by Naomi Andre
European Opera and National Identity
With a long history that spans several centuries, opera is a dynamic, everchanging genre that has its roots in a group of Florentine intellectuals at the end of the sixteenth century who were looking for a way to emulate their idea of the power of ancient Greek music. They had read about the affective power of music from Plato and Aristotle and, despite not having full musical exemplars of what they were trying to reinvent, they came up with a type of music mixed with drama that developed into opera in the early seventeenth century. As opera grew in popularity, the genre came to move between court entertainment and presenting a space for displaying the embodiment of royal power and spectacle. For example, Louis XIV was not just the major patron of opera but also appeared on stage himself in opera ballets. Seventeenth-and eighteenth-century European courts came to rely on opulence as a key feature in opera as was seen in the importation of Italian opera across the continent in opera houses in London, Lisbon, Hamburg, Leipzig, St. Petersburg, and many other cities.
In contrast to its early history in the royal courts of Europe, opera in the nineteenth century began a mass movement into a broader public audience that included a wider range of social and economic classes.15 With the availability of printed sheet music and pianos in many middle-class homes throughout Europe and the United States, operatic numbers (tunes from popular arias, choruses, and ensembles) were performed and known by regular people too, not just royals and aristocrats.
A special case existed in Italy during the middle of the nineteenth century: opera took on a leading role in the Italian Risorgimento (the Italian unification movement to oust foreign governance, primarily the Austrians and the French, and install an indigenous Italian ruler). The leading Italian composer of the time, Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901), and his operas became symbols of the people’s connection to the political struggle. More than exclusively the upper strata of society, indeed a larger, broad cross-section of Italy’s population was now engaged with opera and its new meaning for an Italian national identity. Verdi’s choruses (most notably “Va pensiero” from Nabucco [1841]) became anthems for the Risorgimento unification movement, and these works were sung in homes and played in the streets. The respect for Verdi’s works gave way to his name becoming an encrypted slogan (Viva Verdi!) that had the additional meaning of supporting “Vittorio Emamuele Re Di Italia” for the first leader of the unified Italy. In fact, Verdi was even elected into the first Italian parliament, where he served from 1861 to 1865.16
Though Italy, the birthplace of opera, presents the strongest case in the second half of the nineteenth century, other nationalism movements during this time also saw their goals reflected in opera. The areas around Moravia and Bohemia supported a Czech operatic tradition (with singing in Czech) through Bedřich Smetana, Antonín Dvořák, and Leoš Janáček, precisely while a Czech nationhood and identity were moving into modern formation. Richard Wagner solidified a German operatic tradition with operas based on German and Nordic folklore and developing a musical style that perfectly fit the consonant clusters and linguistic characteristics of the German language. Russia was also finding its voice in the operas of Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky, Modest Mussorgsky, and Alexander Borodin, among others, that featured Russian politics, history, and literature, large choruses representing the Russian people, and singing in the Russian language. In these countries Italian opera (frequently with imported Italian music and singers) had been popular since the eighteenth century. It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century when the national identities of many European countries were shifting—to local ethnic rule in the Czech areas, to a unified Germany from the Prussian states, to a weakening of the tsarist regime that would lead to revolution in the early decades of the twentieth century—that opera in these countries adapted more indigenous elements (native language, composers, and subject matter).
Such examples provide a history of opera that is not usually emphasized or told. Instead of focusing on the major composers whose works have survived or the operas that are still in the repertory, this narrative suggests that opera embodies an expression of national identity for new voices. This is especially true when opera is written about a specific country’s history—with its own national heroes and geographical locations—and composed in the vernacular language of that country (such as American operas in English, Czech operas in Czech, Russian operas in Russian, or South African operas in isiZulu and isiXhosa).
Narratives of American Identity in Opera
The ascendance of American opera composers toward the end of the twentieth century brought a new voice to the international opera scene. In addition to a musical sound that felt more accessible, the subject content regularly included recent history that was immediately relatable to the audience. With several operas based on the lives of Americans, the United States was writing itself into the venerable tradition of opera. The drama in these political operas stemmed from controversial topics and figures in history. The use of the atomic bomb in World War II is problematized in operas by both Philip Glass and John Adams, revealing the weighty legacy this lethal weapon has had on the memory of its citizens (particularly those who grew up during this time) whose country first deployed it. Both Glass’s Einstein on the Beach and Adams’s Dr. Atomic question the ethics around the decision to use the atomic bomb. In an opera that presents a more concrete narrative arc than Einstein, Adams’s Dr. Atomic focuses on the moral issues about deploying the bomb. In this telling, American born J. Robert Oppenheimer is placed at the center of the drama. Additionally, Dr. Atomic creates an imminent anticipation of doom throughout the opera in the nervousness and agitated propulsion in the music that transfers the mental anxiety of the characters onto the audience through an unsettling sense of disquiet and impending disaster as we all wait for the test launching of the first atomic bomb to happen (the opera ends right as the bomb is deployed).
Still alive in 1987 when Adams’s first opera, Nixon in China, premiered, former President Richard Nixon was considered by the American public as a figure who was moving into the role of the wise, experienced senior statesman with his groundbreaking trip to China emerging as the highlight of his presidency. Yet Nixon was still remembered as the president who resigned on the verge of being impeached amid the horrendous state of affairs in Vietnam and a wiretapping situation that exposed unprecedented lies and paranoia. Though these quick examples only skim the surface of the richness of this topic, the larger point is to highlight how a new national voice in opera (in this case mainstream America) has taken some of its central historical moments to retell in operatic form. The complexity of how drama, music, and text can enrich a narrative and say many things simultaneously makes opera a powerful medium. With an emphasis on presenting different sides of a controversy and avoiding final judgment, the genre of opera has proved to be an excellent arena for juxtaposing conflict and passionate feelings. Through a monumentalizing of the spectacle and drama in a nation’s identity, opera provides a way for multiple sides to get compelling exposure.
While the post-apartheid vibrant opera scene in South Africa presents a different voice—an interracial collaborative voice between black and white South Africans—from the previous mainstream of opera in South Africa before 1994, a contrasting picture of mainstream American opera may be seen in a group of works based on black experience that premiered between 1986 and 2005. Compared to the dominant white culture of South African opera during apartheid and the mainstream American opera found in the work of Glass and Adams, these emerging black opera traditions in South Africa and the United States present evidence of a shadow opera situation. Though written and performed separately, and never presented as an official operatic cycle, the black shadow culture of American operas outlines signature points in black history. For a sample representative of an alternative American history focused on black experiences, I briefly construct a narrative out of five operas from this shadow culture as an example of the richness of the o
peras hovering on the margins. Presented chronologically by the periods they outline, I bring together operas that focus on the Middle Passage, Amistad (Anthony Davis and Thulani Davis, 1997); slavery, Margaret Garner (Richard Danielpour and Toni Morrison, 2005) and From the Diary of Sally Hemings (William Bolcom and Sandra Seaton, 2001); and the civil rights era, X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X (Anthony Davis and Thulani Davis, 1986).17 Added to these four recent works is the highly publicized revival of the most controversial opera about blackness in the repertory, Porgy and Bess (1935). This opera shows black life in the early twentieth century as it rubs against the ideals of the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression, and the poverty of the Jim Crow South. In 2011–2012, the work was transformed from Gershwin’s enigmatic characterization of an American folk opera on the opera stage into a new adaptation for the musical theater stage. Consequently, and unlike the vexed operatic version, the work received much attention and praise on Broadway (as well as a small amount of critique) as The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess; Audra McDonald won her fifth Tony for her portrayal of Bess.18
Not surprisingly, since different composers wrote the four recent works separately over the span of a couple of decades, the historical chronology of these operas does not present a linear narrative. Anthony Davis, the only black composer (ever) to have had multiple operas commissioned and performed by major opera companies, outlines the chronological bookends of the timeline presented in these five works. His two operas, Amistad (about the 1839 slave revolt aboard the Spanish slave ship that eventually docked on the coast of New York and became a case heard before the U.S. Supreme Court) and X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X open up the black experience in a telling of slavery’s origins through the question of freedom. Amistad sketches the fate of the Mende West Africans as they arrive in 1839 in the United States, where the international slave trade was outlawed, the abolitionist movement was in its early stages, and the country was still deeply invested in bondage. X brings us to the world of civil rights leader Malcolm X, who questioned the relative freedom of blacks a century after Emancipation. Through his use of jazz and the trickster figure, Davis writes operatically while pulling in black-based musical and literary idioms. Both of these operas also interact with popular film versions (Steven Spielberg’s Amistad [1997] and Spike Lee’s Malcolm X [1992]) and the different telling of each story by these two iconic directors as they reflect different visions of the same material. In the late twentieth century, film has arguably occupied a similar position of social commentary that opera had in the past; through such a lens, new operastudies criticism explores relationships between opera and film.19
Margaret Garner, based on the historical figure about whom Toni Morrison built her award-winning novel Beloved (1987), premiered in Detroit (co-commissioned with the Michigan Opera Theater, the Cincinnati Opera, and the Opera Company of Philadelphia). Italian American composer Richard Danielpour paired with Morrison as librettist and produced an opera filled with black spirituals, call-and-response singing, and a grisly narrative that hauntingly reproduces rape, infanticide, and lynching onstage. Paired with From the Diary of Sally Hemings, these two works feature reincarnated voices for the title heroines when virtually nothing survives in their original voices.20 The theme of recreation is central to all five operas, as the stories are reconstructed from history yet told from new vantage points. As new works are created and the controversial Porgy and Bess was successfully re-adapted for the Broadway stage, these seemingly familiar stories are recast in ways that speak directly to contemporary audiences; they articulate innovative things about how race and gender are configured in African American operatic heroism set in the United States today.
When seen all together, these five productions present a new narrative of blackness, one that retells central moments of African American history and incorporates distinctive portrayals of heroism in opera that bring together race, gender, and underrepresented sociohistorical perspectives. Now, at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the United States, during a time when many see affirmative action as a policy of the past and new formations of a so-called postracialized identity are being constructed, opera emerges as a genre that is capable of retelling the history of black enslavement, segregation, and integration. Black identity has become open to different interpretations. As Barack Obama completed his second term as the first black president of the United States, protests and riots in response to police brutality and the widely held perceived failure of the justice system to work for African Americans caused many to call this time a new stage of the civil rights era.21 In this environment opera has become a new space for articulating how quintessential experiences and achievements of African Americans can be represented. Making this story even more unusual, and linking it to black opera in South Africa, is that it has taken place in an art form that had largely been closed to black composers and musicians.
None of these American operas about black experiences have had the circulation or attention given to the above-mentioned operas of Philip Glass and John Adams. In fact, until Marian Anderson sang at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1955 and opened a symbolic door for many other black singers who were classically trained, with few exceptions opera in the United States had been segregated; the major opera houses and careers in opera were closed to black singers. Yet since the beginning of the twentieth century black singers and composers in America had been involved in operatic activities, albeit most commonly in all-black ventures and in nearly isolated obscurity. In the first half of the twentieth century many singers in the black church and community aspired to sing opera, despite the lack of performance venues open to black classical singers. When George Gershwin cast his landmark 1935 opera, his leading singers already had classical operatic training: Todd Duncan (Porgy) was on the Voice Department faculty of Howard University, and Anne Brown (Bess) was a graduate student studying voice at The Julliard School. With opportunities closed in the first half of the twentieth century for a strong participation in opera by blacks in the United States, it is all the more surprising that by the last decades of the century opera became an arena for exploring how race and gender reflect the changing portrayals of black-white relations in the United States.
A similar thing could be said about opera in South Africa. During apartheid opera was an exclusively white domain, with the black populations maintaining a strong culture of solo and choral singing in churches and civic choirs.22 Yet since 1994, opera rather quickly became a space that black singers and composers moved into. Like both streams in American opera, South Africa is producing newly composed works on cultural and political figures, writing their own South African history into the genre of opera: Princess Constance Magogo KaDinuzulu (Khumalo, Princess Magogo kaDinuzulu [2002]) and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela (Ndodana-Breen, Wilensky and Vundla, Winnie: The Opera [2011]). The Mandela Trilogy presents the situation where a white South African compositional team was commissioned to write three scenes from Nelson Mandela’s life (composers Péter Louis van Dijk, Mike Campbell, and the librettist Michael Williams). Moving chronologically through Mandela’s life, the first act (by van Dijk) captures the style of traditional rural music, the second act (by Campbell) has elements of a jazz musical, and the third act (by van Dijk) is more operatic in style.23 To a greater extent than in the United States, South African national artistic ministries and private industries are supporting opera; in addition to new works, black opera companies are staging adaptations of Western canonic operas (such as Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, Puccini’s La Bohème, and Bizet’s Carmen).24 European opera has also seen many adaptations, and this tradition has continued into the United States. As discussed in chapter 5 on settings of Bizet’s Carmen, there are a few notable cases of all-black settings (Carmen Jones and Carmen: A Hip Hopera are two). What makes the South African situation unusual is the larger number of adaptations into all-black settings. In the United States a significant contrast can be seen in the adaptation of Puccini’s
La Bohème by Jonathan Larson in Rent (1994). While there were several characters who were black, there were also white, Jewish, and Latinx characters who were central to the racial/ethnic make-up of the ensemble. In the United States it is almost unheard of to see an all-black opera cast outside of Porgy and Bess; in South Africa, this is becoming a norm with the Isango Ensemble and in productions for other opera companies.25
The example of South Africa provides a compelling foil to both American opera scenes: the recognized masterworks of Glass and Adams alongside the newly emerging narrative of African American opera. In a genre that frequently signals elitism, foreign languages, and overwrought staging of old-fashioned topics, the past few decades have shown opera to be a medium open to experimentation and new directions. Unlike the situation in post-1994 South Africa, opera houses in the United States have recently been quite slow in moving toward racial integration. Though American houses have been a bit stalled in getting greater numbers onstage, like South African opera, the orchestra, and the various production and technical crews are still primarily white. Nonetheless, opera is providing a space that reconfigures race and gender and reveals a new narrative in the United States and South Africa about how black audiences and performers have had a long-time engagement with singing (primarily in churches and community organizations) in styles that have allowed a few singers who are vocally ready to move into opera. With these recent operatic productions, across the globe in the United States and South Africa, blackness is being newly staged.