Opera in a Multicultural World

Coloniality, Culture, Performance

Mary Ingraham, Joseph So, Roy Moodley, Mary Ingraham, Joseph So, Roy Moodley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317444824
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Opernmusik

Through historical and contemporary examples, this book critically explores the relevance and expressions of multicultural representation in western European operatic genres in the modern world. It reveals their approaches to reflecting identity, transmitting meaning, and inspiring creation, as well as the ambiguities and contradictions that occur across the time and place(s) of their performance. This collection brings academic researchers in opera studies into conversation with previously unheard voices of performers, critics, and creators to speak to issues of race, ethnicity, and culture in the genre. Together, they deliver a powerful critique of the perpetuation of the values and practices of dominant cultures in operatic representations of intercultural encounters. Essays accordingly cross methodological boundaries in order to focus on a central issue in the emerging field of coloniality: the hierarchies of social and political power that include the legacy of racialized practices. In theorizing coloniality through intercultural exchange in opera, authors explore a range of topics and case studies that involve immigrant, indigenous, exoticist, and other cultural representations and consider a broad repertoire that includes lesser-known Canadian operas, Chinese- and African-American performances, as well as works by Haydn, Strauss, Puccini, and Wagner, and in performances spanning three continents and over two centuries. In these ways, the collection contributes to the development of a more integrated understanding of the interdisciplinary fields inherent in opera, including musicology, sociology, anthropology, and others connected to Theatre, Gender, and Cultural Studies.

Part I
Opera as Tradition

1 Jazz, Opera, and the Ideologies of Race

Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon

Almost 30 years ago, Edward Said explored (and deplored) Europe’s cultural construction of its Oriental “Other”. In his now famous book, Orientalism (1978), he revealed the role of scholarly disciplines as well as the arts in that construction. Many have followed him in examining the European taste for the racialized exotic in the visual arts: think of Ingres or Delacroix. In literature, critics have focused on particularly egregious texts like Nerval’s Voyage en Orient (1851) or Hugo’s Les Orientales (1829). In musicology, the interest has been more recent but strong, especially in opera studies—centering on things like interpolated Turkish marches or even entire operas, like Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine. On the surface, opera may not seem to be as strong a candidate for being an imperial means of “dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient” (Said 1978, 3). However, we should recall that, especially in nineteenth century Europe, opera was a powerful discursive practice—and a very popular art form. Therefore it could (and did) create, through repetition, national and racial stereotypes that have proved to have a long cultural life, for they are among the manifestations of coloniality in today’s operatic expression as well.

The other musical form that is our focus—jazz—is one that has been racially coded since its inception. In conjoining the two, we move away from imperial Europe and the nineteenth century to postcolonial (albeit, settler-invader postcolonial) North America, specifically Canada, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; that is, we move to the postmodern era, where art forms mingle and merge, and to a part of the world where cultural influences, like races, mingle and merge multiculturally (in both an ideal and a contested manner). The opera libretti by the Governor General’s Award-winning poet, novelist, playwright, and librettist, George Elliott Clarke, offer us a point of departure to study the ideologies of race in Canadian opera. Born in Nova Scotia, of Mi’kmaq and African-American descent, Clarke is an eighth-generation “Africadian”—to use his coinage: Acadian, from Nova Scotia, and African-Canadian. Clarke’s recent works for the opera stage (including Beatrice Chancy (1999), Québécité (2003), and Trudeau: Long March/Shining Path (2007; 2010)) offer us a way to think through the very different ideologies of both jazz and opera.

Though a European art form with a continuous four hundred year history, opera (like its politics) has changed considerably over the centuries. In the nineteenth century, with the rather large exception of the work of Richard Wagner, operatic plots moved away from their early mythological subjects to embrace historical ones, as the countries of Europe began to define their particular national identities. Opera’s combined power of music and staged drama proved useful in creating an affective sense of belonging, in rallying people around a common cause. Whether you think of Verdi in Italy or, more contentiously, Wagner in Germany, opera has often been linked with issues of national identity. Canada is no exception—but its linking of the two is at times rather perverse, as we shall see.

Operas have been written in Canada, for Canadians, since at least 1790, when Joseph Quesnel’s Colas et Colinette, ou le bailli dupé was first staged (for more background, see Ingraham 2007). But it flourished with the rise of Canadian nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s, thanks to funding help from the Canada Council, commissions from music and drama festivals, university departments, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Radio Canada, not to mention the Canadian Opera Company. In 1967, Canada’s centenary year, substantial money was made available for opera commissions and an explosion of new works resulted, with titles like: Grant, Warden of the Plains; Sam Slick; The Luck of Ginger Coffey; and perhaps the best known of all, Mavor Moore and Harry Somers’s Louis Riel. This last opera was televised by the CBC and revived in 1976 to send to Washington as Canada’s contribution to the American bicentennial, no doubt intended as a tale of Canadian nation building.

This decision to sponsor an opera about Louis Riel in 1967 to celebrate the centenary of nationhood was not a little perverse, to use our earlier description: after all, here was a man who had been hanged as a traitor to Canada in 1885 and whose death had re-awakened hostilities between Ontario and Quebec, Orangemen and Catholics, English and French. Yet, some have argued that the Métis visionary rebel offered Canadians a model leader of heroic proportions who symbolized the First Nations, French, and English elements that are part of our nation’s complex ethnic and racial heritage (Cherney 1975, 129; Hutcheon and Hutcheon 1995, 4–8). It is true that the source text for the opera, John Coulter’s play, Riel, did play an important role in the growth of Canadian nationalism in the 1960s, but the decision to foreground, at that particular celebratory moment in Canadian history, a fractious past of racial, linguistic, regional, ethnic, religious, and political difference seems strange today. Perhaps, though, Riel’s story merely resonates with the themes of so many other Canadian operas of the next fifty years—years full of debates about the historical dimensions of power in coloniality, including issues of race.

HISTORY, THE POSTCOLONIAL, AND COLONIALITY

History haunts Canadian operatic production, as it does Canadian fiction (Vautier 1998; Wyile 2007; Duffy 1986). An engagement, almost dialogue, with the public historical record and identifiable historical figures has been popular among Canadian fiction writers—from Timothy Findley to Rudy Wiebe, from Wayne Johnston to Jane Urquhart. It flourishes in George Elliott Clarke’s non-operatic works, from Whylah Falls to George and Rue. Many have argued that part of this haunting of fiction by the past is a result of a Canadian desire to assert a postcolonial identity (Moss 2003; Sugars 2004; Wyile 2007). The same could be said of the historical impulse in opera. And Canadian historical operas, like the more recent Canadian historical novels, are considerably less likely than their nineteenth century predecessors to participate unproblematically in creating a collective national mythology; they are much more likely (as in the case of Riel) to debunk it, or at least to question—in the name of coloniality—traditional historical versions of the nation’s past. As Colleen Renihan has argued in her dissertation, “Sounding the Past: Canadian Opera as Historical Narrative” (2011), opera’s musical, dramatic, and narrative dimensions can interact to call into question the seeming objectivity of the historical record.

Some Canadian twentieth century operas delve deeply into the continuing, problematic issues of coloniality, especially in how they point to the intersection of the historical and the political. Canadian writer James Reaney has written many opera libretti on postcolonial and colonial themes, most with composer John Beckwith—from Shivaree (in various versions: 1964–5; 1977–8; 1982) to Taptoo (1993–5). But in 1990, he also collaborated with Harry Somers to produce an opera called Serinette. Written about and performed in the historic Sharon Temple in Southern Ontario, this opera told the story of colonial Canada in the years following the War of 1812. It brought together, with all the license allowed to art, two historical communities: that of the “Family Compact” (or establishment)—the Jarvis family—living in what Reaney calls “evil Toronto” (then York) and the Children of Light, the first commune based on Christian principles in Ontario, in whose temple in Sharon the audience was sitting. Somers’s music drew on the conventions of nineteenth century salon music, hymns, and, of course, opera. But he also drew on the musical theatre of Stephen Sondheim and Kurt Weill—in order to capture the wit and satire of Reaney’s libretto, whose words he wanted to be heard. And that, after all, is how opera was born: in the dying years of the sixteenth century, a group of Florentine musicians, poets, and intellectuals decided that the polyphonic music of madrigals did not allow the words to be heard and understood. Their monophonic alternative, modeled dramatically on Greek tragedy, has developed, with many growing pains and changes in girth, into the varied and complex form of music drama we know as opera.

RACE AND ANTI-ORIENTALISM

Just as Reaney turned to little known or rarely acknowledged historical conflicts in his opera libretti, so too did George Elliott Clarke in his first opera, Beatrice Chancy, in 1999. With Canadian composer James Rolfe, he brought the story of a usually suppressed part of Canada’s colonial past onto the stage where it could not be (and was not) ignored as part of coloniality today: the history of Canadian slavery. Clarke has said repeatedly, in interviews and articles, that Canadians have too long been self-congratulatory about questions of race and racism, seeing both as American issues about which Canadians can feel superior. If anything, Canadians are guilty, says Clarke, of being sentimental about race (Clarke 2007b, 140). As an African-Canadian, Clarke is anything but sentimental about race.

In Beatrice Chancy, he adapted (among many other intertexts) both American slave narratives and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1819 verse play, The Cenci, resetting them in early nineteenth century Nova Scotia. The libretto asks Canadians to remember—or perhaps to learn about, for the first time—their uncomfortable racialized historical past as slave owners. Clarke, like Shelley, was attracted to the story of Beatrice Cenci, a (real, historical, sixteenth century) mistreated and subordinated woman—who fought back. The distance from Shelley’s verse play to Clarke’s libretto and verse play (there are two versions) is a temporal one, but it is also geographic and ideological: from the old to the new world, and from a European to an “Africadian” perspective. Yet both poets were writing political protest plays against unjust authority and despotic power. In Clarke’s case, it was both political and specifically racial power, as well as familial: Clarke’s Beatrice Chancy is the daughter of an African slave and her white owner. She is educated in a convent school by her father, Francis Chancy. She is also raped by him, and takes her revenge by murdering him.

The language of Clarke’s libretto mixes the elevated and the biblical with the idiomatic and the sensual (even the vulgar), the lushly poetic with the coarsely powerful. Beatrice Chancy is an educated woman of mixed blood. Sometimes that educated, elevated discourse is heard; at other times, she uses the variety of discourses operative within slave society—from religious to colloquial. Rolfe’s score is as historically grounded as Clarke’s libretto: it is rooted in African-Canadian and -American music (from ring shouts to spirituals to blues) and in Scottish fiddle music and local reels of the time, not to mention bel canto Italian opera.

However, while Beatrice Chancy situates itself squarely amid a series of political and poetic discourses of resistance within coloniality, as Katherine Larson has convincingly argued (2006), there is also a political difference at the heart of this opera’s composition that speaks to its two creators’ different historical and racial positions. Rolfe’s music consciously links black and white traditions in a way that Clarke’s words and story refuse: in the racialized libretto, they remain stubbornly separate, set in deliberate tension with the music’s resolution. Beatrice will murder her father, and, at the very historical moment that Nova Scotia’s slaves are liberated, she and her co-conspirators will be hanged for that murder. The irony is real—and intended.

This is a postcolonial opera as well as a response to continuing coloniality, and it derives part of its power not only from its Canadian colonial and racial thematics but also from its implicit challenge to the European racial tradition of operatic Orientalism. Musicologist Ralph Locke (1991), with tongue firmly in cheek, has described the historical Orientalist operatic paradigm as:

Young, tolerant, brave, possibly naive, white-European tenor-hero intrudes, at risk of disloyalty to his own people and colonialist ethic, into mysterious, dark-skinned colonized territory represented by alluring dancing girls and deeply affectionate, sensitive lyric soprano, incurring the wrath of brutal, intransigent tribal chieftain (bass or bass-baritone) and blindly obedient chorus of male savages (263).

From French grand opera (Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine, for example) to Italian even grander opera (such as Verdi’s Aida), the paradigmatic theme of European Orientalist opera has traditionally involved an overlapping of the interest in the femme fatale and the exoticized racial Other.

OPERA’S RACIALIZED CASTING HISTORY

In contrast to Beatrice Chancy’s racialized postcolonial narrative (where black singers sang all the black roles), in European opera (largely a white domain) those exotic racialized roles—the roles of the Judean Salome, the Indians Sélika and Lakmé, and the Philistine Dalilah—are often sung today by African-American singers like Denyce Graves (and before her, Grace Bumbry, Leontyne Price, and Jessye Norman). Likewise, the gypsy characters in these European plots—women like Carmen, Azucena (in Verdi’s Il Trovatore) or Ulrica (in his Un Ballo in maschera)—are also prime African-American roles, since gypsies too were racialized and exoticized as the Other within European national borders. It has not always been the case, of course, that African-Americans have played these roles; in fact, they did not play any roles for a long time. Todd Duncan was the first black to sing with a major American opera company—the New York City Opera—and that was in 1945; the next year, soprano Camilla Williams actually signed a contract with the same company, being the first African-American to do so. Given that her first role was Madama Butterfly, however, perhaps one Other was as good as any other Other on the opera stage at this moment in coloniality.

The famous African-American contralto Marian Anderson did not sing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York until 1955 and, then, in the gypsy role of Ulrica. In the same year, Robert McFerrin became the first black male to perform at the Met, singing the role of the Ethiopian Amonasro in Aida. Some European stages had been more open to African-American singers earlier than this: in France, in 1927, the role of the Indian Lakmé was sung by a black soprano. But it was not until 1953 that Milan’s famous Teatro alla Scala hired an African-American, and Bayreuth, the home of Wagnerian music, held out until the same year to hire a black soprano and until 1978 to hire a black male in a leading role. To give the full racial context, though, we should also point out that black opera companies have flourished and continue to do so: the company known as Ebony Opera today presents the standard European repertoire with all-black casts, as did the first African-American group to perform at Carnegie Hall in 1892: the World’s Fair Colored Opera Company, featuring the famous Sisieretta Jones, the “black Patti,” who also sang at Covent Garden.

REALISM AND ARTIFICE IN OPERA

Breaking down racial boundaries in this way does not mean that race is no longer an issue on the operatic stage, however. As we mentioned, in a clear manifestation of coloniality, those exotic femme fatale roles were and still are being played by African-American women, and the reason frequently offered is ... realism. As a performed art form, opera has recently been pulled in two opposing directions. On the one hand, th...