If we're serious about African-American composers, then the first opera we have to revive is Troubled Island by William Grant Still. As far as I'm concerned, it's not even a question. This opera about the Hatian Revolution of 1791-1804 was performed for one brief run at the New York City Opera in 1949, and as far as I know has never been performed in its entirety since.
In the recent epoch making American history book, These Truths, Jill Lepore contrasts the American Revolution with the Hatian Revolution between 1791 and 1804, and shows rather definitively that we have to view the the achievement of the American Revolution not only alongside the excesses of the French Revolution, but alongside the ignominious failure of an all too long and agonizing slave revolt which the larger world of the time would devote everything to ensuring its failure.
William Grant Still is, to this day, the 'Dean of African-American composers', whose long career associated him with the Harlem Renaissance. As a jobbing musician he played for a who's who of 20s New York: W.C. Handy, Fletcher Henderson, Eubie Blake, Sophie Tucker, Artie Shaw, Paul Whiteman, and James P. Johnson. As an intellectual, he counted among his friends Alain Lock, Arna Bontemps, Countee Collun, and most particularly, of course, Langston Hughes, who wrote part of the libretto for Troubled Island but could not finish it because he wa hired by the Baltimore Afro-American as an overseas correspondent to cover the Spanish Civil War.
Imagine for a moment the celebrities who probably sat in the audience. One has to imagine theatrical New York, so fashioanbly progressive, was out in force: Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, Brando and Kazan, Rogers and Hammerstein, Bernstein and Jules Stein, Mary Martin and Ethel Merman, Zero Mostel and Jack Klugman, Harold Clurman and Jerome Robbins, Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg, Lilian Hellman and Clifford Odets, you have to imagine they wee all there for the ultimate African-American opera. You have to imagine all of intellectual New York was out full force too: everyone from the actual New York Intellecuals crowd (the Trilling and Kazins and Barzuns and Kristols, Clement Greenberg and Isaac Rosenfeld, Richard Hofstadter, Nathan Glazer, Sidney Hook, Philio Rahv, Dwight MacDonald, Mary McCarthy, (and the very young Pat Moynihan and Norman Podhoretz), but additionally Mailer, and Vidal, and Schlesinger, and Salinger, and Capote. And perhaps some soon to burgeon journalists in their youngest years like Jimmy Breslin, Gay Talese, David Halberstam, Robert Caro... The more WASP corners of New York cultural life probably gave it a pass, but surely William Shawn and his hen house of young New Yorker journalists were there. And it surely had to have been a landmark moment for the later vestiges of the Harlem Renaissance, and one has to imagine you could have seen everyone from Zora Neale Hurston to Langston Hughes (who co-wrote the libretto) to Anne Spencer, to the more down on their luck elder statesmen and grande dames of jazz, too old and forgotten to tour, like Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle and Luckey Roberts and Willie 'The Lion' Smith and Andy Razaf, Ethel Waters, and Adelaide Hall. And let's not forget some deeply curious New York High School students completely enamored both of opera and the historical ideas such an opera portends: students then of little consequence but who attended every production of the City Opera religiously from the time they were barely teens: high school anonyms by the names of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia.
Who knows which if any of these name were there, but I guarantee they all knew about it, and they alongside every other reader at a party of readers was talking passionately about its cultural implications in dozens of restaurants and cocktail bars and dinner parties.
Still felt crushed by the opera's negative reviews. Were the reviews compromised by prejudice? It's impossible to ay as I'm having trouble accessing them. Is the opera a masterpiece? Well, not quite, but parts come astonishingly close. Part of the problem must go to the libretto, which is far more interested in the rebellion itself than its characters. The characters are just melodramatic mouthpieces for their positions in society and do not take on much life of their own. Generally speaking, the opera is wildly successful at excitement and grandeur and not particularly distinguished at intimacy. Its passages for ensemble and chorus belong with some of the strongest music of the century. It's certainly very accomplished, at times extraordinary, musical score that is in the direst need of revival in an era to which it could speak with the force of prophecy. The score is full of everything from Debussy to Gershwin to Weill to blues to gospel to Ellington.
Unless your name is Mozart or Brahms, all great artists can disappoint, and a large part of experiencing artworks is the process of not liking everything you hear at first hearing because you realize that perhaps the art has more to tell you than you it. You experience the work, and hopefully you have a community around you to help you sort through what you might be missing. On our own free time, we have the pleasure to revisit all those things which give us joy, but if we want to keep living, we have to be open to new experiences, and some of those experiences we won't like.
This is far from an unlikeable opera, but on the way to finding greatness, we all have to be prepared to experience things which are not only less than great, but squeeze on the pressure points of hot button issues. In the new era, there are all sorts of people who will complain that the only reason Still and company are on concert programs is because they're black, or women, or gay... And in many senses, that's obviously true. The problem though is that 1. the concert repertoire is a thousandth the size it should be. 2. The hottest button issue in the arts of 2021 is if a different lived experience will result in a unique kind of art. Wherever one stands on the issue of representation, politically or aesthetically, we will not be certain which side of that question is the true one until we hear the works of black and hispanic and female and queer composers much more often than we have. If it turns out that their music really is that different, then we will have been missing out for generations.
There are certain operas which, even if they're not necessarily masterpieces, are works of overwhelming vision: Busoni's Doktor Faust, Nielsen's Saul and David, Boito's Mefistofele. Large parts of Still's Troubled Island seem of their ilk, and Still certainly deserves to be thought a composer mentioned in the same breath with Busoni and Boito.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-JyCiN3Iwg
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