Conference Agenda

At the end of the twentieth century, opera professionals in the United States became increasingly preoccupied with opera’s continued cultural and artistic relevance. Conferences dedicated to the issue proliferated: The State of Opera; The Future of Opera; New Visions in American Opera. By the mid-1980s, talk turned to action. The service organization OPERA America launched “Opera for the Eighties and Beyond” (OFTEAB), a multi-year, multi-million-dollar initiative designed to stimulate not just new works, but also new types of works. The program proved transformative, supporting the development, commissioning, and production of more than sixty works by the professional companies served by OPERA America (Metcalf 2017).

“Opera for a New America” (OFANA), the 1990s follow-up to OFTEAB, extended OPERA America’s funding for new works with a small but significant change in criteria. Rather than emphasizing musical or dramaturgical innovation, OFANA promoted new works that would foster relationships between opera companies and their communities. Such operas, as my research into the archival record of this program reveals, were intended to give “a voice to the previously voiceless, those who by virtue of class, gender, race or other reasons have felt that neither their persons nor their stories were welcome in opera houses.” In short, whereas OFTEAB centered aesthetic concerns, OFANA prioritized issues of representation.

Drawing on archival documents and interviews with OPERA America personnel, in this paper I situate OFANA within the broader multicultural turn of U.S. arts institutions in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Gilmore 1993; Pankratz 1993; Hesse 2000). This turn coincided with the dissolution of the National Institute for Music Theater and the NEA’s Opera-Musical Theater program—both institutes that patronized artistic experimentation—and I argue here that OPERA America’s shift from OFTEAB to OFANA marked the beginnings of a reevaluation of operatic convention in the art world of American opera, a “new American traditionalism” (Baranello 2023) that has continued into the present. This retrenchment played out on stage and behind the scenes, and here I pick at its discursive threads, disentangling the rhetorical entwining of multiculturalism, accessibility, and audience-building within OPERA America’s funding programs and publications.

The production of American opera has played an essential role in the construction of institutional identity at the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis (OTSL) since its founding as a midsummer festival in 1976. From the outset, OTSL’s conception of opera as a primarily theatrical form (as in the company’s name) implied a set of core values emphasizing opera’s dramatic accessibility. Hallmarks include singing all repertoire in English and prioritizing dramatic immediacy through realistic acting on an intimate stage. These features have provided the conceptual momentum required to present modern and contemporary works—including frequent revivals of twentieth-century American operas and 33 world premieres—as long as they correspond to OTSL’s vision of “opera theater.” In this way, OTSL has made a self-consciously outsized, mission-driven contribution to the production of new opera in the United States and has consistently capitalized on the prestige of that contribution in its institutional self-fashioning.

Starting in the 2010s, OTSL’s investment in American opera took a decidedly multicultural turn, foregrounding ethnic and racial diversity as well as queer narratives and contemporary politics. This paper draws on historical records, fieldwork from 2018-2022, and interviews with dozens of artists, administrators, and audience members to analyze the discursive terms of investment and institutional achievement constructed around the production of new work under General Directors Timothy O’Leary and Andrew Jorgensen. These administrators’ priorities dovetailed with a groundswell of criticism regarding opera’s elitism and intractable white canons, and OTSL’s potential for impact (promising to transcend its short seasons, suburban campus, and even its status as “regional opera”) grew along with the opera industry’s focus on representation and diversity. Yet even works framed by the slogan “New Works, Bold Voices” could only be so new and so bold. New works have always occupied a carefully delimited niche at OTSL, as seasons are anchored by canonical European operas. The potential for new works to unsettle operatic practice is further circumscribed by the company’s relatively traditional conception of operatic drama and a preference for moderate musical idioms, all making OTSL’s new works initiative a rich case for understanding contemporary opera’s artistic and political dynamics.

In 2021, the landmark premiere of Terence Blanchard and Kasi Lemmons’ opera Fire Shut Up in My Bones (2019) at the Metropolitan Opera presented two narratives in tandem. Onstage, the opera told a story drawn from Charles Blow’s memoir, following a young Black man coming of age and overcoming a traumatic childhood. Offstage, the opera represented the Met Opera’s historic resurrection following the Covid-19 shutdown, a period of racial reckoning and cultural upheaval. While the piece had originally been slated to appear in November 2023, the advanced September 2021 production was celebrated with special emphasis as the company’s season opener. Yet the juxtaposition of these two narratives—that of the opera against that of the institution’s self-presentation—exemplifies the wider tensions within contemporary efforts to racially diversify the genre.

This paper traces the distinction between “Blackness and the Black” (Moten 2018) that permeates the 2021 Met production of Fire. Examining the opera as both a contained musical world and a significant cultural event, I illustrate how both artists and institutional administrators conceptualize the value of racial representation. First, I analyze how the Met production’s opening scenes musically and dramaturgically construct the autobiographical framework through its score and staging, representing Blow’s authorial voice with three characters—his adult self Charles, his younger self Char’es-Baby, and an allegorical figure named Destiny—that perform mirrored gestures. Second, I examine the production’s paratextual materials, such as the program book, historical exhibitions, and related press coverage, wherein Fire was co-opted into a narrative reframing that argued for the Met’s own cultural relevance. Drawing on studies of Black Opera (André 2018), theorizations of the autobiographical mode in literary and film studies (Lejeune 1989; Renov 2008), and scholarship on the institutional dramaturgy of opera companies (Steichen 2009, 2011), my paper thus unpacks the historic and historical racial valences of the 2021 Met production. Ultimately, I argue that when considered in conjunction, the overlapping constructions of self-narratives undermine the political power imbued in Fire, suggesting that the opera troubles the relationship between the performance of race in opera and efforts at inclusion, representation, and reconciliation offstage.