Dreaming in Ensemble, Caplan

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 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.

Lucy Caplan is a professor of music at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and her essays on classical music have appeared in The New Yorker, Symphony, San Francisco Classical Voice and Opera News.

Author: Lucy Caplan
Format: Hardcover, 336 pages
Publisher: Harvard University Press (2025)
ISBN: 9780674268517