by Naomi Andre
2Black Opera across the Atlantic
Writing Black Music History and Opera’s Unusual Place
This chapter provides a starting point for asking questions about how to structure and shape information about opera in the United States and South Africa that highlights black experience. As these topics become more visible, current scholarship is underway to fill in some of the gaps in these narratives. Because there exists more information about the theorizing, mapping out a list of composers, and forming a history about black music in the United States, I will begin from this vantage point with a few methodological paradigms for writing about black music history in general, and then move on to a historical context for opera in the United States and signature moments we know about for black classical singing, the entrée of black singers into the opera world, and the genesis of breaking down the barriers of segregation. With a quick outline of a few singers from the nineteenth century, I then discuss the interwoven history of minstrelsy with opera, and highlight Marian Anderson’s historic contributions.
My discussion of opera in South Africa emphasizes the recent history since the dismantling of apartheid in 1994. I include a short section on the colonial music history in South Africa, focusing on the encounter of American minstrel troupes who traveled there at the end of the nineteenth century. I also rely strongly on the personal narratives of two South Africans involved in the opera scene there. The first is Italian South African Angelo Gobbato, who emigrated to South Africa as a child in the 1950s and has had an active career in opera as a singer, administrator, director, and professor at the University of Cape Town. The second is Soweto-born composer Neo Muyanga, whose musical training took place in Italy and involved extended stays in England, Los Angeles, and Ethiopia. His operas have begun to be performed in South Africa and, like Gobbato, he sits on several South African artistic administrative boards. The final section of this narrative discusses a few of the early black South African opera singers who have had international success and focuses on an opera-theater company, the Isango Ensemble, that draws its members from the townships around Cape Town and provides an innovative model for engaging opera in a wide cross-section of South African life.
What emerges from these initial histories of black opera in the United States and South Africa is both the need for a more fleshed-out texture of the opera scene in each country and the somewhat surprising revelation that opera is a space where blacks across the Atlantic are writing themselves into history. Through the subjects of the operas, the participants onstage, the composers and librettists behind the scenes, and the publics in the audience, opera has become a vehicle for representing new identities and narratives. Despite the segregated, whites-only history and the parallel musical theater tradition of minstrelsy in both countries, opera has proved to be an unlikely space for voicing black experiences.
Black Opera in the United States
Many scholars have provided helpful methodologies for pulling together a narrative, when so much of it has been hidden and dismembered. It is much easier to report about a history when there is an extant trajectory of what has happened through an archive of biographies, treatises, articles, and published musical works. However, this is not always the case for black music, and so a reconstructed truth is what can emerge. Recent scholars, including Eileen Southern, Josephine Wright, Samuel Floyd, Portia Maultsby, Melanie Burnham, Guthrie Ramsey, Rae Linda Brown, Kyra Gaunt, Tammy Kernodle, Yvonne Kendall, Gayle Murchison, and Eileen Hayes (and this is not an exhaustive list) have let their academic training and lived experience work together to formulate questions and pursue a vision of an imagined past made visible by constructing a history from that which was not always written down in obvious places.1 An older generation of elders who lived at the dawn of the twentieth century also pulled together narratives that named names and wrote black musical experience into a burgeoning history: William M. Trotter (Music and Some Highly Musical People [1878]), W. E. B. Du Bois (The Souls of Black Folk [1903]), James Weldon Johnson (Black Manhattan [1930]), and Alain Locke (The Negro and His Music [1936]). Through those of us who were there with our own memory combined with the memories of others, we are forming a history that records a version of the past that keeps evolving. Though I am not constructing the same type of history, I have relied on their work and realize that this is a developing story. Later in this chapter I have drawn on these sources to outline a rough history of black opera here in the United States.
Another helpful model for this study has been Ronald Radano’s Lying Up a Nation. Early on, he outlines threads for exploring what is at stake for the hinge that brings together race and music in the United States. He identifies the importance of a history that places black people at the center of the creative impetus, that allows blackness to be visible and audible as a marker of meaning in music. Though black music may be hard to define explicitly, once we have figured out what black music is, it can act “as the conscience of the American experience, as the sonic truth teller of race and its multitude contradictions.”2 This has been a beacon for the present study in terms of finding a way to encompass a capacious conception of what “black music” is—especially in reference to opera here in the United States and in South Africa. A difficulty in outlining this project has been that it is not specifically about music composed or exclusively performed by black people—indeed, it looks at music that was at times hostile to blacks in terms of representation, the practice of minstrelsy (here in the United States and in South Africa), and participation in the segregated opera houses as whites-only spaces for the first half of the twentieth century in the United States and nearly the full century in South Africa.
Looking to opera as a place for exploring black experience in both countries is not an obvious choice. Yet it is the very unlikeliness of this situation that makes it all the more surprising and rewarding when examined closely. There is a story that has been buried and invisible about black experience in “classical” music that goes beyond breaking the color barriers and having a presence onstage, a story that encompasses what those bodies onstage mean and how they resonate different meanings for diverse audiences. This space of performance has been saying many things simultaneously, and my goal is to open up some of these meanings. In a slight rewording of Radano’s statement above, the black music in opera tells many truths about a more inclusive version of American and South African experiences.
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Though there had been traveling opera companies presenting opera in English in North America since the mid-eighteenth century, many feel that the history of opera in the United States generally takes off as a more established tradition when Italian opera came to New York with an Italian opera troupe headed by Manuel García in 1825.3 As the noted tenor for whom Gioachino Rossini wrote the role of the Count Almaviva in his 1816 opera, Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville), García, together with his family, was a distinguished presence in music history throughout the century.4 With people like Mozart’s librettist Lorenzo da Ponte (1749–1838) teaching at Columbia University from 1825 (and held a position there from 1827 until his death), who was also involved with the García opera tour in New York, opera gained popularity in the United States starting in the late 1820s.5
Within two decades, early black singers emerged, more as curiosity acts where opera was sung. The history of African American singers in the United States, especially those who sang classical art music (as opposed to minstrelsy) is still being written; however, already there is scholarship that outlines several female singers going back to the nineteenth century (for example, Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, also known as the “Black Swan,” and Sissieretta Jones, also known as the “Black Patti”) who sang operatic numbers and gave concerts. Complementing the other black male performers in the nineteenth century who were more frequently known as instrumentalists (such as Thomas “Blind Tom” Wiggins on the piano and Francis “Frank” B. Johnson, a bugler and band leader), the vast social constraints embedded in
slavery and attitudes against integration and equality made it virtually impossible for black people to obtain the training or have formal opportunities for public performance.
Two important arenas provide a context for examining the presence of African Americans in opera: choral singing and minstrelsy. Both traditions were active early in the nineteenth century and were then rearticulated after Emancipation in the 1860s. During the antebellum period, the majority of African American choral singing has been studied in the context of slavery. Choral music known as “work songs” accompanied slaves’ labor, and they performed other music after hours in their spare time (such as Ring Shout, spirituals that provided coded messages to pass information among slaves, and music for hidden religious services). As in many African communities, choral music also accompanied rites of passage such as births and deaths and was present in other social gatherings. Under slavery, music was regulated, as were many other forms of cultural expression (such as dance). In the freed black communities, religious choral singing had less scrutiny as a subversive force, and churches provided a space for black singing.
With the first founding of colleges for black students in the late 1860s after the Civil War, choral concerts became an early means of formally organized artistic expression and fundraising. The Fisk Jubilee Singers was the first of such groups that were hugely successful and made an important name for black singers who delivered diatonic harmonies and were in tune with the European arts scene. After Fisk University was founded in 1866 in Nashville, Tennessee, the school’s treasurer and professor of music George L. White organized the first concert tour in October 1871 as a fundraising effort; this first group of ten singers would develop into the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Their primary program consisted of European classical choral works as well as slave songs and religious music by former slaves (many of these songs became spirituals). The spirituals grew in popularity and quickly developed into the main attraction wherever the singers performed. These early choral experiences demonstrate that though the black college singers were capable of singing classical repertoire, audiences were more interested in hearing the spirituals. This marked an important point in the history of harmonizing spirituals and bringing dignity to a form previously sung by black people to black people in less formal settings. It also indicates that having choirs of black people singing European art music was not a sure way to maintain audiences and begins to open up the question of what contexts were needed to support black performers in art music.6
As a sharp contrast to the development of concert music sung by black people in dignified settings, minstrel performances by black people before, but primarily after, the Civil War presented a demeaning, albeit entrepreneurial, way for African Americans to make money and perform as artists. Though seen by many as a “low brow” form of entertainment (especially when compared with the repertoire of groups such as the Fisk Jubilee Singers), minstrelsy is the giant specter with which we must contend as we examine black participation in opera. While the two forms are quite distinct—opera and minstrelsy—they provided a complicated, interconnected history for black musicians.
As a genre that started in the first decades of the nineteenth century, one story has Thomas Dartmouth Rice credited as an important early developer of minstrelsy when—according to the story passed down—he decided to imitate a lame black man, presumably a slave, with his ragged clothes, poor English language skills, and awkward physical bearing. “Jumping Jim Crow,” came out of this line of the legacy. Though minstrelsy is a genre and formal structure of musical performance that has a long and more complicated history, it is important in black opera history for the precedent it set in representing black characters onstage. The popularity of minstrelsy in the nineteenth century propagated negative stereotypes that reinforced oppressive beliefs about African Americans. This practice became a widespread form of entertainment in vaudeville theater and the popular musical theater stage that allowed white performers to masquerade in blackface and transgress social-class expectations.7 What was considered to be proper white masculinity was replaced with vulgar stereotypes of black people and gained great acceptance across stages in the United States as well as abroad in Europe and—ironically, yet not inconsequentially—in locations as far-flung as South Africa.8
Though minstrelsy had seen black performers in its early decades, before the Civil War minstrelsy was dominated by white men in blackface portraying the black minstrel stereotypes, crossing the lines of race, class, and gender. It was not until the late 1860s, when minstrelsy was already an established popular art form, that it became a common open space for performing blackness in musical theater for white and black performers alike.
One of the most complicated issues in determining the opera legacy for black performers is the context wherein black performers were called minstrels, Ethiopian delineators, and other terms for minstrel performance when they might actually have been singing classical music, including opera arias and scenes. In fact, early minstrel performances were sometimes called Ethiopian Operas. When George L. White took the first students from Fisk University on a singing tour, they did not yet have their signature name. Abolitionist preacher Henry Beecher (brother to noted author Harriet Beecher Stowe) sponsored the singers for a concert, and the newspapers referred to them as “Beecher’s Negro Minstrels,” thus obscuring the nature of their performance and encouraging their director to come up with an official name for the group. Since the concept of a “year of jubilee” was popular after slavery ended, the “Fisk Jubilee Singers” as a name felt appropriate, became popular, and stuck.9 Without knowing that the musical singing group Beecher presented was the group from Fisk, it is easy to misunderstand this history noted in the newspapers.10 Additionally, this case shows that people did not know what to call a group of black singers in the late nineteenth century besides minstrels, even when their music was a glaring contrast to the minstrel tradition and had what would later be called classical art songs by black composers—the spirituals—as their repertoire.
Since black performers were barred from traditional opera performance, the few singers we know of who had operatic training—Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, Sissieretta Jones, Marie Selika, for instance—are also sometimes described in contexts that could seem like minstrelsy, similar to the situation with the early Fisk Jubilee Singers before they were officially named. Additionally, such operatic singers sometimes formed their own traveling all-black companies or traveled with black minstrel troupes (two noted examples are Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield’s “Black Swan Troupe” in the 1850s and 1860s, and Sissieretta Jones’s “Black Patti Troubadours” later in the 1890s).11 As they traveled, black singers performed in various venues: concert halls, opera halls, town halls, churches, and other places. Hence it is not always obvious whether something advertised as a minstrel act really involved classical art songs and opera arias.
Since the pioneering work of Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History (first published in 1971 with subsequent editions in 1983 and 1997) and Rosalind Story (And So I Sing: African-American Divas of Opera and Concert [1990]), the broad strokes outlining the first black people in opera have tended to focus on two singers. The first black opera singer—Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, also known as “The Black Swan” (ca. 1809–1876)—emerged from slavery and had a career concertizing in the United States as well as abroad. She sang for Queen Victoria in England and was part of the abolitionist movement on both continents. Matilda Joyner Sissieretta Jones, “The Black Patti” (1868–1933), is the next major opera singer for whom we begin to have a complete biography. Born immediately following the Civil War, she benefited from the social movements around Reconstruction and sang concert tours in the United States as well as Canada, Europe, and the Caribbean. Noted musicologist Josephine Wright mentions the Black Patti Troubadours touring internationally and “performing ‘kaleidoscopes’ of arias and choruses from grand opera.”12 Wright’s well-chosen descriptor, “kaleidoscopes,” appropriately
captures the difficulty in characterizing what these traveling staged performances were really like.
As I write in 2017, the early history of black participation in opera (as performers, composers, and impresarios) in the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is still being written and pieced together; however, thankfully, this history is receiving more attention. Just a few examples of the strong recent scholarship that brings together American history, black diaspora studies, and music scholarship is uncovering a new narrative that expands a deeper shaping and engagement of blacks in opera. Musicologist Kristen Turner has written Theodore Drury (1867–ca. 1943) back into history by tracing the Theodore Drury Grand Opera Company, the first long-running black opera troupe in the United States (1900–1907). Turner’s research not only puts this company on the map, but it also contextualizes his work as an impresario and singer through the racial-political thinkers and movements of his time.13 U.S. historian James Cook has written about opera in American nineteenth-century culture through the presence of Jenny Lind, who sang under the sponsorship of P. T. Barnum. Cook’s work encompasses a wide range of African American artists (musicians, dancers, and writers) and activists in the United States, Europe, and beyond. Notable for this discussion is his reconstruction of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield’s career with her fourteen-month concert tour of Great Britain (including her singing for Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace) and her lesser-known abolitionist and benefit activities back in the States during and after the Civil War.14