by Naomi Andre
American and German historian Kira Thurman focuses on black classical musicians in Central Europe and has written about early tours of the Fisk Jubilee Singers in Germany and their reception as black American singers. In addition to writing these events back into history, she asks probing questions about how hearing music associated with whiteness, particularly the German Lied as a symbol of German nationalism, coming out of black bodies challenges assumptions about who sings; referring to reviews of black performers, she notes that “being black while singing German lieder was an odd contradiction for many critics.”15 Another important study that opens up opera in the diaspora includes David M. Powers’s remarkable study that details a narrative for opera during the second half of the eighteenth century in the French slave colonies of the Antilles with a focus on Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti).16 These scholars, along with others, are leading the way in understanding past contributions to the somewhat curious, and complicated, situation of black people in opera today. This includes the welcomed, albeit limited, presence of black women in opera and the nearly invisible—with infrequent notable exceptions—black male opera singers. Offstage, a significant gap is the near absence of black opera conductors, general managers, orchestral musicians, backstage professionals, and members on boards of directors in domestic and international opera companies today.
The touchstone moment for black opera history in the United Sates came in 1939 when Marian Anderson rose to national attention as she sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., to a crowd of seventy-five thousand people assembled there, many thousands more through the radio airwaves. This outdoor concert happened after Anderson’s manager Sol Hurok and Howard University failed in their efforts to set up a performance for Anderson at Constitution Hall because the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR)—who owned the hall—decided that they could not sponsor a black person to sing in their building. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt heard about this and wrote what would become a famous letter resigning her membership in the DAR in protest of denying Marian Anderson the right to sing. Excerpted from Roosevelt’s letter is her unambiguous stance: “I am in complete disagreement with the attitude taken in refusing Constitutional Hall to a great artist. You have set an example which seems to me unfortunate. And I feel obliged to send in to you my resignation. You had an opportunity to lead in an enlightened way and it seems to me that your organization has failed.”17
Eleanor Roosevelt and the Marian Anderson Committee (which formed in the wake of the controversy) arranged for Anderson to give her concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial with the National Mall as her auditorium on Easter Sunday, April 9, 1939. Anderson had risen to prominence before this event with her success in other parts of the United States and in Europe. She made her European debut at the Paris Opera House in 1935 and sang for King Christian in Copenhagen and King Gustav in Stockholm; Finnish composer Jean Sibelius was so impressed with her voice that he wrote and dedicated his song “Solitude” to her. At her return to the United States, she made her Carnegie Hall debut later in 1935 and was one of the first African American singers to be invited to sing at the White House, by the Roosevelts, in 1939. In light of all of these accomplishments, perhaps the greatest for opera in the United States is that she was the first African American singer to sing at the Metropolitan Opera in a major role—that of Ulrica in Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera—on January 7, 1955. Though there were a few other black singers performing at opera houses before, the magnitude of the Metropolitan Opera’s reputation and the spotlight attending to Anderson after 1939, her entrance at the Met in 1955 opened up a symbolic door for other black singers at that opera house and the other opera houses of the world.
Since Marian Anderson’s debut at the Metropolitan Opera, there has been a steady, albeit slow, stream of black singers in major opera houses. As her career showed, it is still not uncommon for African American opera singers to gain acclaim in Europe first before trying to make it in the United States. As a result, there are African American opera singers who have relocated to Europe, a situation not unlike that for jazz musicians. The pipeline for nurturing young black singers in the United States has not grown in proportion to the talent out there. Though there are black singers active in the United States, there are still great barriers, especially in the major opera houses—Metropolitan Opera, Chicago Lyric Opera, Houston Grand Opera, San Francisco Opera, Los Angeles Opera, and opera at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
There are many small opera companies and impresarios who helped sponsor opera productions of works by black composers or produced operas (in the standard repertory) with black singers in the first half of the twentieth century in the United States. Now complementing the newly rediscovered Theodore Drury Grand Opera Company in the first years of the twentieth century is the better-remembered case of Mary Cardwell Dawson, founder of the National Negro Opera Company, which ran for several years in the 1940s.18 Recently, the archives of Henry Lawrence Freeman (1869–1954) were donated to Columbia University, and there are nearly twenty operas in this collection. Additionally, Freeman’s opera activities in Denver, Colorado, are also coming to light. There are other people who contributed to opera activities by African Americans, but these stories are still mostly buried in archives.
The story of black people in opera is one that starts with the history of the singers and access to singing. For this narrative to continue, we need to recover and further nurture the work of black opera composers (the past and present), black directors, coaches, upper-level administrators in opera companies who are hiring black singers, agents, dedicated teachers (some of whom are opera singers themselves), and opera institutions dedicated to producing works by black composers and hiring black singers in all of their productions. Moreover, this story needs to be expanded through the work of an interdisciplinary team of scholars, librarians, and archivists who are helping the preservation and documentation of the black presence in opera from the past into the present and future.
Opera in South Africa
The story behind the current opera scene in South Africa since 1994 is one that has developed alongside the presence of colonialism and apartheid. In a unique situation compared to other countries on the African continent, South Africa has had a continuous (or nearly continuous) opera culture since the late nineteenth century.19 Up until the final years of the twentieth century, the South African official opera environment was all white in terms of its primary patrons, audiences, and participants. The members of this opera society were descendants of British and Dutch colonials, Italian exiles from World War II (including former Italian prisoners of war), and a range of expatriates from Europe and the United States.20 Opera theaters were open to whites only and they were the ones who were a part of the pipeline that funneled singers into the apprenticeships and programs abroad to leading international opera houses and sustainable careers. Yet behind this privileged side of the South African opera world, there was also a unique version of a shadow culture of black opera that had limited access and training, yet with rich connections to the music. Black singers, composers, and audiences were exposed to Western classical and operatic music through choral societies, missionary churches, and educational institutions. Through this contact a strong black connection to singing and opera emerged.
The presence of the Eoan Group, a cultural and community welfare organization for the “coloured” (now more commonly referred to as “mixed race”)21 people in the District Six area of Cape Town opened in 1933 and provides an exception to the all-white South African opera world. The Eoan Group focused on ballet and drama in its first years and then became an important South African opera center from 1943 to 1977, when Joseph Manca brought in a deeper emphasis on the genre.22 With its target on mixed-race people and elements of a civilizing mission, the Eoan Group was situated in a complicated position regarding whom it excluded and the government funding that supported it during apartheid. In terms of exte
nding the arts (and for a time, a big focus on opera) to some—but not all—nonwhite South Africans, it can be seen as relating to a South African shadow tradition at the end of colonialism and through apartheid. The history of the Eoan Group had been nearly buried until recently, as Hilde Roos had fortuitously come into contact with the group’s archival records and has been reconstructing this history back into a larger narrative.23
Similar to the realities for black performers in the United States in the nineteenth century, black South African singers were active in choral singing, through schools and especially through the influence of Christian missionaries who believed that singing was part of the colonial civilizing mission. Traveling Jubilee choirs brought the tradition of African American spirituals to South Africa (through white American and black American singers, alike).24 In addition to choral singing, which was widely practiced in both the United States and South Africa, an unlikely shared musical practice is the American minstrelsy tradition that was brought over to South Africa in the nineteenth century. As early as 1848 there are records of Joe Brown’s Band of Brothers in the Cape Colony; the Harvey Christy Minstrels performed in 1862.25 In 1865 the Christy Minstrels performed for nearly a month in Durban.26 In 1880 there is reference to “the Kafir Christy Minstrels,” a minstrel troupe of black South Africans operating in Durban. Such entertainment continued through the end of the nineteenth century with the well-known Orpheus M. McAdoo and his traveling (alternatively called Minstrel and Jubilee) groups. Orpheus M. McAdoo and the Virginia Jubilee Singers, a group of African American musicians, spent almost five years in South Africa between July 1890 and June 1898.27 When black singers in the United States performed theatrically, the content of the show was not always easy to determine; such was the case when they performed in South Africa as well. Gwen Ansell writes of the traveling African American groups at the end of the century:
But with emancipation after the U.S. Civil War, American minstrelsy had evolved into an African-American performance form that was to impress South Africans of colour far more strongly. This new minstrel show retained some of the old stereotypes in its comic segments, but it also revived authentic elements of African-American culture that had survived in slave communities and combined all of this with acting, singing, and playing of a highly polished, concert hall standard, including arias from Verdi operas. For South Africa, it was Hampton graduate Orpheus McAdoo and his American (later Virginia) Jubilee Singers, who first visited Cape Town in 1887 and toured as far as Kimberley and Johannesburg four times during the 1890s, that made the biggest and most long-lasting impact.28
I cite this excerpt at length to illustrate not only the similar overlap in South African minstrel shows where the repertoire included “a highly polished, concert hall standard, including arias from Verdi operas,” but also to introduce the dynamics of how American minstrelsy influenced white and black South Africans alike. While the history of black participation in the United States needs to deal with the specter of minstrelsy, I argue that minstrelsy also provides an important part of opera history for black and white South Africans.
The transatlantic slave trade has brought much attention to the elements that were passed between African cultures (practices, beliefs, traditions) and the development of African American cultures from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth century in what became the United States. Debates stemming from the theories of E. Franklin Frazier and Melville Herskovits have explored the extent to which elements from Africa were retained, reinterpreted, or reinvented during the devastation of slavery.29 What has not received as much attention is how components from the artistic cultures of African Americans recirculated to the African continent. This emerging history of how minstrelsy was in the background of American and South African musical and theatrical traditions deserves deeper exploration that this study only begins to address. On both sides of the Atlantic, the practice of minstrelsy presents a haunting feature to the operatic traditions that are now so salient in articulating black artistic expression and possible aesthetics.
During my first visit to the South African College of Music at the University of Cape Town, when I was giving a guest lecture on early Verdi operas in an Italian opera class, I mentioned the chorus that was so popular in the nineteenth century, “Va pensiero” from Nabucco, that was an early hit for Verdi and became an anthem for the Italian unification efforts during the Risorgimento. Immediately, a few of my students from the townships in the class started humming the tune. I was shocked—most opera fans in the West do not know this opera at all, let alone be able to hum one of its tunes. The students told me they had sung this tune (and, it turns out, many other opera tunes) in their township choirs. I came to realize that though these students might not have attended an opera, they had been singing choruses and adapted numbers from operas in their choirs for generations. This is only one example of the immediacy some of the opera repertory already has with South African black culture and reveals a more than likely connection between these nineteenth-century traveling minstrel and Jubilee groups and the varied repertory they brought with them. While the early histories of South African opera in both white and black cultures are only recently being written, these histories begin to bring into dialogue how blackness in opera has, and continues to be, expressed in diverse settings across the Atlantic.
Two important recent discussions of opera’s history in South Africa can be found in recent narratives by Angelo Gobbato and Neo Muyanga. Both are less formal histories than would be in a textbook; nonetheless, they are personal reflections that represent two helpful vantage points for fleshing out the richness of this story.30 I had the pleasure of meeting Angelo Gobbato, one of the central figures in developing the opera program at the South African College of Music at the University of Cape Town and in supporting opera more generally in South Africa, as he was nearing retirement. I was delighted to sit in on some of the rehearsals for his production of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro with the current opera program director Kamal Kahn. They were setting the opera in a Stellenbosch vineyard, where the racial-class lines provided by their setting and cast(s) added a thoughtful commentary to the servant-aristocracy themes embedded in the opera.31 I write “cast(s)” because the opera program (integrated by race, but with a majority of black singers) was so large that they triple cast the roles to accommodate the talent available.
I found Angelo Gobbato’s essay featured on the Cape Town Opera House website. The essay opens:
When I emigrated to South Africa with my family from Milano in 1950, I was seven years old and already determined to pursue a career as an opera singer. The following account of operatic developments in my adopted country over the past fifty years is thus based on personal experience and recollections and should not be read as either an academic document or as exhaustive historical research.32
Despite such disclaimers, this unofficial history is a thoughtful and important telling of opera in Cape Town going back to the late nineteenth century, with the most detail on 1950 through 2012. Such statements are important, especially in these early years and stages of understanding opera in South Africa before a more “official” history has been written. From firsthand experience, Gobbato outlines the struggles and triumphs of training singers and presenting operas with black and white singers, when possible. About the 1950s, he writes:
Although the National Party had already become the ruling party in South Africa and had begun its strict enforcement of Verwoerd’s Apartheid Policy, the University of Cape Town had firmly and publically expressed its opposition to this system and, although individual permits had to be obtained with great difficulty, singers of all races were being trained at its Opera School.33
A few sentences later Gobbato discusses the other operatic activities, complementing those of University of Cape Town opera program, at that time in Cape Town, including foreign companies that toured as well as further South African opera ventures:
Under the name of The Eoan Group, th
ese indefatigable workers mounted several seasons of opera in the Cape Town City Hall—a venue which was not only more economical to rent but which was also practically the only theatrical venue in C[ape] T[own] for which permits could be obtained allowing mixed races both on stage and in the auditorium.34
Gobbato outlines the greater difficulty in the 1960s and 1970s for finding spaces that allowed for integrated performers and audiences. One example he mentions is the controversy that surrounded the Nico Malan (now known as the Artscape Theatre Centre) performing arts complex when it first opened in 1971 as a “whites only” space. There were boycotts and protests until the government finally changed this policy. However, the oppressive administration was strong; this happened in the period of apartheid crackdowns, such as District Six being declared “whites only” under the Group Areas Act (in the late 1960s), and the beginning of those enforced removals/relocations of people who had formerly lived in its historically multiracial area. The arts reflected this wave of regime change as protest theater flourished and international artistic blacklisting grew. To illustrate how opera became a central symbol of the apartheid control of the arts, Gobbato states about this time in the early 1970s:
Opera, already considered by many as an elitistic and unnecessarily expensive artistic waste of time, had become synonymous with the Apartheid Government’s attempt to establish international credibility for itself and it was predicted that the advent of a new democratic regime would see the well deserved end of all operatic endeavor in the country.35
And yet, as Gobbato writes in his history, opera did not die at the end of apartheid. In fact, just the opposite is true: opera has become a hallmark of the artistic scene in South Africa since 1994, yet in a newly born way with an interracial participation of white, mixed-race, and now mainly black singers.