by Naomi Andre
Notes
Chapter 1. Engaged Opera
1. Trayvon Martin was fatally shot by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood-watch volunteer, in Sanford, Florida, on February 26, 2012. Martin was seventeen years old and was walking home from a convenience store after having purchased candy and a soda; he was unarmed.
2. Under the apartheid system, white men had two years of compulsory military service, followed by camps at intervals. This was abolished in 1994. The End Conscription Campaign, begun in 1983, was an anti-apartheid organization connected to the United Democratic Front and opposed the conscription into military service in the South African Defense Force. See Conway, Masculinities.
3. Johan Botha (1965–2016). His homepage states, “After his studies and his debut in 1990 he came to Europe. His international career developed quickly after initial engagement in Germany.” http://www.johan-botha.com/biography.php?lang=en.Wikipedia lists his birthplace as Rustenburg, South Africa, in 1965. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johan_Botha_(tenor).
4. Kinney, “As the Met Abandons Blackface” (quotation on p. 4 of 14).
5. The publicity around the Met’s decision not to use blackface makeup for Otello might have a larger effect on the opera industry and could be the beginning of a new practice. Time will tell. But up until 2015, putting racialized makeup on singers for the title roles of Otello, Aida, or Madama Butterfly and Turandot (“yellowface” makeup) was an assumed practice generally not commented upon. An early article that commented on “yellowface” is Guilford, “It’s Time to Stop Using ‘Exoticism.’”
6. Roberts, Fatal Invention.
7. Michelle Alexander, in New Jim Crow, has raised a national awareness of how the “war on drugs” of the 1980s and 1990s led to racial targeting for incarceration and sentencing practices. This is one of the factors in the background to the Black Lives Matter movement.
8. A further discussion of the theoretical paradigms by Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, and Paulo Freire is taken up in the conclusion of this study.
9. Said, “Imperial Spectacle”; Said, “Empire at Work.” “Imperial Spectacle” was first published in 1987 and then became more widely available when it was republished as “Empire at Work” in his collection Culture and Imperialism in 1993.
10. della Seta and Groos, “O cieli azzurri”; Bergeron, “Verdi’s Egyptian Spectacle”; Robinson, “Is Aida an Orientalist Opera?”
11. From the origins of opera through the present, the issue of “realism” and “real life” have been discussed with regard to reception and analysis. From the discourse of verisimilitude through verismo through the concern since the early 1990s for opera singers’ bodies to be thin, lithe, attractive, and sexy to contemporary audiences, opera is concerned with a construction of reality that connects to, and reflects, its time.
12. Several sets by Franco Zeffirelli later in his career typify this trend with his productions of La Bohème (1981), Tosca (1985), and Turandot (1987) at the Metropolitan Opera in New York that had ornate, busy, and extremely complicated sets. This visual spectacle in the set almost made it less important to focus on what the singers looked like (in fact, in some scenes in Turandot it was almost difficult to find the singers in the ornate sets); hence, the singers were there primarily to provide aural pleasure rather than a “realistic” visual portrayal of the operatic character. As I witnessed many times, it was not unusual for the audience to clap for each new set as the curtain opened at the beginning of the act.
13. The Texaco broadcasts were originally co-sponsored in 1931 and then moved to full Texaco sponsorship in 1940. See Pogrebin, “ChevronTexaco.”
14. The Metropolitan Opera unveiled its use of supertitles in the Met Titles, a system that displays the text on screens behind seatbacks (because the proscenium is too large for the more conventional supertitles) on October 2, 1995. Tommasini “Reinventing Supertitles.”
15. I mention black female singers (and not even all the singers of that era) and no black male singers because there were very few black men singing at the Met. This is a deeply pressing topic and has been discussed thoughtfully by Wallace Cheatham (Dialogues on Opera) and Alison Kinney (“Conversations with Black Otellos”).
16. The adaptation of Bizet’s Carmen opera on the African continent in South Africa and Senegal led to an article for a journal issue on Opera and Citizenship (see André, “Carmen in Africa”).
17. Joseph Ramaka’s Karmen Geï (2001) is most efficiently seen in a context of Senegalese film. I have not found a burgeoning opera scene in Senegal; however, there might be a fruitful exploration in the wider region of opera in the Sahel (for example, Bintou Were, A Sahel Opera [2007], composed by a collaborative team) and the Sahel Opera organization.
18. At the time of this writing I know of a few South African scholars working on extended projects (monographs, articles) on opera in and around South Africa: Innocentia Jabulisile Mhlambi, Donato Somma, Grant Olwage, Thomas Pooley, and Hilde Roos. The complicated layers of operatic activity during colonialism, apartheid and post-apartheid, provides a rich environment for South African opera studies.
19. For a further discussion of the historical context for Verdi’s Aida see Said, “Empire at Work,” Gauthier and McFarlane-Harris, “Nationalism.”
20. American Music Review 45, no. 1 (Fall 2015) is devoted to Harry Lawrence Freeman’s Voodoo, the archive of his works given to Columbia, and the conference “Restaging the Harlem Renaissance: New Views on Performing Arts in Black Manhattan” (June 26–27, 2015).
21. Information about Adolphus Hailstork’s operas appears at his music publisher’s website (Theodore Presser Company, http://www.presser.com/composer/hailstorkadolphus/); see also Banfield, “Hailstork, Adolphus Cunningham,” and Hailstork’s entry on the AfriClassical.com website (African Heritage in Classical Music), http://chevalierdesaintgeorges.homestead.com/hailstork.html#21. At the time of this writing, the Theodore Presser Company website mentions that Hailstork is currently composing Robeson, an operatic theater work written for Trilogy: An Opera Company in Newark, New Jersey. On the Trilogy: An Opera Company homepage they state that their focus is “on the works of black composers as well as works reflective of the Black Experience.” Their mission statement includes their commitment to “maintaining diversity within its hiring practices.” http://trilogyaoc.homestead.com/page04.html.
22. Ronni Reich, “Robeson Opera Opens at NJPAC,” Star-Ledger, November 25, 2014. http://www.nj.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2014/11/robeson_opera_opens_at_njpac.html. See also Kozinn, “Living Colour and Robeson Opera.”
23. Leslie Adams (Blake [1986]), based on the nineteenth-century novel by Martin Delany about a slave who traveled throughout the southern United States and Cuba to plan a large-scale insurrection, Regina Harris Baiocchi (Gbeldahoven: No One’s Child [1997], about Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and their patron Charlotte Osgood Mason), George Lewis (Afterword [2015], about the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in Chicago), Dorothy Rudd Moore (Frederick Douglas [1985]), Richard Thompson (The Mask in the Mirror [2009], about relationship between Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Ruth Moore).
24. Smittle, “Glimpse of the ‘Little Rock Nine’”; Cooper, “Little Rock Nine Inspire an Opera.”
25. I saw the New York City Apollo Theater premiere (October 6, 2017). For more information see Kimberly C. Roberts, “‘We Shall Not Be Moved’: A Candid Commentary on Our Society,” Philadelphia Tribune, September 19, 2017, and Salamishah Tillet “A Police Bombing, Homes on Fire and an Opera the Grapples with It All,” New York Times, September 15, 2017.
26. Hyde, “The Summer King.”
27. While the sexualized nature of gender is a main subject in opera, I am referring to operas such as Harvey Milk (composed by Stewart Wallace with a libretto by Michael Korie) from 1995, based on the gay activist politician; Patience and Sarah (composed by Paula M. Kimper with a libretto by Wende Persons) from 1998, heralded as an early mainstream gay-themed opera; and Brokeb
ack Mountain from 2014 (composed by Charles Wuorinen with the libretto by Annie Proulx), based on her 1997 short story. Two well-known cases of earlier operas that highlight gay desire are Berg’s 1935 Lulu, with the lesbian character the Countess Geschwitz, and stagings that play up same-sex desire through cross-dressed conventions (for example, the opening of Der Rosenkavalier or operas with travesti roles by Handel, Mozart, or Rossini).
28. As an opera scholar, I am well aware of how controversial it is to imply that a grand opera tradition ended in the early twentieth century with the death of Puccini (1924). There are definitely wonderful now-established operas written afterward (such as those by Menotti, Britten, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, to name just a few) as well as many of the composers in this study. However, I am referring to the general “grand tradition” of the long nineteenth century.
29. Thomas Schippers (1930–1977) is the only one in this group who grew up outside the Detroit area, in Portage, Michigan, an area near Kalamazoo.
30. The issue of Verdi working with (and despite) the censors of his time is a rich area of Verdi scholarship. Writing his opera Un Ballo in Maschera is the greatest difficulty he encountered in his career; the opera was originally intended for the Teatro San Carlo in Naples but ended up being moved to the Teatro Apollo in Rome due to troubles with the Neapolitan censors. One of the difficulties was the setting of the opera in Sweden and the situation of regicide onstage when King Gustavus III is assassinated. This was changed to a setting with a fictitious Riccardo, Count of Warwick and the governor of Boston. In the Swedish setting, Ulrica’s racial identity is not indicated, and she is called “Mam’zelle Arvidson.” Parker, ”Ballo in maschera, Un.”
31. Though there are different meanings for the term “creole,” a basic use for the word is in the colonial setting for children born in the colonies—children of mixed parentage from the colonies and the New World or children born of colonial parents in the New World. Renato’s being a Creole is not necessarily an indication of his racial difference.
32. Bergeron, “Verdi’s Egyptian Spectacle.”
33. I use the term “sexuality” in this study primarily as a way to explore how gendered conventions express sexual behavior (for example, the hypersexualized association of behavior, as with the minstrel Jezebel caricature, or acts around sexual violence and domination). Less prominent in these case studies are the issues surrounding lesbian, homosexual, or bisexual identities. Chapter 5 includes a discussion around trans queer themes in a 2016 production of Carmen by Opera Modo.
34. As John Rockwell, author for the New Grove Dictionary of Opera entry titled “Four Saints in Three Acts,” writes that the synopsis he produces for his entry is “drawn from Grosser’s scenario; it could not be deduced from Stein’s words alone.”
35. For a discussion about the multiple layers of meaning blackness and modernism project in Four Saints in Three Acts, see Barg “Black Voices/White Sounds.”
36. This thinking of time and the act of interpretation relates to themes by Johannes Fabian in his exploration of how our position with various Others (the West and the “rest,” the present and the past, the anthropologist and the subject) shapes our discussion and analysis. See Fabian, Time and the Other.
37. Radano and Bohlman, “Introduction,” 5.
38. Stoever’s “Listening Ear” has a lot in common with my construction of the “Period Ear,” which I used more generally to understand the historical and cultural context around “listening” to gender and race/ethnicity in early-nineteenth-century Italian opera (see Voicing Gender). Other important studies that have influenced my thinking about black performance include DeFrantz and Gonzales, Black Performance Theory (especially “Introduction: From “Negro Expression” to “Black Performance”) and, about listening, opera, gender, and race, Eidsheim, Sensing Sound, and Hutcheon, Theory of Adaptation.
39. The five-article cluster appears in African Studies 75, no. 1 (2016): “Introduction, Winnie: The Opera and Embodying South African Opera;” André, “Winnie, Opera, and South African Artistic Nationhood”; Somma, “‘Just Say the Words’: An Operatic Rendering of Winnie”; Mhlambi, “Embodied Discordance: Vernacular Idioms in Winnie: The Opera”; and “‘The Musical Thread’: Neo Muyanga on Opera and South Africa; A Conversation between Neo Muyanga and Donato Somma,” an interview with another up-and-coming opera composer.
40. Lorde, “Master’s Tools.”
41. Barber, Anthropology of Texts, 42–44.
Chapter 2. Black Opera across the Atlantic
1. For additional pioneering work, see Catherine Parsons Smith (esp. on William Grant Still), Carol J. Oja (on William Grant Still, the black presence on Broadway, and black virtuosos during the civil rights era). Newer projects are emerging as well: David Gutkin’s “American Opera, Jazz and Historical Consciousness, 1924–1994” (unpublished dissertation) has a section on the operas of Harry Lawrence Freeman; Gutkin and Marti Newland co-edited a special issue of the American Music Review (vol. 45, no. 1 [Fall 2015]) with an emphasis on Freeman and opera during the Harlem Renaissance. These represent a few new directions in a field that needs much more work.
2. Radano, Lying Up a Nation, xv.
3. For a deeper background into the beginnings of opera in North America and the United States, see: John Dizikes, Opera in America; Elise Kirk, American Opera; and Katherine Preston, Opera on the Road.
4. In addition to Rossini’s Barber with Manuel Garcia I, Manuel García II (the son) was a baritone and leading vocal pedagogue; he wrote one of the most influential singing treatises of the bel canto singing technique. The two daughters, Maria Malibran and Pauline Viardot, became important singers and musical figures in their own right.
5. Information on Lorenzo Da Ponte is from Tim Carter and Dorothea Link’s entry, “Da Ponte, Lorenzo,” Oxford Music Online.
6. Graziano points out that with the right management, such as Major Pond managing the “Black Patti” in the 1880s, “white audiences would attend popular events with high-art programs in which the races were mixed” (“Early Life,” 580). Kristen Turner’s work discusses the Theodore Drury Grand Opera Company, an all-black opera company that had strong black patronage from 1900 to 1907 (“Class, Race, and Uplift”).
7. Several authors have discussed the transgressive elements of minstrelsy. See Cockrell, Demons of Disorder, for an especially strong discussion of the subversive nature of whites blacking up in this tradition; regarding whiteness, social class, and sexual perversion, Lott, Love and Theft.
8. For sources on minstrelsy in South Africa during the nineteenth century see Ansell, Soweto Blues, 13–17; Cockrell, “Of Gospel Hymns”; and Erlmann, “Feeling of Prejudice.”
9. Southern, Music of Black Americans, 228. Graham in Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry also mentions the naming of the Fisk Jubilee Singers as having connections to Leviticus 25: 39–55 and the biblical emancipation of the Hebrew slaves.
10. The use of such terms, “minstrels” and “minstrel shows,” caused confusion in its own time up through today. Luckily, there are scholars (James Cook, Sandra Graham, Kira Thurman, among others) who are looking up historical performances and programs to help clarify what repertoire was being sung by black solo artists and chorale groups.
11. Chybowski, “‘Black Swan’ in England” and “Becoming the ‘Black Swan’”; Graziano, “Early Life,” 545, 561.
12. Wright. “Jones, Sissieretta.” The Black Patti Troubadours used the term “Operatic Kaleidoscope” in the nineteenth century in their programs. Marta J. Effinger-Crichlow mentions the term as well in “Jones, Madame Sissieretta Joyner.”
13. Turner, “Class, Race, and Uplift.”
14. Cook, Arts of Deception. His current project on the first African American artists, writers, and activists to market their careers globally is under contract with Norton.
15. Thurman, “German Lied,” 569n83.
16. Powers, From Plantation to Paradise.
17. Na
tional Archives and Records Administration. “File copy of the letter from Eleanor Roosevelt to the president general of the DAR.” http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/american_originals/eleanor.html.
18. See Bryan, “Radiating a Hope.” Bryan is working on a book-length study of Dawson, titled A Place on the Stage: The Legacy of Mary Cardwell Dawson and the National Negro Opera Company, forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press.
19. For the early history of opera in South Africa see Malan, “Opera Houses in South Africa.”
20. For information about Italian prisoners of war from World War II, see Donato Somma, “Mythologising Music: Identity and Culture in the Italian Prisoner of War Camps of South Africa,” unpublished thesis for the University of the Witwatersrand, May 2009. http://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/7005. See also Somma, “Madonnas and Prima Donnas.”
21. To non–South Africans, the nuances around what being coloured/colored means today are complex. In some conversations I have had with South Africans, the term “mixed race” refers to people who are black South African (for example, a clan affiliation such as Xhosa Zulu, Ndebele, and the like) and something else (for example, white, Malay, Indian); these people feel that after apartheid, “coloured” can now be synonymous with “mixed race.” Being biracial or mixed race can mean having parents who are not biracial or mixed race or colored. Other people feel that coloured/colored in South Africa today is something more specific that retains closer ties to the past. This position posits that being coloured/colored is different; as Eusebius McKaiser points out, “the criterion for being classified is clear: both of your parents must be colored.” (See McKaiser “Not White Enough, Not Black Enough”). This means that in order to be coloured/colored today, both parents must fit the apartheid-era classification of being coloured/colored.