That “Porgy and Bess” — written by three white men, the Gershwin brothers and DuBose Heyward — has become known as the quintessential opera of the black American experience is a symbol of both the systemic racism found throughout the arts and the specifically slow-to-modernize nature of the operatic canon. (It opens the Metropolitan Opera’s season on Sept. 23.)
But though they’ve been ignored or underheard, African-American composers have long been crafting ambitious music dramas. Some of the works cited below exist in complete editions, ready to be programmed. Others are still emerging, thanks to the work of scholars reversing decades of neglect. (Dates indicate either publication or the first known performance.)
Scott Joplin, ‘Treemonisha’ (1911)
The “king of ragtime” had trouble getting this opera performed. Some of that difficulty had to do with branding, since “Treemonisha” — in which the youthful title character dodges danger, 20 years or so after the Civil War, in order to become a teacher and community leader — is not best understood as a ragtime opera.
It’s more than that. The work has the dramatic cut-and-thrust of Verdi, some syncopations familiar from the composer’s piano music, as well as choral complexities and solo arias that can stand with canonical works of the Romantic and modern eras.
Joplin self-published the piano-and-vocal score — a costly endeavor. Gunther Schuller’s later arrangement put the work more squarely in the tradition of grand opera. But Rick Benjamin has made an effective arrangement for a smaller, more period-accurate orchestra.
H. Lawrence Freeman, ‘Voodoo’ (1914)
A friend of Joplin, Mr. Freeman led his own company — the Negro Grand Opera Company — in an era when the Metropolitan Opera told him that it could “not see our way clear” to accepting his music for production.
When “Voodoo,” an evening-length warning against using magic for romantic fulfillment, was performed in a semi-staged production in New York in 2015, it was the first time the work had been performed since 1928. The piece has Wagnerian affinities, with Rhinemaiden-like music in the early going. But this influence is often suavely merged with spirituals and African percussion accents — often deployed in the service of love triangles and mystic conjuring spells.
Shirley Graham Du Bois, ‘Tom-Tom’ (1932)
Before she married W.E.B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham was known as perhaps the first black woman to have an opera performed, in 1932, for an audience of 25,000 at Cleveland Stadium. The score for that epic work, “Tom-Tom” — which traces the black experience from West Africa to the Harlem Renaissance — was long thought lost. (The full work was found in Ms. Graham Du Bois’s papers.) A performance at Harvard in 2018, organized by the scholar Lucy Caplan and the American Modern Opera Company, introduced tantalizing excerpts — some merging jazz harmony with European operatic influences.
James P. Johnson, ‘De Organizer’ (1940)
The writer of the hit song “Charleston” was also a composer with theatrical experience. This one-act opera about labor politics, with a libretto by Langston Hughes, was performed in 1940. (The deliverance that a working-class community seeks is provided by the labor organizer of the title, who aides in the creation of a union despite the opposition of the local overseer.)
Once again, the score was long thought lost, aside from arrangements of one aria, “Hungry Blues,” recorded in 1939. Yet at the turn of the 21st century, Mr. Johnson’s piano score was discovered, and a reconstruction was mounted in 2002.
William Grant Still, ‘Highway 1, USA’ (1963)
Often called the dean of African-American composers, Mr. Still also worked with Langston Hughes — on “Troubled Island,” which played at New York City Opera in 1949.
But his later “Highway One, USA” is a brutally compact piece of American verismo revolving around sibling rivalry and sexual jealousy; it could easily work on a double bill with another one-act (“Cavalleria Rusticana” or “Pagliacci,” perhaps). For now, a complete rendition is available on a recent recording by the St. Olaf Orchestra, and an excerpt was brilliantly recorded for Sony’s Black Composers Series, in the 1970s.
Anthony Davis, ‘X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X’ (1986)
A noted jazz pianist and bandleader, Mr. Davis credited the soprano Beverly Sills with helping get this nimble, biopic-style opera commissioned by New York City Opera — predating both Spike Lee’s 1992 film “X” and other operas, such as “Nixon in China,” based on contemporary events.
Mr. Davis brought members of his own band into the standard orchestra. The more traditional orchestral textures also crackle with lyrical beauty and harmonic interest, as in “Louise’s Aria,” for Malcolm X’s mother.
Leroy Jenkins, ‘The Mother of Three Sons’ (1990)
Mr. Jenkins, a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, was commissioned to write this opera by Hans Werner Henze. Along with his collaborators, the choreographer-director Bill T. Jones and the librettist Ann T. Greene, Jenkins produced a sometimes grim, sometimes dizzyingly folkloric opera full of modernist touches and references to the blues.
Mr. Jones’s choreography was integral to the mixture of African myths that comprised the ambiguous narrative. The opera also made its way to New York City Opera, where Mr. Jenkins made a series of audio recordings from the pit (where he also played violin). But no commercially available recording has yet been issued.
Anthony Braxton, ‘Trillium J’ (2009)
A sometime collaborator with both Mr. Jenkins and Mr. Davis, this improvising saxophonist and composer has long faced obstacles to seeing his complex notated works performed. Like Mr. Freeman, Mr. Braxton launched his operatic career by fielding his own orchestra — starting with money he won from a MacArthur “genius” grant in the 1990s.
The interconnected series of “Trillium” operas place him in the lineage of Wagner and Stockhausen. They are zany and profound (often in the same moment); diatonic as well as chromatic (ditto). The most recent installment to receive a public performance — “Trillium J,” a work with four stand-alone acts, including an apocalyptic town council meeting and intrigue at a gangster hide-out — appeared in semi-staged form at Roulette in Brooklyn, in 2014.
Source: Read Full Article