I was very fortunate to have a friend who had opening night tickets to a world premiere of an opera. I didn’t ask him what the opera was, and didn’t remember the answer, so imagine my surprise when I looked at the program to discover it was about the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who I had been learning about recently in this class. The opera followed the group’s inception, their efforts to raise funds for Fisk College, and their international tour. It was an ensemble piece, with most of the music being spirituals, arranged for the chorus. There were occasional solos and monologues, and the piece resembled an Oratorio, though without much recitative. I left with “didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel” stuck in my head for the next several days, and a feeling that the opera wasn’t quite finished.

The Opera is an ensemble piece, and it thematizes the individual vs. the collective in music making right away, but before we have really gotten to know any character as an individual, which makes the thematization less effective. This didn’t quite work. We are introduced to most of the characters fairly late in the second act, where they give short monologues about who they are, their experiences and connections to the music, etc. This was effective when it happened, but the whole opera would benefit from beginning with some sense of the individual characters. There is a difficulty in adapting historical material: lives unfold in a way that isn’t necessarily dramatically satisfying. Jubilee is also attempting, I think, to let the music speak for itself, not to give us in depth biographical information on the singers, a performance history of the group, nor to adapt their lives into a tightly dramatic work. Jubilee instead aims to illuminate the nature of the spiritual genre anew for the opera stage.