(Credit: Steven Pisano) “Written on Skin” is considered by some to be British composer George Benjamin’s masterpiece and one of the most important works of the 21st Century. The opera, which was written by Martin Crimp, first premiered July 7th, 2012 at the Aix-en-Provence Festival. Led by the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, the piece was an instant success, lauded for its {…}
(Credit: Carl Van Vechten) Next to “Troubled Island,” “A Bayou Legend” is William Grant Still’s most famed opera. The opera had its world premiere on March 31, 1974, at Opera South in Mississippi. It would then have a historic performance in 1981 when the Mississippi Educational Television Authority presented the opera on TV, marking the first time an opera by {…}
Scott Joplin’s “Treemonisha” first premiered as a concert read-through in Harlem in 1910, and was not fully staged until 1972, over fifty years after the composer’s death The work, described as “an entirely new form of operatic art,” combines Wagnerian conventions of opera with traditional African-American folk tales and music. Joplin, writer of the score and libretto, may have created {…}
(Credit: Lorenzo Gaudenzi) “Powder Her Face” by Thomas Adès premiered at the Cheltenham Music Festival on July 1st, 1995. While the opera was well-received by music critics, “Powder Her Face” became notorious for its sexually explicit content. With a libretto by Philip Hensher, the opera tells the story of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, a famous British socialite of the twentieth {…}
George Walker was one of the great Black composers of all time. Born on June 27, 1922, in Washington D.C., his mother Rosa King supervised his first piano lessons when he was but five years of age. By the time he was 14-years-old and a student of Howard University, Walker hosted his first recital. He was then admitted into the {…}
Charpentier is known as somewhat of a “one-hit-wonder” in the opera world, perhaps best known for his opera “Louise,” which features the gorgeous aria “Depuis le jour.” In his time, however, he was a renowned composer, best-known for provoking the rigid social standards of French opera. Born June 25, 1860, in Dieuze, France, Charpentier moved to Paris in the 1880s. {…}
Sir Peter Neville Luard Pears was one of England’s leading tenors in the early twentieth century due, in part, to his close relationship with Benjamin Britten. Pears premiered nearly all of Britten’s most notable works. Pears was born June 22, 1910, to a religious family in Farnham, Surrey. The youngest of seven children, he grew up performing in amateur productions {…}
Scott Joplin was one of America’s most renowned black composers, garnering the title of “King of Ragtime.” Born in 1868 as the second of six children to an ex-slave from North Carolina and a freeborn woman from Kentucky, his birthday and place of birth remain points of contention to this day. He grew up in Arkansas and learned basic music {…}
“My dear Dr. Koussevitzky, To begin with, I have two handicaps—those of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have some Negro blood in my veins.” These are the words of composer Florence Price in a letter to conductor Serge Koussevitzky in an attempt to find a champion for her work. Koussevitzky would not be among those to {…}
(Credit: Eric Woolsey) On June 15, 2019, Terence Blanchard’s opera “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” premiered in full at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. Described by the composer as “opera in jazz,” the work will be the first opera by a Black composer ever staged at the Metropolitan Opera. The libretto by Kasi Lemmons is based on the memoir {…}
(Credit: Ken Howard) Terrence Blanchard and Michael Cristofer’s “Champion” is termed an “opera in jazz,” a unique choice of words. There are a lot of operas in the history of the artform that have gone under the designation of “jazz opera,” but the choice here speaks to Blanchard’s decision to use the full range of jazz expression in the context {…}