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Dreaming in Ensemble: How Black Artists Transformed American Opera
A revelatory new account of Black innovation in American opera, showing how composers, performers, and critics redefined the genre both aesthetically and politically in the early twentieth century.
The inauguration of a “golden age” in Black opera is often dated to 1955, when Marian Anderson became the first Black singer to perform in a leading role at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Yet Anderson’s debut was actually preceded by a rich Black operatic tradition that developed in the first half of the twentieth century. Lucy Caplan tells the stories of the Black composers, performers, critics, teachers, and students who created this vibrant opera culture, even as they were excluded from the genre’s most prominent institutions. Their movement, which flourished alongside the Harlem Renaissance, redefined opera as a wellspring of aesthetic innovation, sociality, and antiracist activism.
Caplan argues that Black opera in the early twentieth century had decidedly countercultural ambitions. In opera’s sonic grandeur and dramatic maximalism, artists found creative resources for expressing the complexity of Black life. The protagonists of this story include composers Harry Lawrence Freeman and Shirley Graham, whose operas boldly interpreted Black diasporic history; performers Caterina Jarboro and Florence Cole-Talbert, who both starred in the racially fraught role of Aida; and critics Sylvester Russell and Nora Holt, who wrote imaginatively about the genre in the Black press. Yet Caplan also focuses on the many Black students, amateurs, opera house staff, and listeners who contributed indelibly to opera’s meanings.
With the creation of new companies, choruses, and audiences, opera not only circulated in the Black public sphere but itself became a public sphere with radical potential.
The inauguration of a “golden age” in Black opera is often dated to 1955, when Marian Anderson became the first Black singer to perform in a leading role at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Yet Anderson’s debut was actually preceded by a rich Black operatic tradition that developed in the first half of the twentieth century. Lucy Caplan tells the stories of the Black composers, performers, critics, teachers, and students who created this vibrant opera culture, even as they were excluded from the genre’s most prominent institutions. Their movement, which flourished alongside the Harlem Renaissance, redefined opera as a wellspring of aesthetic innovation, sociality, and antiracist activism.
Caplan argues that Black opera in the early twentieth century had decidedly countercultural ambitions. In opera’s sonic grandeur and dramatic maximalism, artists found creative resources for expressing the complexity of Black life. The protagonists of this story include composers Harry Lawrence Freeman and Shirley Graham, whose operas boldly interpreted Black diasporic history; performers Caterina Jarboro and Florence Cole-Talbert, who both starred in the racially fraught role of Aida; and critics Sylvester Russell and Nora Holt, who wrote imaginatively about the genre in the Black press. Yet Caplan also focuses on the many Black students, amateurs, opera house staff, and listeners who contributed indelibly to opera’s meanings.
With the creation of new companies, choruses, and audiences, opera not only circulated in the Black public sphere but itself became a public sphere with radical potential.
323 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 4, 2025
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August 11, 2025
What a rare joy! To read this book is to enter an impeccable work of historical scholarship, one that is so beautifully composed and richly informed by contemporaneous critical literature, the distinctive cultural insights of Black and of white perspectives, familiarity with the language and sensibilities of artistic creatvity and musicianship. Every sentence exudes sharp intelligence and.deep consideration.
Hardly any word choice betrays the fact that this impressive young author grew up surrounded by a 21st century milieu of lazy cliches, rampant jargon, and casually conversational syntax. Lucy Caplan is simply a marvelous analytical narrative historian of music.
The only complaint that I can muster about this volume has to with the woeful inadequacy of its index. One would never know, from consulting the final 9.5 pages, that Lucy Caplan includes enlightening allusions to luminary African American composers and performers Margaret Bonds, Rhianna Giddens, and Odetta Holmes, or that she devotes significant attention to the educational infrastructure that aspiring Black musicians derived from their time spent at conservatories such as Fisk University, Howard University, the Juilliard School, and Oberlin College. Entries indicating how and where such key figures and places touched upon or situated Caplan's illuminating narrative would vastly enhance the indexes' utility to students and scholars alike.
Hardly any word choice betrays the fact that this impressive young author grew up surrounded by a 21st century milieu of lazy cliches, rampant jargon, and casually conversational syntax. Lucy Caplan is simply a marvelous analytical narrative historian of music.
The only complaint that I can muster about this volume has to with the woeful inadequacy of its index. One would never know, from consulting the final 9.5 pages, that Lucy Caplan includes enlightening allusions to luminary African American composers and performers Margaret Bonds, Rhianna Giddens, and Odetta Holmes, or that she devotes significant attention to the educational infrastructure that aspiring Black musicians derived from their time spent at conservatories such as Fisk University, Howard University, the Juilliard School, and Oberlin College. Entries indicating how and where such key figures and places touched upon or situated Caplan's illuminating narrative would vastly enhance the indexes' utility to students and scholars alike.
Displaying 1 of 1 review