by Naomi Andre
An engaged musicology helps me to hear Price’s body and experiences in her voice. Revealed in this voice is the childhood in Mississippi during the 1930s and 1940s; the proud and puzzled receptions of her operatic singing by her family, community, and audiences around the world; the comments she must have endured. As the regal and long-suffering Aida, Price was the African American singer whose voice fit the character perfectly; in this role she proved so many people wrong for their bigotry and violence. And she made so many things right for those of us who have fallen in love with opera.
Rubrics for Listening and Analyzing across the Chapters
Woven throughout each of the four case-study chapters that focus on specific works (From the Diary of Sally Hemings, Porgy and Bess, the Mérimée and Bizet nineteenth-century Carmen and subsequent black settings of the story in the United States and South Africa, and Winnie: The Opera) are three basic lines of inquiry for structuring my analysis of these works. These questions present a loose rubric for setting up the historical context for the work and a more specific analysis of how the text and music create the drama behind the themes of race, gender, socioeconomic status, sexuality, and definitions of nation.33 Put simply, I ask: Who is in the story? Who speaks? and Who is in the audience? Though each chapter adjusts these questions to directly address the particular situation of each work, the first question refers to who is onstage (or onscreen in the film adaptations) as well as who is not there. This question relates to the representation of the role being portrayed and the identity (racial/ethnic, gendered, any visible marker) of the person playing the character. Is there true-to-color casting where the characters are portrayed by the race/ethnicity of the actor performing the roles, or is there a practice of colorblind casting or makeup used to darken skin tones and alter physical features? Rarely are these issues free of contemplation, for they relate to the accessibility of having people of color perform roles frequently assumed to be white (or nonspecified racially) and opening up opportunities for nonwhite performers to be in mainstream repertoire and productions.
In addition to the importance of who is onstage is the narrative point of who gets to speak—which is more complicated than who we see onstage. I want to further complicate the important statement that the physical presence makes, and the presence of a larger narrative voice; both can be, but are not always, embodied together. For example, while the presence of black bodies onstage for the premiere of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thompson’s Four Saints in Three Acts in 1934 was a bold and momentous statement for that production, no one would claim that the intellectual content of this opera was based on black experiences. This is true given the late decision to cast black bodies in the compositional history of the work (it was not conceived as a story told from black voices) and the fact that the semantic content of this work is based less on a linear story and more on experimental abstraction.34 However, the presence of the black bodies once they are in the opera, performing the text, and inhabiting the roles creates new meanings regarding the aesthetics interlinking blackness and modernism.35
At stake with who speaks—who gets to tell the story—are the difficulties associated with determining when, or how, one story can be representative of a specific set of experiences. This is true when a member of one identity group represents a world within or outside his or her own experience. In the case of Porgy and Bess, for example, George Gershwin clearly got many things right about a certain black experience in America; but, as I discuss in chapter 4, other aspects of the opera are quite problematic in this respect. The point is that the representation of a specific identity group’s world requires special consideration, whoever the authors are. When a world onstage is created by an insider to that community, the concern is not to say there is one monolithic representation more authentic than any other, but that this is one representation from someone who has lived experience in that world. When a world is created by someone outside that specific community, reactions and commentary by members of the represented community warrant careful attention.
The final rubric I bring to each case study has to do with who is in the audience—who interprets the story. How is the narrative perceived, and whose experiences are reflected in the interpretation? Rather than focus solely on the concept of the unspecified or abstract general reader—a device in literary critical theory that harks back to the classic constructions of Roland Barthes’s “Death of the Author,” which focuses on the reader at the expense of the author (“the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the author”)—I want to find a more flexible type of “reading” that accounts for the role each of us plays in our analyses. While there is definitely a place for learning and thinking about these works based on collected historical facts (reviews of the first performances, sociopolitical contexts for the specific period, and the like), I propose that envisioning a world at least partially fueled by an imagination of the past allows us to ask questions that go beyond what we know for sure and complements what we do not know. Though such an activity could be written off as speculation—a slippery slope that could feel like anything is possible and everything goes—this imagination is meant to open up a capacious space for what is not written down or easily recorded.36 The power of these works lies in what they offered to their original audiences as well as what they still can offer us today. Part of that legacy is how we piece together those stories from the past and write a thicker (in the Geertzian sense) account of history. To borrow a concept from Ron Radano and Philip Bohlman, I am inserting my own “racial imagination” into my reading of these operas. I am taking their formation of a “shifting matrix of ideological constructions of difference associated with body type and color that have emerged as part of the discourse network of modernity” to help shape how I read meaning into these works.37 My goal is to share what I think about these works, given the historical facts as well as my own background, training, and lived experiences.
The context for analyzing a performed work from the standpoint of the audience has a deeper precedence in theater criticism than in opera studies; however, there also exists the larger umbrella of literary and cultural theory as well as performance studies. A grounding text in theater studies is Susan Bennett’s work on theater audiences (Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception [1990]) and bringing together the cultural context of a performance along with the spectators’ experiences of the event. Stuart Hall (Representations; “Encoding/Decoding”) has also theorized about the heterogeneity of an audience and how it can lead to a diversity of readings and interpretations—around encoding and decoding—and how such meanings are produced, circulated, and reproduced. A particularly helpful study for my thinking about audiences and publics transnationally, and especially for her work on the African continent, is Karin Barber’s opening up the meaning and capaciousness of what a text is (especially outside of a written tradition) and how it can be interpreted by multiple audiences (Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Public) and the ways being in society shape the ways of being in an audience (“Preliminary Notes on Audiences in Africa”). Jennifer Lyn Stoever’s recent work, The Sonic Color Line (2016), provides a new construction of racialized listening along with the “listening ear” that can hear aural ideas of blackness. Stoever’s work reflects many practices I have incorporated myself, and I find her terminology to be helpful in opening up possibilities for new paradigms. Indeed, it is a rich field of scholarship linking performance and interpretation, especially around race and gender, that has informed my hearing and understanding of the case studies in this book.38
Looking Ahead
Immediately following this introduction, chapter 2 opens up a dialogue for thinking about opera in the United States and South Africa. It provides an overview of relevant themes relating to the participation of black people in opera in both countries. With a juxtaposition of the situation in both countries, the themes focus on the influence of the minstrel tradition as it crossed the Atlantic from the United States t
o South Africa, the early performers who broke through color barriers in classical singing, and the institutions that supported these new voices in opera.
In the opening case-study discussion (chapter 3) on the solo-opera From the Diary of Sally Hemings, we find the trope of interracial relationships worked out both in the content of the narrative as well as in the creation of the work. The interracial collaboration was between white composer William Bolcom and black playwright/librettist Sandra Seaton, who worked together on recreating a story that has been lost. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings represent both the early stages of American history as well as many of the types of secrets that were hidden around race. In this genre, such possibilities can be drawn musically that bring things to life in the cloak of the imaginary: an effervescence that is held in sound and voice. This story opens up the hidden history of miscegenation between master and slave and threatens that the “purity” of race as categories between black and white are blurred even with the Founding Fathers of the United States.
From the Revolutionary era that began the formation of the United States, the next case study (chapter 4) moves to a moment in history after Emancipation in the early decades of the twentieth century. With the energy of the Harlem Renaissance and the reality of Jim Crow segregation, the matrices of race, gender, and sexuality (in terms of the expression of sexual behavior) are examined in the telling and retelling of the Porgy and Bess story. With the development of an “American” operatic voice in the beginning of the twentieth century, Gershwin brings together an “American Folk Opera” that articulates the experiences of African American life from the vantage point of a Jewish man born of Russian immigrant parents and a white Southerner (librettist DuBose Heyward) who grew up among the failed promises of Reconstruction. Chapter 4 addresses this story as it was told in 1935, awash in minstrel stereotypes, and then adapted in 2011 to rethink how the depth inherent in the original characters could be made more visible. A centered focus on the character of Bess reveals her evolution as a woman whose sexual experience is presented in terms that vacillate between victimhood and choice. The other female characters (Clara, Serena, and Maria) are also examined to flesh out the larger view of black womanhood in the 1930s and the first decades of the twenty-first century. At stake is the way femininity and race are intertwined for black women in the decades following the Civil War and in the present.
The theme of adaptation is expanded in chapter 5, in the case study that follows the character of Carmen from her genesis in the middle of the nineteenth century with Prosper Mérimée’s novella (1845–46) through Bizet’s opera (1875), the film adaptation of Carmen Jones (1954), the MTV hip hopera (2001), and the South African U-Carmen eKhayelitsha (2005). As a way to bring these works into conversation with each other to address the way blackness is foregrounded, I rely on the three central rubrics (Who is onstage? Who is in the audience? and Who is reading and interpreting the work?) to focus on the intricacies of representation across the parameters of race, gender, expressions of hypersexuality, class, and nation while they are juxtaposed and held in dialogue with each other. This chapter brings together the same story as it moves across the Atlantic from Europe to the United States to South Africa and becomes a focal point for looking at text and genre. Though each telling is unique, the counterpoint of female characters who push the boundaries of acceptable behavior becomes a transnational lens through which to see how theories shaping womanhood migrate and are translated across international borders. Carmen, as a cipher, becomes a global citizen and measure of modernity for her time.
Chapter 6, on Winnie: The Opera, is the only section of this book that had its genesis in another context. When I first traveled to South Africa in August 2010, saw the students at the University of Cape Town, and heard the vibrancy of the new operatic scene emerging, I found out about the upcoming performance of this new opera about Winnie Madikizela-Mandela from my work with Kamal Kahn (head of the Opera School at UCT who had been involved with early stages of the production) and meeting lead librettist Warren Wilensky and composer Bongani Ndodana-Breen at a reception. The opera project sounded interesting, and though I had no idea where it might lead, I knew that I wanted to see this premiere. I was very fortunate to receive generous support and encouragement from several departments at the University of Michigan and was able to go to Pretoria to the State Theatre to attend the final week of dress rehearsals, the premiere, and second performances. I also looked up contacts at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. I had the name of one scholar in African languages, linguistics, and popular cultures who was working on the South African opera Mzilikazi Khumalo’s Princess Magogo kaDinuzulu (2002), at that time the only full-length opera written by a black South African. Additionally, I had the good fortune to meet another Wits professor who is a musicologist, opera scholar, and professional singer (tenor). Innocentia Jabulisile Mhlambi and Donato Somma and I have ended up forming a wonderful collaborative team that has deeply enriched my engagement with this opera and its setting in South African culture. We kept our initial goals modest; perhaps we could write a jointly authored paper that would contextualize and analyze this new expression in black South African opera. Through more funding and support we were able to meet again in the United States and at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), through a partnership between the University of Michigan and Wits, and our collaboration grew. Parts of chapter 6 were originally published in a cluster of articles in African Studies (2016) that focus on this opera and the burgeoning opera scene in South Africa.39
The original goal of this article on Winnie: The Opera was to introduce the opera so that my South African colleagues could further write about how the opera worked in South African culture. Instead, the piece became a discussion of how this opera in South Africa reflects trends that are going on here in the United States with the presence of a more “official” line of opera dominated by a white culture and a type of “shadow” line of opera that tells the stories of black South Africans and African Americans. It was through this work that I realized that the genre of opera was being used on both sides of the Atlantic to tell an alternative story of racial experience in counterpoint to the dominant narrative.
The more I thought about these opera scenes across the Atlantic, the more it seemed to present an ironic reworking of “using the Master’s tools to dismantle the Master’s house,” to inadequately paraphrase a famous concept articulated by Audre Lorde in her article “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.”40 I do not cite this reference lightly, for I believe it to be one of the most compelling statements about the presence of women of color (and can be extended to also include other underrepresented identities) both in the academy and larger hegemonic discourses of power. I refer to this article carefully and respectfully. Lorde’s comments were written in response to a feminist conference that excluded the meaningful participation of nonwhite women. You can hear how tired and exasperated Lorde is in her article as she relates how a phone call to her was the token gesture to include and recruit women of color to the event. In the content of the conference papers and the presence of bodies at the conference, Lorde outlines how a method of business as usual is not going to “[re]define and empower” new voices and seats at the table for negotiation and power.
In using Lorde’s metaphor of the “Master’s tools,” I want to resituate the genre of opera from a mouthpiece of the oppressor to a vehicle that can be utilized by anyone. There is nothing inherently “white” or “nonblack” about the music, text, and possibilities within the choices one can make in composing opera. In chapter 6 I discuss Karin Barber’s use of the construction of genre and the opportunities for dialogues between African, Western, and other non-Western forms of oral and written culture she outlines that perfectly fit the operatic conversations going on in South Africa.41 The presence of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela as an operatic subject in this book illustrates how the stylized language of opera can
be learned, adapted, and utilized by anyone who has access to the proper training and talent. This is not yet a perfectly “level playing field,” and this is a music that shows class and economic status hierarchies; these boundaries need to be forded and dissolved through fiscal subsidies and broader support for the arts. But the ability of opera to articulate the needs, desires, aspirations, and character of anyone across the globe is something we see demonstrated in the shadow, alternative opera scenes in South Africa and the United States.
Through the examination of opera from the vantage points of race, gender, class, sexuality, and other cultural identities, our vision of opera changes. No longer functioning as an exclusively elitist event for the upper crust of society, its use by different populations can transform the way opera works in culture. The case studies outlined in these chapters present readings of canonical as well as lesser-known works that challenge the concept of an art form that is removed from its original time and place. In addition to presenting a set of questions that identify the vantage points of identity in the analysis of opera (for the people onstage, the intended audience, and the ones interpreting the work), the conclusion of this study presents another model for thinking about how opera and classical art music produce meaning today. To conclude this study, I explore the potential of an engaged musicological practice that allows old and new, standard and underrepresented narratives to be voiced in opera. Such a practice would both invite new audiences into the opera house and present traditional opera goers with new realities.