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  Black Opera

  Black Opera

  History, Power, Engagement

  NAOMI ANDRÉ

  Publication of this book is supported by the Manfred Bukofzer Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

  Portions of chapter 6 have been adapted from “Winnie, Opera, and South African Artistic Nationhood,” African Studies, no. 1 (2016), © 2016 by Taylor & Francis. Reprinted by permission.

  © 2018 by the Board of Trustees

  of the University of Illinois

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: André, Naomi Adele, author.

  Title: Black opera: history, power, engagement / Naomi André.

  Description: Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017056072| ISBN 9780252041921 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780252083570 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780252050619 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Blacks in opera. | Opera.

  Classification: LCC ML1700 .A53 2018 | DDC 782.1089/96—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017056072

  Cover illustration: Courtesy of Cape Town Opera, photographer Bernard Bruwer

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  1Engaged Opera

  2Black Opera across the Atlantic: Writing Black Music History and Opera’s Unusual Place

  3Haunted Legacies: Interracial Secrets From the Diary of Sally Hemings

  4Contextualizing Race and Gender in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess

  5Carmen: From Nineteenth-Century France to Settings in the United States and South Africa in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

  6Winnie, Opera, and South African Artistic Nationhood

  Conclusion: Engaged Musicology, Political Action, and Social Justice

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  This project has benefited from generous support from my home institution, the University of Michigan, and the guidance of many people. I was fortunate to receive funding from the UM African Studies Center (the wonderful African Heritage Initiative), the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, a Humanities Faculty Fellowship, and the LSA Associate Professor Support Fund. I was further aided by additional support from Women’s Studies, the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, and the Residential College. A special thanks goes to the Women of Color in the Academy Project for their writing groups and retreats as well as their warm collegiality.

  I have been fortunate to have colleagues and friends who have given me very helpful feedback as I have moved through the process of pulling this project together from many diverse experiences and ideas. I am grateful for the extremely valuable comments I have received from people who have read portions of the manuscript at various stages: Evelyn Asultany, David Burkham, Suzanne Camino, Evan Chambers, William Cheng, Mariah Fink, Jennifer Myers, Marti Newland, Josh Rabinowitz, Kira Thurman, and Michael Uy. Many thanks to Mark Clague and his dynamite seminar on Porgy and Bess (fall 2017) for reading over and commenting on chapter 4. Special thanks also goes to Abby Stewart, who read through and commented on the full manuscript at a critical point when all the puzzle pieces were coming together, and to Ayanna Okeeva Smith and Marian Killian-Gilbert for inviting me to Indiana University for a short yet stimulating and rejuvenating residency in the fall of 2016. I want to express deep gratitude to my editor, Laurie Matheson, as we have moved through a second project together. I am intensely grateful for Laurie’s guidance and shepherding this project through the various stages, including identifying courageous readers who generously gave me critical advice and helped me clarify and strengthen the presentation of my ideas and assembling a wonderful production team (many thanks especially to Jennifer Clark and Julie Gay).

  A growing group of scholars who have become friends and supporters over the years in our mutual quest to flesh out sources and shape a historiography of black composers, to practice new formations of intersectional analyses, and to pioneer directions in music scholarship: these dear people include Ellie Hisama, Tammy Kernodle, Karen Bryan, Gwynne Kuhner Brown, Kira Thurman, and Alison Kinney. Thank you for being beacons in the groves of underexplored repertories and populations.

  I am fortunate and thankful to belong to a diverse, rich intellectual community in multiple disciplines within the University of Michigan, across the United States, and in South Africa. Most locally in Ann Arbor are Sandra Gunning, Amal Fadlalla, Edie Lewis, Kelly Askew, Cynthia Burton, Terri Conley, Helen Fox, Susan Walton, Beth Genne, Rebecca Schwartz-Bishir, Ruth Tsoffar, Tiana Marquez, Sarah Fenstermaker, Elinor Linn, and Marc Gerstein. More broadly are April James, Nancy Clark, Marnie Schroer, the Callahan family (especially Michael, Susan, and Treana), Donato Somma, and Innocentia Jabulisile Mhlambi. There is a very special group of people who have known me for at least a couple of decades and are particularly marvelous in remembering things about me that help me navigate the sensational as well as the tough times: Caroline Gaither, Rachel Andrews and Kathy Battles, Wendy Giman, and Leone and Ken Litt.

  Fueling this project were a few special local hangouts: Zingerman’s Coffee Company and the Mighty Good Coffee at Arbor Hills. I also want to express happiness for having Piper, Zeus, and Danny as faithful writing companions.

  My deep appreciation goes to Don for his care and support in holding things together on the home front and being a thoughtful listening ear. I also want to mention my love and joy for being Safiya’s mom and for having her wonderfully earthshaking presence in my life.

  Black Opera

  1Engaged Opera

  Throughout this book I present a way of thinking, interpreting, and writing about music in performance that incorporates how race, gender, sexuality, and nation help shape the analysis of opera today. My focus is on how these works, regardless of whether they were written in the distant or recent past, resonate with the issues and experiences of people today: those in the audience and wider contemporary publics. Most musicological analysis, including opera studies, has done its best to reconstruct a viable historical context from what we know of the past to help us understand how we might think about this work in the present. Some of that energy fueled the desire to reconstruct historically informed “performance practice,” for example, recreating how Mozart might have first seen and heard his operas (such as the instruments used, the ornamentation improvised, and the materials for the costumes and set designs). This book departs from the solitary goal of understanding how music might have had meaning in the past. While the past is relevant to a general understanding, my larger emphasis is on how these operas have meaning for current audiences. By “audiences” I am referring both to the actual people in the concert hall as well as potential audience members among those who do not attend “classical” (in the general sense) concerts because such venues seem too elitist or outside of their grasp. I am interested in what audiences today see and the connections they can draw to recent and current historical events; this method of inquiry incorporates the shared lived experiences of everyone involved: the performers and the public. Such an approach that brings together opera in a historical context and focuses on how it resonates in the present day points to a type of analysis I call an engaged musicology.

  Black Otello

  I start with two true stories about Verdi’s 1887 opera Otello as it was performed early in the second decade of the twenty-first century. These events provide a context for the impetus of this study. The first happened in the fall of 2012; the second is from the summer–fall 2015.

  In the fall of 2012 I took one of my bl
ack South African colleagues to a performance of Verdi’s Otello in the Metropolitan Opera’s Live in HD series. My colleague was a visiting scholar from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and we were part of a small team embarking on a research project that was examining the current opera scene in South Africa. This colleague was in the middle of a six-month stay here at the University of Michigan, and one of my pleasures was going to live opera performances together at the School of Music, Theatre and Dance at the university, and in Detroit at the Michigan Opera Theatre. The Metropolitan Opera’s Live in HD broadcasts involved a type of hybrid “live” experience as we watched the Saturday matinee performance of the Metropolitan Opera in real time, live streaming to a local movie theater.

  While I was excited to share this wonderful opera with my colleague who was fairly new to opera as a genre, I was also a little anxious about this particular performance. It is already a complicated situation with the performance of Verdi’s Otello and the then-standard use of blackface makeup for the title character. To make things even more awkward, the role of Otello was being sung by Johan Botha, an Afrikaner singer who would be wearing the blackface makeup. I did not know how to think about this—especially given the time period. Here we were, less than twenty years after the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, where the most brutal regime of white-against-black violence and oppression on the planet during our lifetime had taken place. As an African American woman who was born at the end of the civil rights era, I came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, a time when so many of us thought we were poised for only better and more substantial gains regarding racial inequality and understanding. Yet there we were, sitting in an American movie theater watching one of the most important opera houses in the world utilize the practice of blackface makeup that vividly referenced the painful tradition of minstrelsy, where (primarily) white singers portrayed negative stereotypes of blacks. And I had the opportunity to watch this performance with my black South African friend seeing this minstrel holdover performed by one of her white countrymen in an era that was only a few years past the oppression of apartheid. The timing was also relevant for events developing in the United States. There in the fall of 2012, we were already more than six months past the death of Trayvon Martin and still quite unaware of the upcoming impact his murder and the other public deaths of young black people (primarily young men) would have on the public to kick off a new articulation of racial awareness in the United States.1

  I sat in the darkened movie theater watching the screen and watching my collaborator watch an Afrikaner in blackface playing the role of Otello. I wanted to apologize, even though that was not the most productive thing to do. I decided that there really was not much I could say to “explain” or even try to justify and try to make sense of what was happening. Instead, I watched the performance and listened to her questions. She wondered about Botha’s age, as a way to figure out where he fit into South African history. Though I did not know his age, she estimated that he probably had grown up under apartheid and, as was mandatory, served in the South African military.2 A confirmation online shows his age to have been forty-seven at the 2012 performance, so he would definitely have qualified to serve in the South African Defense Force when he came of age in the mid-1980s.3 Botha onstage (through the streaming HD broadcast) and my South African colleague and I in the theater were all in the same age group and yet experienced vastly different lives regarding black-white racial politics during the same period, separated by the Atlantic.

  There was very little public comment on the racial politics of the 2012–13 season production of Otello at the Metropolitan Opera. The big news was that it was a revival for Renée Fleming (in the role of Desdemona), as it was one of her earliest triumphs with the Met and had been her first Met opening night seventeen years before. In an article he wrote for the New York Times, “Returning to a Special Role, Maybe for the Last Time: Renée Fleming in the ‘Otello’ Revival at the Met” (October 10, 2012), Zachary Woolfe focused on Fleming and said nothing about race or blackface makeup. He praised Fleming, critiqued Botha’s stage acting, and then wrote, “ To be fair, Mr. Botha may have had other things on his mind. After an uncomfortable first half dotted with stifled high notes, it was announced that he was suffering from allergies. No matter the culprit, his voice settled after the intermission, and its impressive size and bronze color came through.” Though “bronze” is mentioned in reference to to Botha, it is only about the sound (vocal color) of his voice—not an uncommon style of commentary—and has no specific reference to race in this context.

  The second event took place just three years later, in the summer and fall of 2015. The Metropolitan Opera was going to open its 2015–16 season with a highly anticipated new production by Bartlett Sher of Verdi’s Otello, this time with Latvian tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko in the title role, with the Russian soprano Hibla Gerzmava as Desdemona. Displayed prominently in their season book, the Met had put a picture of an Otello with noticeable blackface makeup. Alison Kinney, an opera lover and journalist, was the first to write about the Met’s decision not to use blackface after the season brochure “featured a cover image of pale Latvian tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko looking … like he’d had a bronzer malfunction.”4

  The question of whether or not to use blackface seems a more straightforward issue than it turns out to be on deeper inspection. Many people outside of the opera world are quite perplexed to realize that—as the past few years of these two examples show—the opera stage is the only stage in the world today where this practice of using blackface makeup for nonblack singers to portray black roles is a regular feature that is practiced, accepted, and—until very recently—never discussed.5

  These opening stories around Otello begin to illuminate what is at stake with the representation of a black character on a stage where the history is to use blackface makeup. This means something in the United States, where the history of minstrelsy, blackface makeup, and negative stereotypes of blacks in the nineteenth century still provide a legacy today. This also means something for audiences who see a white South African singer in blackface makeup and make the connection that he served in the South African military during apartheid, just a few decades before.

  In both the United States and South Africa, the opera stage was closed to black singers for decades, and there was a strong mechanism in place in both countries, the enactment of painful and legally enforced practices of white supremacy, that segregated these stages. In an era when science no longer supports a genetic basis for racial differences, we still live in a time when phenotypical differences are legible and the construction of racial difference presents various meanings.6 In the United States we have seen the first black president, Barack Obama, serve two terms; in South Africa, a steady stream of the first democratically elected presidents, all black, since the end of apartheid: Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, Kgalema Motlanthe, and Jacob Zuma. Yet both countries still are working out issues about how to write a history that is honest and brings in the diverse experiences of racial difference.

  As I write the chapters of this book, I have seen the deterioration of black-white race relations in the United States as long-time hidden practices are getting more national attention: the “new Jim Crow,” with incarceration rates and sentencing terms unfairly applied to black people; events where innocent black people are shot by the police and no one is held responsible; and cases where police officers are targeted and murdered.7 From afar, during my years growing up, the South African protests against apartheid provided a juxtaposition to the racial tensions in the United States. The increasing violence in South Africa with the Sharpeville Massacre (1960), the Soweto Uprising (1976), and the state of emergency under Prime Minister/President Pieter Willem Botha (1985) was dimly reflected in the growing American consciousness of apartheid in the 1980s. In my first year at Barnard College, the Coalition for a Free South Africa at Columbia University assembled a shantytown along College Walk (April 1986)
that was also joined by other universities, including Dartmouth and Cornell. The 1990s brought about the triumph in dismantling apartheid and provided the restorative justice model of the Truth and Reconciliation Coalition led by Nobel Prize laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Yet we have, only a few decades later in 2015 and 2016, South African student protests around #FeesMustFall and #Rhodes-MustFall, calling for the decolonization and transformation of South African institutions of higher education. This second decade of the new millennium has brought both hope and discouragement around black-white relations on both sides of the Atlantic.

  My goal is not to conflate these two countries around their racial oppressions as being the same. They are separate and have different histories, trajectories, and legacies. Instead, my aim is to bring into focus two complementary operatic arenas, half a world apart, that demonstrate similar and different approaches to situations with much in common—specifically, the new millennium’s legacy and articulations of the oppression of black people. This legacy is based on earlier oppression (colonialism and apartheid in South Africa, slavery and Jim Crow segregation in the United States) that had some release at the end of the twentieth century with the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa (and development of their new constitution) and the emergence of a black middle class (despite the growing movement of mass incarceration that targeted blacks) in a United States reaping the benefits of the civil rights movement and desegregation. Yet at the beginning of the second decade of the new millennium, both countries have seen a resurgence of racial tensions in the #FeesMustFall and related movements in South Africa and the #BlackLivesMatter and related movements in the United States.

  This book does not essentialize “black experience” into a set of codified events. Rather, it presents alternative narratives informed by theoretical paradigms that draw most heavily on feminist intersectional analysis, Patricia Hill Collins’s standpoint theory, bell hooks’s model of the margin and the center, and Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed.8 As a means of expanding the current narrative of history, by including the legacies of slavery, colonialism, Jim Crow, or apartheid, I show that opera has proved to be a flexible and capacious genre. It can give voice to the different experiences that exist outside the mainstream; with the participation of black composers and librettists behind the scenes, black bodies and embodied stories on the stage, and black audience members interpreting the performance, opera compellingly expresses multiple vantage points than have not been previously engaged.