OPERAS BY BLACK COMPOSERS: A TIMELINE OPERAS BY BLACK COMPOSERS: A TIMELINE

African American composers have written themselves and their stories, opera by opera, into American musical life. In a society hostile to the very idea of their existence, Black operatic composers created a repertoire of remarkable breadth and depth. They drew upon a diverse set of musical influences, from ragtime to the spirituals to Verdi to jazz; they wrote operetta and Wagnerian dramas, tragicomic love stories and historical epics. (It is worth noting that these composers’ decisions to work across a variety of musical genres often stemmed as much from necessity as from creative choice: since they regularly faced insurmountable hurdles in getting their work published and performed, they took on whatever work they could in order to make ends meet.) Long relegated to the status of exceptions, curiosities, and aberrations, these works constitute an unduly overlooked corner of the American musical past.

This timeline contains some examples of operas by Black composers, from one written just a few decades after Omar’s autobiography was published to works written in the present day. It is far from comprehensive; instead, it gives a sense of how expansive the tradition of Black operatic composition is, and how many people have contributed to its creation.

1868

John Thomas Douglass (composer and librettist), Virginia’s Ball. Virginia’s Ball is thought to be the first opera by an African American composer. Unfortunately, the score and libretto have been lost.

Louisa Melvin Delos Mars (composer and librettist), Leoni, The Gypsy Queen. Delos Mars was likely the first African American woman to write an opera. Leon, The Gypsy Queen was produced in Providence, Rhode Island; this score, too, is sadly lost.

1889

Harry Lawrence Freeman

The Martyr. Freeman over the course of his first compositions, is ancient Egypt.

William Grant Still and Langston Hughes/Verna Arvey, Troubled Island. Like Ouanga!, Troubled Island takes as its subject the Haitian Revolution. It was produced by New York City Opera in 1949, marking the first production of an opera by a Black composer by a major company. “I Dream a World” from Troubled Island.

1932

Clarence Cameron White and John Frederick Matheus, Ouanga! In the 1920s, violinist-composer White and scholar-poet Matheus traveled to Haiti to collect material for this opera about Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a leader of the Haitian Revolution.

1949

Shirley Graham (composer and librettist), Tom-Tom. Graham’s epic opera, a diasporic tale of African American history which spans from the distant past to 1930s Harlem, premiered in a Cleveland baseball stadium in 1932 before an audience of thousands. Listen to excerpts from Tom-Tom here

Dorothy Rudd Moore’s opera tableaus. more than was a moment shoulder.

3 of Frederick

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Paul Laurence Dunbar, Dream Lovers A collaboration between a famed Afro-British composer and an equally well-known African American poet, Dream Lovers is a romantic tale set in Madagascar.

Freeman (composer and librettist), wrote more than twenty operas career. The Martyr, among his a Wagner-inspired drama set in

The score for Scott Joplin’s opera Treemonisha, published in 1911. Creativity Commons.

Scott Joplin (composer and librettist), Treemonisha. Joplin was known best for his ragtime compositions, but he was also fascinated by opera. He was unable to stage a performance of his second opera, Treemonisha, during his lifetime, but it has since been produced many times.

Nkeiru Okoye (composer and librettist), Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed That Line to Freedom. Okoye became interested in writing a piece about Tubman while living in Baltimore (Tubman’s birthplace), and spent years researching the heroic abolitionist’s life. The opera not only narrates Tubman’s experiences – first in slavery, then as a rescuer of enslaved people –but also conveys the historical soundscape of Tubman’s own time.

Harriet Tubman.

Anthony Davis and Thulani Davis, X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X. Written by composer Anthony Davis and his cousin, the poet and scholar Thulani Davis, this opera explores the life of one of the most influential figures in the twentieth-century Black freedom struggle. X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X

Rudd Moore (composer and librettist), Frederick Douglass. opera narrates its protagonist’s life via a series of dramatic The composer recalls that as she worked on the piece for than a decade, she felt a deep affinity with her subject: “there moment which was as though [Douglass] were sitting around my It was something just uncanny.” An excerpt from Act 2, Scene Frederick Douglass.

Terence Blanchard and Kasi Lemmons, Fire Shut Up in My Bones. Based on a memoir by author and columnist Charles Blow, Fire Shut Up in My Bones premiered in St. Louis in 2019 and became the first opera by a Black composer and librettist to be staged at the Metropolitan Opera in 2021. “Peculiar Grace” from Fire Shut Up in My Bones.

REFLECT: Listen to two or three excerpts from these operas. What similarities and differences do you notice among the works? Have you heard operas by Black composers before, on recordings or in performance? If so, what was the context? If not, why do you think that is?