Tag Archives: black opera

The Story Behind a Custom Piano in a Museum

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Madame Evanti’s Custom Built Fischer Piano. Evans-Tibbs collection, Anacostia Community Museum, Smithsonian Institution, gift of the Estate of Thurlow E. Tibbs, Jr.5

Madame Evanti’s Custom Built Fischer Piano is located at the Anacostia Community Library in Washington, DC. Now if you are anything like me you might have questions like: 

Who is Madame Evanti, and why is her piano special enough to be in a museum? What is the Anacostia Museum and why was it assigned for the blog posts this week?  

Anacostia Museum, which opened in 1967,1 is created for and about the community of Anacostia, a neighborhood in Southeast Washington, D.C. that is home to many influential artists and leaders. The museum does feature many important artifacts from the Anacostia community but has also branched out to incorporate a larger diaspora.

The goal of the museum is to interpret and celebrate African American history and culture.2 This means incorporating not only locally and regionally found expositions, but nationally and internationally as well. Because of this global and local lens, the museum has impressive features on the family archives of  19th-century African American locals and works from black DC artists.2 This archival work is reparative documentation of history that has previously been erased from history but is now story-telling of the east-of-the-river communities in DC that will be remembered and recognized. Starting with Madame Evanti. 

Portrait of Lillian Evanti made in Buenos Aires, Argentina, undated. Evans-Tibbs collection, Anacostia Community Museum, Smithsonian Institution, gift of the Estate of Thurlow E. Tibbs, Jr.6

Lillian Evanti is famous for being the first African American to sing in a professional European opera company.3 She was born in 1890 to a well-education and affluent African American Family in Washington D.C.. Due to her family status, she was fortunate enough to attend Howard University and graduated in 1907. She became composer, lyricist, and teacher but was limited in her professional opportunities due to discrimination. She moved to Europe and made her debut in Nice, France in 1924.4 Her success in Europe is impressive and historically significant, but it is not as heavily discussed as the great strides she afforded for the arts in America upon her interspersed returns home. 

Madame Evanti was a founding member of America’s National Negro Opera Company (NNCO).4 She starred as Violetta in the opening production staging of Verdi’s La Traviata. Throughout the 1930s, Evanti advocated for the establishment of cultural center in Washington for classical and contemporary music, drama and dance. Her labor, testifying to a congressional committee in advocacy for a national performing arts center, contributed to the creation of the Kennedy Center.4

Madame Evanti is also a good-will ambassador through the State Department.3 She traveled to Latin America to perform, but her travels inspired something bigger. Evanti was also a composer. Below is a recording of one of her compositions. Her song Himno Pan-Americano is an anthem of peace dedicated to the Pan-American Union (now known as the Organization for American States).3

So much history and story-telling to be told, and it was all behind a piano. 

“Porgy and Bess” and African-American Identity

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Arguably the most famous American musical theater production of the 20th century is Porgy and Bess, “an American Folk Opera,” the peak of Gershwin’s career. There is rarely a night in the world when Porgy and Bess isn’t performed live on stage. The distinct characters of the songs have spawned hundreds of arrangements. in Maurice Peress’s book “Dvorák to Duke Ellington: A Conductor Explores America’s Music and Its African American Roots”, We are able to see the intersections between “Porgy and Bess”, Gershwin, and the African-American identity. 1

Although “Porgy and Bess” was a cultural gift, it is not exempted from some controversy. “Combining the sons of Russian Jewish immigrants, George and Ira Gershwin, with the scion of a prominent white South Carolina family, DuBose Heyward, and his wife Dorothy, an Ohio native, to depict an exclusively African-American story”(Cooper 2019)—is this an example of good melting-pot American art? Is it improper cultural appropriation? The fact that the most well-known opera depicting the African-American experience was produced by a team made up exclusively of white people is no secret to Black composers looking for acceptance. 2

In a 1936 essay for Opportunity, an Urban League journal, Hall Johnson, a black composer, arranger, and choir director whose Broadway hit musical “Run, Little Chillun!” had been successful, said Gershwin was “as free to write about Negroes in his own way as any other composer to write about anything else.” However, he noted that the finished product was “Gershwin’s idea of what a Negro opera should be, not a Negro opera by Gershwin.” Decades later, the writer James Baldwin reiterated this criticism in a review of the movie, saying that although he enjoyed “Porgy and Bess,” it was still “a white man’s vision of Negro life.”2

“Porgy and Bess” provided jobs for black singers with classical training during a time when discrimination kept them from appearing at the Met and other prestigious venues. When the initial tour of the play arrived to the segregated National Theater in Washington, DC, the black stars of the show took a stance and promised not to perform. The theater was compelled to integrate as a result, albeit only briefly. “Porgy” established the careers of other black vocalists , such as Leontyne Price, who sang the part of Bess right out of Juilliard.2

Eventually, It began featuring American culture internationally. However, this came with some problems. “Porgy and Bess”, being a Jewish composer’s work about African Americans, the work’s European premiere in Copenhagen during World War II sparked controversy because of its staging, which was seen as a direct protest against the Nazi regime. During the middle of the Cold War, in the mid-1950s, author Truman Capote wrote an entertaining portrayal of the inherent ironies of this visit of Leningrad and Moscow.2 The piece seemed to be fitting into the operatic canon, proving the pieces power.

 

1 Peress, Maurice. 2004. Dvorák to Duke Ellington : A Conductor Explores America’s Music and Its African American Roots. New York: Oxford University Press, Incorporated. Accessed November 2, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central.
2 Cooper, Michael. “The Complex History and Uneasy Present of ‘Porgy and Bess.’” The New York Times, The New York Times, 19 Sept. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/arts/music/porgy-bess-gershwin-metropolitan-opera.html.

Leontyne Price and Racism in Opera

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Leontyne Price made her Metropolitan Opera debut in January 1961 as Leonora in Giuseppe Verdi’s Il Trovatore, pictured here.

Leontyne Price is known as the first Black leading performer in opera. She was the first Black prina donna to gain an international reputation and become a singing superstar in the world of opera. Born as Mary Violet Leontyne Price on February 10, 1927, she grew up singing in the church choir and only decided to pursue music after she graduated from the College of Education and Industrial Arts, now Central State University.1 She then attended the Julliard School of Music and began her singing career on Broadway in 1952. She made her operatic debut in 1957 and continued traveling the world singing opera until 1985 when she switched to more recital work.2  Her role in Verdi’s Aida remains her best-known work, and she is widely considered the most stunning Aida this world will ever see (see video below). Price was an incredibly accomplished artist and received numerous awards, including 20 Grammys, the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1964), the Kennedy Center Honor (1980), the National Medal of the Arts (1985), and is a National Endowment for the Arts Opera Honoree. 3 Today, at age 96, she continues to inspire upcoming generations of Black classical musicians.

I found this snippet of a newspaper from the Kansas Whip in 1955 titled “Whites Help Welcome Negro Soprano Home”, describing the large mixed-race crowd that greeted Price for a benefit concert in her birth town of Laurel, Mississippi. 4 I found this title to be extremely diminishing of Price’s accomplishments as an artist – according to the snippet, it was the largest gathering of White and Black people in Laurel’s history. To title this as “Whites Help Welcome Negro Soprano Home” is centering White people once again in a story that should be centering Black voices and celebrating Price’s artistry and accomplishments. It reminded me of the conversations we have had in class about White saviorism and White guilt – once again, White people are making themselves the heroes of someone else’s story.

Article published in the Kansas Whip in Topeka, Kansas on April 1, 1955

We can only begin to comprehend the struggles that Price had to overcome as a Black woman in the opera industry, which is a racist and almost exclusively White-dominated industry to this day. Take the Met, for example. With a board of 45, only 3 managing directors are Black.5 Bass-baritone Morris Robinson said in a New York Times article about representation in opera: “In 20 years, I’ve never been hired by a Black person; I’ve never been directed by a Black person; I’ve never had a Black C.E.O. of a company; I’ve never had a Black president of the board; I’ve never had a Black conductor,” Mr. Robinson said. “I don’t even have Black stage managers. None, not ever, for 20 years.”6

Representation in opera is still a huge issue today and racism is prevalent, especially considering the mostly old and white audience that opera attracts. Hopefully, as time goes on, we will center Black artists in the world of opera. Artists like Leontyne Price are an inspiration, but also a reminder of how far we still have to go to achieve equity in the world of opera.  

“I am here and you will know that I am the best and will hear me. The colour of my skin or the kink of my hair or the spread of my mouth has nothing to do with what you are listening to.” – Leontyne Price

 

   

1 Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Leontyne Price.” Encyclopedia Britannica, October 3, 2023. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leontyne-Price.

5 Barone, Joshua. “Opera Can No Longer Ignore Its Race Problem.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 16 July 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/opera-race-representation.html.