Black Opera

by Naomi Andre

  22. A quick history of these points with the Eoan Group can be found in Roos, “Eoan—Our Story,” esp. 190–91.

  23. See Roos, “Remembering to Forget the Eoan Group,” and Muller and Roos, Eoan: Our Story.

  24. See Cockrell, “Of Gospel Hymns.” Cockrell writes, “Spirituals were first sung in Durban in 1889, not by a black choir but by a forty-voice white ensemble conducted by a Mr. MacColl” (423).

  25. Ansell, Soweto Blues, 14–16. Veit Erlmann mentions the troupe as the Christy Minstrels in Cape Town in August 1862 (“Feeling of Prejudice,” 334).

  26. Cockrell, “Of Gospel Hymns,” esp. 419. Cockrell outlines several cases of minstrelsy in South Africa by American and British troupes as well as internal South African troupes. The American and South African troupes involved white and black performers in blackface.

  27. Erlmann, “Feeling of Prejudice,” esp. 331.

  28. Ansell, Soweto Blues, 15.

  29. E. Franklin Frazier (The Negro Family in the United States [1939]) was a sociologist who argued that “slavery was so devastating in America that it destroyed all African elements among black Americans.” Melville Herskovits (The Myth of the Negro Past [1941]) was an anthropologist who argued that “African traditions had survived in black cultures in the Americas.” A helpful source on this topic and this debate is Holloway’s Africanisms in American Culture, esp. pages 3–4.

  30. I found Angelo Gobbato’s essay of the opera scene in South Africa on the Cape Town Opera website, http://www.capetownopera.co.za/index.php/company/history in the fall of 2015 and last saw it posted there in June 2016. The information about composer Neo Muyanga is primarily from his website, http://www.neosong.net/index.html, and the published interview, Somma and Muyanga, “The Musical Thread.”

  31. I was fortunate to sit in on a few rehearsals (sadly, I was not able to be there for the final performance) during my first trip to Cape Town (July 2010). To triple cast Mozart’s Figaro is quite an accomplishment since the opera already has a large cast. Most educational opera programs double cast the roles to allow young voices a rest (not to sing two performances in a row) and give more students opportunities.

  32. Angelo Gobbato’s history of the opera scene in South Africa (hereafter cited as Gobbato’s History) is no longer on the Cape Town Opera website (http://www.capetownopera.co.za/index.php/company/history) and it has not been replaced with another history of the company. I last downloaded this history in early June 2016. The history is not dated, but clues in the essay (the memories from “over the past fifty years” when Gobbato mentions having emigrated to South Africa in 1950 in the beginning and the “production of Porgy and Bess that is currently playing in Berlin” at the end) seem to refer to the present time of the essay as September 2012 when the CTO went on tour and sang the choir for Porgy and Bess (with Sir Williard White and Latonia Moore with Sir Simon Rattle conducting at the Berliner Festspiele on September 14, 15, and 17, 2012). See http://www.berlinerfestspiele.de/en/aktuell/festivals/musikfest_berlin/archiv_mfb/archiv_mfb12/mfb12_programm/mfb12_veranstaltungsdetail_41218.php.

  33. Gobbato’s History.

  34. Ibid.

  35. Ibid.

  36. Information about Neo Muyanga can be found on his website: http://www.neosong.net/index.html, and in Somma and Muyanga, “Musical Thread.”

  37. Somma and Muyanga, “Musical Thread,” 87.

  38. Ibid., 90–91.

  39. Ibid., 90–93, quote on 93. Tiyo Soga (1829–1871) was a South African journalist, minister, and translator, and also a musical composer of hymns.

  40. South African Bongani Ndodana-Breen is another composer who has spent some formative years in Canada and the United States. He is the composer of Winnie: The Opera (2011).

  41. Somma and Muyanga, “Musical Thread,” 75.

  42. Ibid., 95.

  43. Khabi Mngoma (1922–1999) was the head of music at the University of Zululand and “had worked in the cultural sphere as artist, teacher, publisher, organizer (of cultural activities), choir conductor and singing coach, historian, and administrator.” See Khumalo, “Graduation Addresses.”

  44. See Khumalo’s website (http://www.sibongilekhumalo.co.za/biography.html) and her Wikipedia entry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sibongile_Khumalo). Also see Paul Maylam, “Citation for Sibongile Khumalo: Honorary Graduand, Rhodes University, 18 April 2009,” http://www.ru.ac.za/media/rhodesuniversity/content/ruhome/documents/citations09/CITATION%20%20FOR%20%20SIBONGILE%20%20KHUMALO.pdf.

  45. Ansell, Soweto Blues, 115

  46. Despite having the same surname, Mzilikazi Khumalo and Sibongile Khumalo are not related. Princess Magogo ka Dinuzulu (2002) was the first full-length opera by a black South African composer. Trained in the tonic-sol-fa tradition, composer Khumalo was aided in the orchestration of this work. Bongani Ndonana Breen’s Winnie: The Opera (2010) was the first full-length opera by a black South African composer that was also fully orchestrated by the composer.

  47. The inability to read music was not an uncommon situation after the Bantu Education Act was passed in 1953 and took the education of blacks away from the state-aided mission schools and enforced a new inferior pedagogy that worked as an education for servitude.

  48. The Pretoria Technikon merged with two other institutions to form the Tshwane University of Technology in 2004. Information about Maswanganyi’s career is gleaned from her page in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsakane_Valentine_Maswanganyi. The Roodepoort City Opera is located in Johannesburg. Through different configurations (and managements) this municipal theater was where white South African Tenor Johan Botha got an early start in his career in 1989.

  49. The first quotation in this sentence is from James Christopher Monger’s “Artist Biography: Amici Forever” on the AllMusic.com website: http://www.allmusic.com/artist/amici-forever-mn0000197340/biography; the second is from the “Amici Forever” Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amici_Forever.

  50. The AllMusic.com website provides track listings for both albums (The Opera Band and Defined) and lists the source for the number.

  51. Virginia Davids was also a singer in the Eoan Company opera activities in the Cape Town area.

  52. For information on Pumeza Matshikiza, see Isokariari, “Cape Town Soprano”; Picard, “Pumeza Matshikiza”; Tonkin, “Pumeza Matshikiza”; see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumeza_Matshikiza, and http://www.deccaclassics.com/us/artist/matshikiza/biography.

  53. For information on Pretty Yende, see Fonseca-Wollheim, “Little Time to Prepare”; Renee Montagne, “Pretty Yende: An Opera Star Whose Rise Began with a Fall,” Deceptive Cadence, NPR, Morning Edition, March 20, 2015; Zemsky/Green Artists Management homepage for Pretty Yende, http://www.zemskygreenartists.com/artists/pretty-yende; http://www.roh.org.uk/news/opera-and-music-201617 states that Yende made her Covent Garden debut as Adina in Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore on May 28, 2017. As this book goes to press, Yende’s second solo album, Dreams, produced by Sony, was released in November 2017 and with mid-nineteenth-century Italian and French repertoire.

  54. At the time of this writing, the documentary film Ukucula: I Live to Sing is available through the PBS website, http://www.thirteen.org/programs/i-live-to-sing.

  55. Both quotations come from the Isango Ensemble website, http://site.isangoensemble.org.za.

  56. Township Opera. Produced and Directed by Anthony Fabian, BBC and Elysian Films, 2002. 59 mins. Another beautifully photographed history of this opera company is in Driver, Short History of Dimpho di Kopane.

  57. Allen, “South African Troupe.”

  58. District Six is a part of Cape Town that has great historical value. It had been a racially integrated area with Cape Malays, Xhosa, mixed race, and smaller numbers of whites, Afrikaners, and Indians. During apartheid it was reclassified as a whites-only area and forcibly relocated many in the late 1960s through the early 1980s. Since 1994, the government is still working to recognize older claims of former residents. The Fugard
Theatre was named for Athol Fugard (b. 1932), an Afrikaner playwright whose work strongly opposed the apartheid system.

  59. http://site.isangoensemble.org.za.

  60. Dornford-May “Working.”

  61. Ibid.

  62. “President Obama Welcomes the Broadway Cast of Hamilton,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3bNmhbvU2o. President Obama delivered remarks before a performance of “Hamilton at the White House” on March 14, 2016.

  63. Ibid.

  Chapter 3. Haunted Legacies

  1. These sources will be discussed in further depth later. DNA testing from 1998 revealed that the descendants of Sally Hemings are from someone in the Jefferson family, almost without a doubt Thomas, but possibly another relative in the Jefferson family. The other evidence of the relationship is in the memoir that Madison Hemings, the son of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, wrote and published in 1873. There is a body of secondary literature about this relationship and current historical debates about it. Two leading analyses on the Jefferson and Hemmings story are by Annette Gordon-Reed (Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings [1998] and The Hemingses of Monticello [2008]) and Randall Kennedy (“Sally Hemmings and Thomas Jefferson).

  2. Envoice and envoicing are terms that have been used in music studies to give agency to hidden and less audible meanings in musical works. Frequently used to empower a marginalized message, in recent usage the terms have been used by James Deaville (“Envoicing of Protest”) and Carolyn Abbate (“Opera; or, The Envoicing of Women”).

  3. Personal email correspondence with Sandra Seaton, June 12, 2017.

  4. In this section I will use different names for the person whose Koi-San birth name has been lost. She has been called: Saartijie and Sara Baartman. In his eulogy for her funeral with the repatriation of her body back to South Africa, President Thabo Mbeki called her Sarah Bartmann, and I use this spelling in the balance of my discussion.

  5. Crais and Scully, Sara Baartman. Page 1 of the book’s introduction places Baartman’s birth in the 1770s.

  6. Ibid.

  7. Quereshi, “Displaying Sara Baartman,” 245.

  8. Ibid., 246–47.

  9. An excellent starting place for a discussion of the DNA testing and a bibliography of the relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson can be found on the Monticello website: https://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery/thomas-jefferson-and-sally-hemings-brief-account. Additionally, the possible kinship relationships between Hemings and the Jefferson family have been scrupulously documented by Annette Gordon-Reed in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Also see Whooley, “Objectivity and Its Discontents,” and Bay, “In Search of Sally Hemings.”

  10. Thabo Mvuyelwa Mbeki, “Speech at the Funeral of Sarah Bartmann, 9 August 2002,” http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/speech-funeral-sarah-bartmann-9-august-2002.

  11. Ibid.

  12. Though it could seem that Sally Hemings was given a choice to stay in Paris and become a free person, there was no guarantee or infrastructure to ensure that she would be able to survive and take care of herself. Additionally, she had no way of enforcing a promise that Jefferson would give her a comfortable and privileged life if she returned with him to the United States. Discussion of the arrangement Jefferson promised Sally Hemings if she were to return from Paris with him can be found in Meacham, Thomas Jefferson, 217–19.

  13. In South Africa, the Population Registration Act (1950) organized people into three main racial categories: Black, White, Coloured (those of mixed race). Indians (from India), Chinese, Malay (Indonesians), and other racial/ethnicities brought over through colonialism were put in different categories.

  14. Various sources list “Epps” and “Eppes” for Elizabeth Hemmings’s mother, Susannah. For consistency, I will use Epps.

  15. For a discussion of the dynamics of domination (and possible love) between master and slave in physical relationships see Brown, “Black Rapture.”

  16. Seaton, “Program Notes” (recording notes); quotation appears on the second (unnumbered) page.

  17. Ibid.; quotation appears on the fourth (unnumbered) page.

  18. Seaton, “Program Notes” (Michigan Quarterly Review), 627. These “Program Notes” include some of the same information, but are a little different than the “Program Notes” that accompanied the recording of From the Diary of Sally Hemings (White Pine Music) in 2010.

  19. Edward Rothstein “Life, Liberty.” The two exhibits were “Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: Paradox of Liberty,” National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. (January 26–October 14, 2012), and “Landscape of Slavery: Mulberry Row at Monticello,” held at Monticello.

  20. Though many in the general public only became aware of Sally Hemings in the 1990s after the DNA testing and ensuing controversy, there have been many others who believed and passed down an oral history of the Hemings family and the Jefferson-Hemings legacies from Monticello since the nineteenth century. As an historical and archeological site, Monticello has also become a leading place for understanding slavery in Jefferson’s time and place. Among others, Lucia Cinder Stanton, Monticello’s Shannon Senior Historian, has published about and aided in studying Jefferson’s life and slavery at Monticello. “Getting Word: African American Families of Monticello” is an oral history project that also follows and archives interviews to preserve a formerly hidden history: https://www.monticello.org/getting-word. Thanks to Sandra Seaton for letting me know about the “Getting Word” oral history project.

  21. There has been much discussion and debate over the scientific validity of whether or not Jefferson and Hemings had a sexual relationship and if they had children together. Additionally, the nature of the relationship, if it existed and bore children, is impossible to know given the complicated dynamics of consensual romantic love and the larger context of the master-slave economic reality during this time. Important sources include the two books by Annette Gordon-Reed (Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, Hemingses of Monticello) and the narrative and bibliography on the “Thomas Jefferson: Monticello” website: http://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery/thomas-jefferson-and-sally-hemings-brief-account. Additional sources include Lanier and Feldman, Jefferson’s Children, and Bey, “In Search of Sally Hemings.”

  22. The information about these people is gleaned primarily from the Monticello.org website and the presidential biography section on whitehouse.gov website. See also Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings and Hemingses of Monticello.

  23. Many people believe that Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson had six children together, two who did not survive childhood (Harriet I, 1795–1797, and a daughter born in 1799 who did not survive infancy) and the four who lived into adulthood (Beverley 1798–1873, Harriet II 1801-after 1863, Madison 1805–1877, and Eston 1808–1856). See https://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery/thomas-jefferson-and-sally-hemings-brief-account.

  24. Thomas Jefferson’s will provided for the freeing of five of his slaves, all of whom had close connections to Sally Hemings: Burwell Colbert, a relative of Sally’s; John Hemings, Sally’s younger brother; Joe Fossett, another relative of Sally’s; Madison Hemings (Sally’s son); and Eston Hemings (Sally’s son). See Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, 38–39. Beverly and Harriet (children of Sally Hemings) were allowed to leave Monticello, a euphemism for being granted their freedom (Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, 25, 26, 201; Meacham, Thomas Jefferson, 495–96. The only slaves Jefferson freed (as specified in his will, or those he allowed to unofficially leave) were all directly connected to Sally Hemings.

  25. The information in this paragraph is also laid out in Chart 3.1.

  26. Scholarship that puts the Hemings-Jefferson relationship into an interracial context during its time includes Morgan, “Interracial Sex,” 52–84, and Rothman, “James Callender,” 87–113.

  27. “Program Notes,” From the Diary of Sally Hemings liner notes, unnumbered pages.

  2
8. Ibid.

  29. Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, viii. This “Author’s Note” was added in 1998 after the results of the 1998 DNA testing showed that Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson most likely bore children together.

  30. “The Memoirs of Madison Hemings,” reprinted as appendix C in Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, 245–48. These memoirs were originally published as “Life among the Lowly, No 1,” Pike County (Ohio) Republican, March 13, 1873.

  31. This paragraph is not meant to imply that such interracial/“mixed”/biracial categories are not gaining acceptance and understanding in the United States. I mean only to imply that at the time of this writing, such categories are a long way off from being as fully understood as the categories of “white” and “black.” This will probably continue to change into having “in between” categories become more widely accepted. This paragraph focuses on black-white relationships; other interracial relationships (such as white-Asian, Native American-Latino, and any other combinations) have overlapping yet different histories and meanings.

  32. Bolcom was at Mills College from 1958 to 1961 when he first studied with Milhaud and received his master’s degree. Bolcom again worked with Milhaud when he attended the Paris Conservatoire later in the 1960s.

  33. Shuffle Along was revived on Broadway in 2016. It opened on April 28 but closed early on July 24, when the management decided not to replace the lead, Audra McDonald, who took maternity leave. This revival was staged at the Music Box Theatre and was directed by George C. Wolfe, choreographed by Savion Glover.