Conference Agenda

In this paper, I examine operatic performance as a site of memory, as well as an under-examined technology of memory transmission. Extending Diana Taylor’s (2003) and Rebecca Schneider’s (2011) work on the embodied archive of performance, as well as Lea Luka Sikau’s work on the compulsive repetition at the core of operatic practice, I consider the material and immaterial impacts of intergenerational transmission in opera within the context of the pivotal Canadian Centennial opera Louis Riel, premiered in 1967. In 2017, the Canadian Opera Company revived the opera, in a radical new production directed by Peter Hinton. This production was celebrated for its radical re-imagining of many of its aspects, including the addition of a silent chorus of Indigenous actors, which has been the focus of most recent work on this piece (Danckert 2019; Maiello 2018; Renihan 2018). Despite this production’s divergences from the initial 1967 version, and in many instances from the original score as well, however, several performances within the piece betrayed their uncanny connections with the original production, connections that I argue were subtle, and went unacknowledged, even largely by the performers themselves.

Canadian baritone Bernard Turgeon, who created the role of the Métis leader Louis Riel in the late 1960s, committed extensively and intensely to the embodiment of this role, reportedly trying to channel the historical figure himself. In 2017, in the midst of this new production, Baritone Russell Braun’s performance evidenced its own ghostly residues of Turgeon’s performance. Through interviews with singers and members of the creative team of the 2017 production, I explore ways that performances across generations of this opera contain deposited traces, or gestural residue—both vocal and physical—of those of previous generations. Like Schneider, I am interested in considering ways that performances of this work have repeated, with difference, across generations. By considering contemporary operatic practice as one that is deeply connected with the past through the bodies and voices of singers, I also consider the uniquely complicated instance of performing Louis Riel, a Métis man, by singers who do not claim Métis heritage.

Both scholarly and popular narratives of Black opera tend to highlight the preponderance of exceptional “firsts” which occurred between 1935 and 1955: the premiere of Porgy and Bess (1935) as the first time Black singers appeared en masse in an operatic work; Camilla Williams’s debut with New York City Opera (1946) as the first time a Black woman was offered a contract by a major U.S. company; Marian Anderson’s Metropolitan Opera debut (1955) as the first appearance by a Black singer on the art form’s most prominent American stage. Yet as one critic took care to clarify at the time, Black interest in opera was “no sudden thing,” but rather a longstanding intergenerational phenomenon. In this paper, I resituate these high-profile events as the product of decades of activity within Black musical communities. Although civil rights-era political imperatives meant that it was tactically important for Black artists’ operatic achievements to be framed as unprecedented, their work had deep roots on the cultural margins. Camilla Williams, for instance, insisted that her debut was made possible by Cleota Collins, the Black soprano who taught her at Virginia State College. Such acts of recognition established a lineage in which performers like Williams could situate themselves.

In emphasizing the intergenerational lineage and countercultural origins of Black opera, I offer an alternative to the exceptionalizing lens through which this history is often interpreted. Building upon the work of scholars of Black classical music including Kira Thurman, Samantha Ege, and A. Kori Hill, I shift my focus away from white tastemakers’ delayed attention to Black artists, and toward the institutional and interpersonal networks in which Black artistry flourished. Like Tammy Kernodle, whose work on jazz and gender eschews the trope of the “exceptional black woman,” in favor of an emphasis on collaboration and offstage labor, I show how Black operatic artists took care to recognize their forebears on and off the stage. At a moment characterized by mainstream institutional desegregation, Black artists’ emphasis on the intraracial roots of their investment in opera also served as a reminder of the art form’s continued radical potential.

Koh Bunya (Jiang Wenye; 1910–1983) is now primarily known as a composer, whose life and legacy have been caught up in the upheavals of twentieth-century East Asia, each time being disadvantaged by the changing directions of politics. This paper, however, examines his early career as an opera singer, which is only beginning to be explored (Shen 2023). Born in Japanese Taiwan, Koh completed his secondary education in Nagano before beginning his engineering studies in Tokyo. Despite apparently receiving no formal schooling in singing (Liou 2023: 233), he enjoyed a successful career as a baritone. Besides appearing regularly on the catalogue of Columbia Records, he sung as part of the Fujiwara Opera Company and was involved in several of Japan’s first staging of European canonical works such as La Boheme and Tannhäuser. His emergence as a singer without formal training has been said to be possible because of the Western music education – specifically, school singing education – implemented by the imperial Japanese government in colonial Taiwan (Liou 2005 and 2023). Yet the centrality of church singing in Koh’s life remains underexplored.

Rather than framing Koh’s breakthrough as a singer squarely in the imperial Japanese context, I consider his singing in relation to the Presbyterian Church’s presence in Taiwan since 1865 and, more generally, to the missionary enterprise in seventeenth-century Dutch and Spanish ‘Formosa’ (Taiwan). Indeed, Christianity looms large in Koh’s life and work: his birthplace Dadaocheng was anchored by George Leslie Mackay’s Presbyterian Church, his fellow Taiwanese singers who he met while a student in Japan and with whom he formed a ‘local visiting group’ to perform throughout Taiwan in 1934 all shared in common their belief in Presbyterianism, and themes of Christianity feature often in his later compositions. Building on my fellow panellists’ work on ‘the material and immaterial impacts of intergenerational transmission’ (Paper 1) and the recontextualization of what have hitherto been read as singular events by exceptional singers within longer trajectories of community music-making (Paper 2), I situate Koh’s voice within longer, intergenerational lineages of not only school but also church singing across iterations of colonial Taiwan.