In a 1936 essay titled ‘Opera and the Negro Problem’, W. E. B. Du Bois argued – perhaps counterintuitively – that the elite artform of opera enjoyed a ‘vital connection’ to the everyday struggles of African Americans.Footnote ¹ He maintained that opera speaks to ‘Negro farm tenants in Arkansas’ and ‘Black college graduates searching New York for a job’ alike by virtue of its dramatization of human life. Opera also appears in Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, wherein the titular protagonist from ‘Of the Coming of John’ undergoes a transformative experience in a New York opera house while encountering the beauty and sophistication of Richard Wagner's Lohengrin. Opera offered John a glimpse of a life ‘without the cringing and sickening servility, without the cruel hurt that hardened his heart and soul’, a life which promised to raise him ‘out of the dirt and dust of that low life that held him prisoned and befouled’.Footnote ² In the reality of the opera house, John is eventually expelled from his seat to accommodate a white man; in the unreality of the opera production, by contrast, the possibilities for Black life are limitless.

This ‘vital connection’ between opera and everyday Black life is the beating heart of Lucy Caplan's richly illuminating and compelling Dreaming in Ensemble: How Black Artists Transformed American Opera. To whatever extent there is a consensus on the development of Black opera in the United States, most histories locate its inaugural moment with the 7 January 1955 debut of Marian Anderson at New York's Metropolitan Opera, which effectively ended the segregation of the operatic stage. Caplan (Music, Worcester Polytechnic Institute) purports, however, that this was the culmination rather than initiation of a Black tradition in US opera, and she turns her attention to the work of Black artists in the half-century before Anderson's debut – an overdue and welcome shift. Indeed, she aims to eschew the typical protagonists of scholarship on Black opera – the individual, elite, high-profile soloists who desegregated majority white companies throughout the 1950s and 1960s – in favour of the collective efforts of unexceptional, often working-class groups practising opera in less institutional spaces – ‘foregrounding not the few artists who reached the art form's upper echelons, but rather the many who sang opera in a library basement’ (2). These subjects include amateur companies, extras, staff, pedagogues, and beyond. In doing so, Dreaming in Ensemble expands the archive of Black operatic history and redefines its scholarly terrain, offering a corrective to narratives that privilege institutional breakthroughs over community-based collaboration.

One of Caplan's central interventions is her theorization of ‘Black operatic counterculture’, a term she uses to describe a distinct cultural formation shaped by Black composers, performers, and critics in the early twentieth-century US. She argues that these artists were not merely reacting to exclusion from white institutions, but actively developing an operatic culture ‘with its own coherent logic and parameters’ (11). Rather than seeking assimilation, they embraced opera's grand aesthetics – its sonic excess, dramatic spectacle, and expressive range – as a medium for Black world-making. This alternative, she suggests, rejected both the racial caricatures of minstrelsy and the sorrows of the spiritual, turning instead to opera's ‘un-reality’ as a site of speculative freedom (12). Perhaps Caplan's most interesting claim is that Black operatic counterculture presented a unique challenge to mainstream operatic culture within the realm of institutionalization. She maintains that as mainstream opera was rapidly losing its nineteenth-century status as an integral part of US popular culture and becoming sequestered in the elite space of the opera house, Black opera continued to operate in public-facing, anti-institutional spheres such as makeshift venues and amateur companies (7). In doing so, she argues, Black artists preserved opera's social vitality while radically reimagining its cultural possibilities – not merely as a vehicle for elite entertainment, but as a public sphere in its own right, a space where new social relationships, solidarities, and forms of community could emerge.

These radical re-imaginings form the backdrop for the first two chapters, which outline the anti-institutional bent of Black operatic counterculture. Chapter 1 tells of a ‘postbellum, pre-Harlem’ collective of composer Harry Lawrence Freeman, impresario Theodore Drury, and critic Sylvester Russell, all of whom shared a conviction that opera would define a new era in Black musical life. But this life was that of the working-class commoner, as Drury fashioned an opera company of amateurs while Freeman had his operas performed by a coalition of maids, cooks, and chauffeurs. Chapter 2 traces how critics, educators, and singers embedded opera in the Black public sphere during the 1910s–1920s. Figures such as E. Azalia Hackley, Lester Walton, and Nora Douglas Holt redefined operatic vocality as a tool for self-making, particularly for women, and turned schools, newspapers, and musical clubs into hubs of operatic life. These efforts, writes Caplan, ‘disentangled the Black classical voice from the historical suffering associated with the spirituals, and offered a pathway toward a more just world’ (63).

Beginning in the 1920s, the Harlem Renaissance ushered in a period of widened operatic opportunity, allowing Black artists to perform on mainstream stages while reimagining opera as a vehicle for diasporic memory and political imagination. Marking a shift from the ‘Black public sphere’ (83), Chapter 3 centres on the Black labourers who first desegregated mainstream opera houses, such as Met extra W. Llewelyn Wilson, Met doorman Edward ‘Black Carl’ Johnson, and odd-job jack-of-all-trades Julian Bagley of San Francisco's War Memorial Opera House. While some supernumeraries such as Cleveland's Juanita Morrow ultimately rebelled against the racial hierarchies of the opera house, most did little to reshape the institution's representational norms, taking roles as savages and slaves. Visible yet silent, Caplan argues that these figures instead exercised agency through subversively listening to productions they would have otherwise been barred from attending (102). Chapter 4 follows Black sopranos Florence Cole-Talbert and Caterina Jarboro, who in the 1920s–1930s took on the title role of Aida in mainstream companies. Caplan argues that their performances imbued Verdi's work with new social meaning, transforming the enslaved Ethiopian princess into a vehicle for freedom dreams and aesthetic self-definition. Black opera engaged in the work of ‘compos[ing] Afrodiasporic history’, as outlined in Chapter 5. Caplan's focus is 1932's Tom-Tom, a sprawling epic penned by (Harlem) Renaissance woman Shirley Graham, later the wife of Du Bois. Spanning a premodern West African village to a pre-Emancipatory US plantation to a 1920s Harlem cabaret, Tom-Tom utilized spirituals, jazz, and African folk songs to curate what Caplan reads as an archive of Black life as well as a capacious vision of collective Black world-making. While Caplan invokes ‘world-making’ at several points – variously as ‘express[ing] the complexity of Black life’ (11), ‘Black operatic self-determination’ (113), a ‘historical argument about African American music and diasporic solidarity’ (156), and an ‘ideological investment in Black revolutionary history’ (216) – the concept remains more suggestive than systematically theorized.

The final chapters of the book retell familiar stories of desegregationist ‘firsts’, often offered as celebratory proof that, in Caplan's delicious prose, ‘the arc of the Black operatic universe bends toward justice’ (169). But these triumphs were less isolated, inaugural firsts, she argues, than they were ‘moments in which the longstanding tradition of Black participation in opera became more visible to mainstream onlookers’ (170). Abbie Mitchell, Camilla Williams, Anne Brown, Todd Duncan, and the members of the National Negro Opera Company (the protagonists of Chapter 6) as well as Marian Anderson (the subject of Chapter 7) all owed their success to a preceding collective of offstage labourers, vocal coaches, and activists who operated outside of the spotlight. For every Williams there was a Cleota Collins, for every Anderson a Sylvia Olden Lee. And if anyone had ‘opened the door’ for future Black involvement in opera, it was literal doormen such as the Met's ‘Black Carl’ who had done so first.

These final chapters in particular raise a larger, unresolved question regarding Black operatic counterculture – namely, what precisely is countercultural about Black opera? As central as this framing is to Caplan's intervention, she is notably reticent to address this question. The most compelling evidence for this framing would appear to be Black opera's allegedly anti-institutional bent, the notion that it was counter to the mainstream by virtue of its performance by amateur companies in makeshift venues. As Caplan lays out in her introduction, mainstream opera allegedly underwent a process of ‘sacralization’ at the turn of the century, removing itself from the public popular sphere and entrenching itself within the elite opera house as a form of high art (7–10). (She candidly admits that this narrative is an oversimplification, but discreetly confines this observation to a footnote (247, n. 35)). She clarifies that ‘[mainstream] opera's redefinition as “high culture” was thus bound up with its institutionalization’ (9), whereas Black operatic counterculture rejected that institutionalization. And indeed, had the book ended after Chapter 2, this thesis would have been a compelling one, as by that point Black opera continued to operate in figuratively (and sometimes literally) underground spaces. But starting in Chapter 3 the book takes a turn from the library basement to the elite opera house, as Black artists fought for inclusion within mainstream operatic institutions. Chapters 3 and 4 are concerned with the presence of Black artists in ‘the mainstream opera house’,Footnote ³ while Chapters 6 and 7 focus on ‘the desegregation of the operatic mainstream’ (18).Footnote ⁴ Caplan here admits that her counterculture is not particularly countercultural, conceding that ‘their [Black artists’] relationship to opera was not always explicitly oppositional’, and that ‘they tended not to make overt calls for systemic change, or to challenge the genre's representational norms’ (18). By the end of the book, the story of Black operatic culture bears more than a passing resemblance to that of mainstream (white) operatic culture – a process of sacralization that gradually transferred it from the popular sphere to the elite institution, entrenching itself as a mode of high art (or ‘high culture on the lower frequencies’, as Caplan puts it on page 10). Caplan's project operates in productive tension between countercultural ambition and institutional inclusion, but the boundaries of that counterculture remain frustratingly diffuse.

Indeed, at times the reader is left to assume that Black opera is countercultural specifically by virtue of being Black, which operates as a stand-in for resistance and dissent. Yet I am inclined to agree with Caplan in citing Anthony Reed, who cautions against interpreting all Black art through the ‘romance of resistance’, thereby reducing all Black expression to an oppositional stance against a hegemonic mainstream.Footnote ⁵ But by not clearly delineating what renders Black opera a counterculture – or worse, by tacitly assuming that it operates as a counterculture by virtue of its Blackness – Caplan appears to advance the very ‘romance of resistance’ she guards against.

Nevertheless, Dreaming in Ensemble ultimately honours the promise of what Du Bois identified as opera's ‘vital connection’ to Black life, particularly the lives of workaday communities. Working with a fragmentary archive shaped by absences and curatorial neglect, Caplan excels at distilling coherent narratives and vivid portraits from scattered sources, conducting close, imaginative readings of even adversarial or compromised sources with critical care. There is a beautiful against-the-grain reading on pages 45–46 that filters white criticism of the Drury Company through Saidiya Hartman's notion of waywardness, reclaiming the very untutoredness, physicality, and metric anarchy decried by the white press as markers of Black performance.Footnote ⁶ Caplan seems to be echoing recent scholarship that locates Blackness in the nexus of aesthetics, affect, and performance, implying that even Bizet's Carmen (the object of the cited reviews) could be part of a Black operatic counterculture when rendered within a Black tradition of praxis. Dreaming in Ensemble thus gestures beyond countercultural critique toward a richer vision of Black opera as a site of aesthetic innovation and speculative world-making. That vision, more than any single theoretical frame, constitutes the book's most enduring contribution, and future scholars of American music, opera, and Black studies would do well to follow Caplan's field of inquiry. And if the genre of opera once offered Du Bois's John ‘a glimpse of a life’ otherwise denied, then Dreaming in Ensemble sketches the outlines of that life – not as tragedy, but as ensemble.