Get Free Shipping on orders over $79
Dreaming in Ensemble : How Black Artists Transformed American Opera - Lucy Caplan

Dreaming in Ensemble

How Black Artists Transformed American Opera

By: Lucy Caplan

Hardcover | 17 June 2025 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Hardcover


RRP $61.95

$50.75

18%OFF

or 4 interest-free payments of $12.69 with

 or 

Ships in 5 to 7 business days

A revelatory new account of Black innovation in American opera, showing how composers, performers, and critics redefined the genre both aesthetically and politically in the early twentieth century.

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 actually 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.

Embracing opera's inventive and even liberatory possibilities, these figures powerfully expanded the parameters of Black cultural production. 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.

More in Music

Even the Good Girls Will Cry : My 90s Rock Memoir - Melissa Auf der Maur

RRP $36.99

$32.99

11%
OFF
In Love and Death : The Lost Notebook - Bert McCracken

RRP $99.99

$70.99

29%
OFF
My First Piano Adventure Lesson Book A - Nancy Faber

RRP $22.95

$17.99

22%
OFF
Hal Leonard Guitar Method: Book 1 (Second Edition) - Will Schmid
Pop Songs For Kids : Sheet Music Book for Piano / Keyboard - Hal Leonard Publishing Corporation
Lemmy : The Definitive Biography - Mick Wall

RRP $24.99

$20.75

17%
OFF
Mixtapes and MTV : Triumphs and Tragedies in 1980s Music - Tony Wellington
Star of the Show : My Life on Stage - Dolly Parton

RRP $85.00

$61.99

27%
OFF
Rumours of My Demise : A Memoir - Evan Dando

RRP $34.99

$28.75

18%
OFF
White Male Stand-Up - Alan Davies

RRP $34.99

$28.75

18%
OFF
Cher : The Memoir, Part One: The global number 1 bestseller - Cher
Punk : The Last Word - Stephen Colegrave

RRP $69.99

$65.99

Grime : Documenting the scene's rise and reign - Roony Keefe

RRP $59.99

$45.75

24%
OFF
My First Piano Adventure - Lesson Book : My First Piano Adventure - Nancy Faber
A Perfect Union of Contrary Things - Maynard James Keenan

RRP $40.99

$34.75

15%
OFF
How to Make Gravy - Paul Kelly

RRP $26.99

$22.99

15%
OFF
Faith, Hope and Carnage - Nick Cave

RRP $36.99

$29.75

20%
OFF
The Book of Daniel : From Silverchair to Dreams - Jeff Apter

RRP $26.99

$22.99

15%
OFF