Community takes center stage in Lucy Caplan’s first book, Dreaming in Ensemble: How Black Artists Transformed American Opera. The intricate details Caplan gleans from newspapers, scrapbooks and eyewitness accounts illuminate the humanity of her subjects and also support her central thesis. Caplan does not see the Black classical singer as an exceptional (and thus unusual) figure. Rather, she ‘locate[s] the activities of composers and solo performers alongside those of amateur ensembles, laborers, and listeners’ (p. 6). This is a richly layered historical survey: ‘firsts’ and famous names are not ignored, but they are placed in the context of community and school theatre, of supernumeraries and listeners, critics and audiences.
Dreaming in Ensemble is essentially chronological, as Caplan traces Black operatic endeavors from the post-Reconstruction period until Marian Anderson’s Metropolitan Opera debut in 1955. At the same time, it is clear that many of the activities, organizations and people dealt with cannot be so simply confined to one place on the timeline. Caplan lays out the book’s seven chapters in three sections. The first section consist of Chapters 1 and 2, which are set before the Harlem Renaissance in what Caplan dubs the ‘dawning of Black operatic counterculture’ (p. 20) Chapter 1 introduces the early works of composer Harry Lawrence Freeman (1869–1945), the musical criticism of Sylvester Russell (c. 1860–1930), and the founding of the Drury Opera Company by Theodore Drury (1867–c. 1943) in 1900. Caplan also foregrounds the social aspect of each of these projects to support the central theme of community. Freeman’s operas, the Drury Company, and Russell’s criticism were only possible because of the ensembles – often made up of volunteers – that performed them, and the newspaper audience members who engaged with Russell’s reviews. Chapter 2 continues the focus on the development of Black musical criticism through the operatic writing of Lester Walton (1882–1965) and Nora Douglas Holt (1885–1974) as well as the activism and musical-pedagogy of E. Azealia Hackley (1867–1922). Caplan explores how singers and pedagogues created a space in Black communities for a more expansive understanding of operatic activity that encompassed everything from amateur productions to music lessons and the purchase of operatic recordings (p. 57). Caplan’s examination of Azealia Hackley and her work is especially valuable for its assessment of how racial uplift, respectability politics and the burgeoning accessibility of music lessons and music publications interacted to create a space in which individuals could engage with opera and with their own identities as people and listeners.
Section two includes Chapters 3, 4, and 5 all of which cover developments that began in the ferment of the 1920s. Chapter 3, ‘The Forgotten Man of the Opera’ is a fascinating look at Black supernumeraries, opera workers and listeners, as well as the ways in which people whose presence was ignored or taken for granted interacted with and understood opera. Caplan’s portrait of Julian Bagley (1892–1981), who served as concierge, handyman, de-facto tour guide, in-house critic and historian at San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House for more than forty years, gives voice to a man who was deeply immersed in opera. The focus of Chapter 4 is singers, particularly Florence Cole-Talbert (1890–1961) and Caterina Jarboro (1898–1986), both of whom performed the role of Aida first in Europe and then in the United States. In Chapter 5 Caplan turns to composers and the use of opera to frame an African and African American past, with an emphasis on Tom-Tom (1932) by Shirley Graham (1896–1977).Footnote 1 Caplan highlights how, in this middle period, the Black operatic counterculture was pulled in two directions: at the same time that some Black singers were becoming more visible to the white operatic mainstream as performers, the counterculture was also influenced by the cultural ferment of the Harlem Renaissance (p. 133).
Chapters 6 and 7, which make up the third and final section of the book, deal with what Caplan refers to as the ‘era of firsts’, from the 1935 premiere of George Gershwin’s Black-cast opera Porgy and Bess to Marian Anderson’s aforementioned Met debut in Un ballo in maschera twenty years later (p. 18). In Chapter 6 she focuses on the beginnings of desegregation in the operatic mainstream and how this was reflected in performance, composition and institution-building. This chapter includes the author’s most extensive discussion of canonic repertoire, from Porgy and Bess and Four Saints in Three Acts to the various ‘exotic’ heroines (e.g. Selika, Carmen, Lakmé, Cio-Cio-San) performed by Black sopranos and mezzo-sopranos. Caplan conveys the ambiguity inherent in these roles – the traditional ‘beautiful brown woman falls in love with white man; then dies’ plotlines and the very fact that Black women were seen as equally suitable for Indian, Japanese and Romani roles as they were for Black characters – without minimizing the agency and skill of the performers for whom these roles were the mainstays of their careers. In Chapter 7 she revisits the well-known story of Anderson’s Met debut by focusing primarily on Black artists and activists who laid the groundwork for this performance. She also discusses the Black composers who – then, and to this day – struggled to have original works produced.
Throughout the book, Caplan returns to several stalwart individuals who had an impact on the project of Black operatic counterculture during the entire period covered. One such is the composer, producer and writer Harry Lawrence Freeman, known as ‘The Black Wagner.’ He is first encountered as the conductor of his early opera The Martyr in Denver in the 1890s; thirty years later as the master of ceremonies for a vocal competition and the premiere of another opera, Voodoo (1928), in New York; as the author of his 400-page manuscript, The Negro in Music and Drama in the 1940s; and throughout his life at work on a ‘Zulu tetralogy’ to equal the Ring Cycle, of which thousands of pages of manuscripts remain as a monument to his life’s work. He died in 1954. Caplan enters the narrative at this point, reflecting,
Freeman himself, even, did not hear much of this music beyond what he could play on the piano. In accessing his work via methods that relied on the print archive and acts of partial performance, as I did in my research—by paging through scores, playing through passages on the piano, singing along tentatively, using that experience to assess his work, and leaving the rest to my imagination—I experienced these operas in a way that is appropriate to their history…. If the archive is always a site of partial access to the past, here that partiality becomes its own sort of closeness, a way of foregrounding the persistently unrealized nature of Freeman’s—and so many others—grand operatic universe (p. 227).
One could make of Freeman a tragic tale of unfulfilled ambition, but Freeman himself was proud of the legacy he left, and Caplan conveys its grandeur and scale.
The biographical sketch of Freeman, which winds throughout the book, is merely one example of the greatest strength of Dreaming in Ensemble: the author’s care and respect for the entire ensemble cast of both opera and her narrative as people. Caplan is fully conversant in the literature on sound, race, and the complexity of the relationship between Black singers and opera in the public imagination, including works by Jennifer Stoever, Daphne Brooks, and Nina Sun Eidsheim.Footnote 2 Perusing the notes also reveals the breadth and depth of her archival research. One example is in her discussion of the Drury Opera Company’s 1900 production of Carmen. Caplan mentions all the names listed as part of the cast, even those who were volunteers (generally unmentioned and difficult to trace); this is particularly noteworthy because much of the Drury Company’s archival material has been lost. This information is important. As Caplan observes, ‘These singers’ sustained engagement with opera—week after week, rehearsal after rehearsal, performance after performance—meant that in practice, they were the primary agents of Drury’s contributions to Black operatic counterculture’ (p. 43). In this perspective, Caplan draws inspiration from Sadiya Hartman, stating that ‘Like [Hartman’s subject Mabel] Hampton, members of the Drury Company have not entered the historical record as ‘opera singers’ per se. It is not despite, but because of this position that their efforts are so illuminating’ (p. 39.)Footnote 3 While Caplan expands less upon the individuals foregrounded in her research than does Hartman, she is just as attentive to all of those whose names emerge from the archive – whether that be the thirty-five linear feet of the Harry Lawrence Freeman collection at Columbia or a single programme attribution from another source.
Dreaming in Ensemble fits into the tradition of scholarship on Black opera, which has long taken an expansive, community-based view of artists and their contributions. In 1878, when James M. Trotter published Music and Some Highly Musical People, he included composers, performers and ensembles among his examples of Black musical luminaries.Footnote 4 Caplan also cites the influence of the 2012 anthology Blackness in Opera, as well as the perspective on Black artists in Europe in Kira Thurman’s scholarship.Footnote 5 Dreaming in Ensemble can also be placed in potential conversation with Samantha Ege’s work on the South Side of Chicago.Footnote 6 Ege focuses on the shorter time frame of the interwar period, but she also places higher-profile subjects such as Florence Price and Margaret Bonds within the context of social networks, educational legacies and community institutions, just as Caplan does. While not explicitly cited in this book, Caplan and many of her interlocutors (including this reviewer) are members of the Black Opera Research Network (BORN), a global organization dedicated to bringing together performers and scholars of Black opera.Footnote 7
Dreaming in Ensemble is fundamentally about what opera can mean – how many things opera can mean – when it is considered within a community. Caplan’s detailed focus on the ‘ensembles’ who perform, compose, attend, write about and advocate for Black opera conveys the richness of Black operatic counterculture. Research into both the history of Black opera and its vibrant present continues to be a group effort, and Dreaming in Ensemble is both a spotlight on and a continuation of that legacy.
