black and nonblack casting of roles or roles of any racial/ethnic identity; race and gender are always noticeable: people do not not see race and gender. Even if roles are portrayed where these identities are meant to be ambiguous, these are parameters that audience members will always look for and notice. The cultural history of a place will also shape how these features are interpreted. For example, in the United States and South Africa, the history behind black-white racial relationships continues to inform how blackness and whiteness are read and interpreted by audiences. Actors, singers, directors, and audiences are all aware that the personhood of the performer will be read into the characterization of the role and the reception of that actor in that particular role. Audiences may understand that a performer’s race is not a featured element of his or her character in the drama; that is not the same as saying that audiences will ignore (or even forget) the racial identity of an actor.

  As a counterpoint to the use of blackface makeup in Otello, let’s examine two examples—for the United States and the rest of the world—of how race can be an especially powerful tool when a black singer sings a “black role” that is not overwhelmed by negative or minstrel stereotypes: Marian Anderson singing Ulrica at the Met in 1955 and Leontyne Price singing Aida—especially in her farewell performance at her retirement from the Met in 1985.

  African American singer Marian Anderson became an important figurehead for black participation in opera in the United States and beyond. She was at the center of the highly publicized concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 when the Daughters of the American Revolution denied her the right to sing in Constitution Hall and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt stepped in to voice her support of Anderson as an opera singer. Today, many people know that Anderson broke the “color barrier” at the Metropolitan Opera in 1955 when she sang the character of Ulrica from Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera. This was an important symbolic move, for it ushered in a new era of having black singers perform at the Met as well as in other leading opera houses around the world. How might the details of this important debut be interpreted?

  Marian Anderson had a career that primarily took place on the concert stage in churches, in celebrated concert halls, and on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Generally, she performed classical art song (such as Lieder and songs in French, Italian, and English). Her emphasis was in a non-operatic repertory, except for arias and numbers excerpted from opera. Her legacy is defined as breaking a barrier in opera, yet her actual experience in opera was quite limited; the choice of Verdi’s Ulrica for Anderson, therefore, seems to be an uncanny fit for her experience and presence in opera. Ulrica is a major character, but unlike most other major characters in an opera, her presence is quite limited—in fact, she appears in only one scene, in the second half of act 1 (act 1, scene ii). Given the segregation of the opera stage and her resulting limited experience in opera, this opera allowed Anderson to dominate the stage when she appeared, but also to appear only once in the opera. While she was not entirely in the vocal prime of her career when she
made this auspicious step in opera (born in 1897, she was fifty-seven years old when she made her Met debut), her performance was momentous and groundbreaking.

  The role was also a striking emblem for her debut at the Met. The character of Ulrica is a fortuneteller and, depending on the version of the opera followed, her role is specified as being a “negro fortune teller,” in the Boston setting at the end of the seventeenth century (the original setting had been in Sweden around the court of Gustavus III).30 In this Boston setting, the character of Renato (Captain Anckarstroem in the Swedish setting), the secretary to the governor, also has an ethnic characterization, as he is referred to as a “Creole.”31 In any case, Ulrica is a character who is set apart from others in the opera. In both versions her dwelling is off from the main action of the opera, she is someone who can communicate with the supernatural, and her music is exoticized through the use of tritones, low woodwind timbres, and an invocation to the “Re dell’abisso” (“King of the Abyss [underworld]”). For the first black voice featured on the Met opera stage, Anderson fulfilled and mirrored the role of a foreign character, invited as a featured presence to peer into an alternate plane of reality and predict a new future. Though these stereotypes are not negative in the sense of having a direct minstrel legacy, they do reinforce her character as having an “exotic” heritage and position her “outsider” status both in terms of ethnicity/race as well as geographical location on the outskirts of the town and royal court, where most of the main action takes place. Anderson’s “integration” in opera was complete as to her presence on the Metropolitan Opera stage. The role of Ulrica is important to the plot, but it is a small major role (or a major small role), depending on how one sees her position on the margins of the primary landscapes (regarding the principal narrative and geography) of the opera.

  In the first generation of black opera singers on the Metropolitan Opera stage that followed Anderson’s historic debut, Leontyne Price became a central leading presence with the wide range of roles and exquisite artistry she brought to her performances. Unlike Anderson, whose place in opera was central in a more ideological vein than in practice, Price sang in opera houses all over the world and left a legacy of operatic recordings. She was a celebrated muse for the eminent American composer Samuel Barber, and she sang Cleopatra for the opening of the new Met Opera house at Lincoln Center in 1966 in Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra. Though the opera was not a huge success, it showed how far things had come in just a little over a decade. Before 1955, black singers were segregated from the Met; in 1966 a black singer premiered the gala opening of the new season in the new opera building in a newly composed opera—certainly this was one of the greatest honors given any opera singer in recent history.

  Price was an adventurous singer who excelled in repertory that was both part of the staple diet of her lyric-spinto voice (heroines of Verdi and Puccini) and the ever vocally exposed Mozart roles (Donna Anna, Pamina, and Fiordiligi). She also was a singer of older repertory when such operas were not standard, and she sang Monteverdi’s Poppea (L’incoronazione di Poppea) and Handel’s Cleopatra (Giulio Cesare). Price was a singer connected to her time with her early performance of Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites at San Francisco in 1957 (the same year the opera premiered) early in her opera career when she was only thirty years old (she sang Madame Lidoine).

  For me, and I suspect many others, Price’s most famous signature role was the title character in Verdi’s Aida. It was one of her most frequent roles, and it was the one with which she chose to close her career at the Met Opera house in 1985. In the case of Price, the most pristine voice available for the role does not have to don the blackface makeup to sing the mythic captive Ethiopian princess. The whole scene comes together and resonates even more powerfully in the Act 3 Nile scene during her aria “O Patria mia” and the following duet with her father. For many, these moments are when real life and opera life all come together.

  We see the conflict Aida endures as she has fallen in love with the leader of the Egyptian army (Radames), her captor. We also know that her father, the Ethiopian king Amonasro, is going to compel her to fight for her country in his attempt to lead a rebellion. In a private moment at night along the banks of the Nile, Aida contemplates suicide as she realizes that her position is completely untenable; there is no way she can both love Radames and be the daughter her father raised her to be. Yet at this point leading into her aria, her destiny still feels unknowable as she is given an impossible situation that has no easy solution. Her aria presents the culmination of her feelings—that she will never see her homeland again; she can never go back, and it will never be recoverable. Her last line is repeated several times: “O Patria mia, non ti vedrò mai più” (Oh my beloved country, I will never see you again). Verdi is known for working with his librettists to ask for “la parola scenica”—theatrically effective language, “the scenic word.” Verdi scholars have discussed the importance, especially in his later operas, of his dramaturgy, wherein he would compress a dramatic moment into a powerful, concise statement, or even a single word. The concept of “patria”—homeland, what is familiar, and what is worth dying for—is a featured image in Verdi’s operas throughout his career during the Risorgimento (the Italian unification movement that led to the modern formation of Italy through its first Italian parliament in 1861). Though Aida is from 1871, in that first generation of Italian unification, the strength of this movement was still a recent memory for its first Italian audiences, and Aida’s insistence on “O Patria mia” would have had a strong resonance.

  Just when we think things cannot get worse for Aida, her father (Amonasro) arrives unexpectedly and raises the tension to a new level. Though he has only recently been captured, he has figured out the situation between Radames and Aida and has formulated a plan more devastating to her than the suicide she had considered in her preceding aria. In their duet, he systematically breaks down Aida’s resolve as he takes her through the destruction of their country to relive that terror. He then presents the solution: through Radames’s love for her, she will get him to tell her the path of the Egyptian army while Amonasro hides so that he can lead the rebellion to success. Aida is horrified and immediately refuses. It is then that Amonasro presents his most deadly blow. He outlines the new inevitable bloodshed and suffering for their country that her decision will entail:

  Una larva orribile

  Fra l’ombre a noi s’affaccia …

  Trema! Le scarni braccia

  Sul capo tuo levò …

  Tua madre ell’è … ravvissla …

  Ti maledice…

  A horrible form

  Comes toward us from the shadows …

  Tremble! Its withered arms

  Are raised toward your head …

  It is your mother … recognize her …

  She curses you …

  At this point, Aida has been reduced to one word, “Pietà!” (Have mercy!) that she repeats, nearing the point of total exhaustion. Amonasro’s response is not one of comfort but of even further fury: he repels her and says,

  Va indegna! Non sei mia figlia

  Dei Faraoni tu sei la schiava!

  Go, unworthy one! You are not my daughter

  You are the slave of the Pharaohs!

  The climax is achieved; Aida has come to the end of her endurance. The music had been steadily expanding out—the upper strings reaching the top of the range and the lower strings extended down further to a deep lyrical bass line. It is as though Aida has become engulfed in the metaphorical soundscape around her. The moment of judgment has come, and Aida is totally bereft. She finally realizes what she must do—to follow what she was raised to become. Their exchange outlines her decision.

  Aida

  (trascinandosi a stento ai piedi del padre) (dragging herself painfully to her father’s feet)

  Padre! … a costoro … schiava … io non sono … Father! … I am not … their … slave …

  Non maledirmi, … non impr
ecarmi … Do not curse me … do not revile me …

  Ancor tua figlia portrai chiamarmi … You can still call me your daughter …

  Della mia patria degna sarò I shall be worthy of my country

  Amonasro

  Pensa che un popoplo, vinto, straziato Think a martyred, defeated people,

  Per te soltanto risorger può … Can rise again only through you …

  Aida

  O patria! O patria … quanto mi costi! Oh my country! O my country … how

  much you cost me!

  In a masterful use of la parola scenica, “patria” has now transformed from being the thing desired yet unattainable (in her preceding aria, “O Patria mia”), the ideal you choose to follow (“Della mia patria degna sarò”), to the sacrifice you believe in and must make (“O patria … quanto mi costi!”). Aida has come of age, and she has made up her mind; she has made a decision in an unbearable situation. Verdi recognized the intensity of this moment dramatically and was adamant to Ghislanzoni, his librettist, that there is no way Aida has the mental or emotional capacity to sing a cabaletta (of la solita forma) that the conventional form dictated.32 Musically in the orchestration and in the form, the drama showcases this point where expectations are broken and things come to halt.

  I find it impossible to watch Leontyne Price sing this scene and not feel its momentousness. I watch and hear Price sing Aida throughout her career and feel how real these words are: “Oh my country, how much you have cost me.” It feels like a moment when the drama onstage and the reality offstage crash together, and I feel as if I understand something new—each and every time I experience it. This voice comes out of a body that lived through the end of Jim Crow and segregation, was part of the continuous waves of the Great Migration to the north and west with people searching for safety, a chance to make it, and to thrive. As Price was stepping onto the leading opera stages around the world, people were marching into the burgeoning civil rights movement. Price made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1961, three years before the Civil Rights Act (1964) was passed and officially outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.