Bringing ‘Jubilee’ to opera
September 2024 in Articles
The story of the real-life Fisk Jubilee Singers
Opera with Opera News October 2024 issue
When the writer and director Tazewell Thompson’s ‘Jubilee’—the story of the real-life Fisk Jubilee Singers, an ensemble that was founded in 1871 at Fisk University in Nashville and introduced the world to the music of Black America—opened at Arena Stage in Washington DC in 2019, it was ‘told in a nearly unbroken cascade of song’, according to the Washington Post theatre critic Nelson Pressley, who pronounced the work ‘a joy’ and had special praise for the music, comprising more than 40 spirituals: ‘The harmonies are lush, and the rhythm is crisp.’
Thompson, who wrote the libretto for Jeanine Tesori’s award-winning 2019 opera ‘Blue’, first encountered the Jubilee Singers in 2000 when they were the subject of a PBS documentary. He knew that the story of the group and its members was at its core an opera. His belief was shared by Seattle Opera’s general director Christina Scheppelmann, who will begin her new job as general and artistic director of La Monnaie in Brussels in January. She chose ‘Jubilee’ as the final mainstage production of her tenure at Seattle Opera. Leading the cast of 13 is Lisa Arrindell as Ella Sheppard, the de facto leader of the Fisk Singers (a role Arrindell also played at Arena Stage).
In July we asked Thompson to reflect on the creation of ‘Jubilee’ and the legacy of the famed vocal troupe.
Over my head, I hear music in the air. Over my head, I hear music in the air. There must be a God somewhere. That spiritual begins my opera, Jubilee. My earliest memories are of being constantly engulfed with music, sounds, lyrics, words. Rarely did a moment of silence interrupt this overwhelmingly awesome orchestral assault!
I was taken from my mother and father at a very early age and made a ward of the state. They were deemed irresponsible, unsafe, unsuitable, unfit to raise children. Under a not so fatalistic star, they might have led, separately, respectable lives and contributed, in some way, to my upbringing and to society. On their wedding day, unborn me in my mother’s belly, they fought while walking down the aisle in the storefront church after exchanging vows. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child; A long way from home …
My drifter-dreamer father was a struggling pick-up-band alto saxophonist. My startlingly beautiful mother, with a voice to match and visions of stardom, devoured Jet, Ebony and movie magazines. Both were allergic to earning an honest paycheck. They unlawfully lifted anything not tied down. From their aggressive klepting, they possessed an enormous collection of records they treasured. My father’s favourites: Coltrane, Ellington, Basie, Monk, Armstrong. My mother’s: Ella, Billie, Dinah, Sarah, Lena. I have fond memories of my mother singing and my father playing along with these beautiful classic jazz and blues recordings. Sounds and lyrics were interrupted by their frequent bouts of verbal fisticuffs. As a pair they were incorrigible. I so loved them both.
As parents they were a disaster. Five and four years after they brought, respectively, myself and my younger sibling into the world, there was a fire; I was saved but, through their tragic team negligence, the fire took my brother’s life. Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen, Lord. Nobody knows my sorrow.
I was placed in St Dominic’s Convent in Blauvelt, New York, and spent seven years of my childhood living there. I was in a home, protected and loved by a progressive Dominican order of nuns. I was the only Black boy in my class of 30. I was an altar boy and a boy soprano learning the music of my new religion—Roman Catholic—baptized, first communion and confirmation, all in the same year. I learned how to read music, and how to read and write Latin. Was I learning and knowing the Gregorian chants, liturgical music or hymns? Yes. Was it deep and in detail? No. It was opera. Pace, pace, mio Dio! Cruda sventura m’astringe, ahimè, a languir …
Sister Benvenuta taught music on Tuesdays and Thursdays. A tall, elegant, thin figure behind her white Dominican Sisters habit; black hard-arched veil, black laced-up chunky practical heels, long bony fingers with a pitch pipe eternally clutched to her like a third hand; a smooth, comforting whisper of a voice; herself, a sweet soprano.
She would wheel a metal cage-like trolley that contained a record player on top and housed, in the two compartments below, her prized possession: long-playing opera records, compliments of the Longines Symphonette Society. Sister Benvenuta acquainted us with the synopses of the great opera warhorses. She played specific selections and taught us what to listen for. She waxed ecstatic over the voices that filled the classroom: Callas, Caruso, Tebaldi, Sutherland, Corelli, Nilsson, Merrill, Lanza, Tucker, Sills. She would speak of style, size and range; use expressions like ‘silvery, silky, shimmering, bell-like, brassy, breathy, coloratura, vibrato, trills, timbre, tremolo, agile, angelic, lilting, ringing, fireworks, bombastic’ and one that scarified me: ‘Castrato’!
One Tuesday morning, Sister Benvenuta called, ‘Mr Thompson’. (For seven years I almost forgot I had a given first name, always addressed by my surname.) ‘Mr Thompson, please see me in my office after class. I want you to hear something that personally connects and concerns you.’ What lies over the ocean, Lord? What lies over the sea? Who is this hand that reaches out, Lord? Is this hand for me?
Sister Benvenuta played, for my benefit, records she’d acquired of great Black artists: Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson, Roland Hayes, Leontyne Price, Mahalia Jackson. ‘They are singing Negro spirituals, introduced by a group called the Fisk Jubilee Singers. When you leave us and move on with your life, you must find out more about this astonishing group that created music in your image. They inspired the work of some of my closest friends—Dvořák, Delius, Gershwin.’
I listened and loved it all: the abundant fund of compelling, addictive, syncopated melody; personally lived storytelling. Songs that are spare, precise, emotionally soaring, gut-wrenching, heartfelt and heartbreaking. Themes of pride, fear, faith, courage, loss, renewal, joy, celebration and community. A full-circle reintroduction to the music, blues and jazz—all with echoes of spirituals—like my parents shared with me. A fulsome introduction to the earliest music of my people.
As I moved on I rediscovered the source of these spirituals. I saw a documentary about the Fisk Jubilee Singers. I was intrigued by the story of these extraordinarily courageous and gifted, hitherto enslaved human beings, who set off from Nashville on fundraising concerts, touring America and Europe performing spirituals to save their crumbling, beloved Fisk Colored School—eventually renamed Fisk University. The Jubilees sacrificed, going without food, freezing in the winter, often suffering from illnesses and violent hostility on a punishing tour schedule—because they knew that education was the path to real power and individual personhood.
I became obsessed and determined, wanting to know more. I began to collect anything related to spirituals: old vinyl, CDs, books and sheet music. I thought of an opera centred on the spirituals. When a commission to write a play was offered to me, I knew I wanted to tell the story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers. After a highly successful and extended run of Jubilee, my a cappella musical at Arena Stage in Washington DC, I spoke with Christina Scheppelmann of Seattle Opera about Jubilee. She instantly saw it as an opera. A major American opera house—a cause for celebration!
The journey of the Fisk Jubilee Singers is very much the story of the Negro spiritual. Why do these songs matter, why do they endure? The earliest songs sung in America are those songs sung by the enslaved—as early as the beginning of the 17th century—known as field songs, folk hymns, cabin songs, secret songs, sorrow songs, plantation melodies, hand-me-down songs, shouts, spirituals or jubilees.
The songs matter because the men and women who sang and ‘composed’ them expressed their faith, pain, anguish, hope, loss, love and resilience in these songs as they struggled from day to day—even as they laboured to help shape and build this country, they planted the roots, erected the scaffold, designed a blueprint, added a spine. It was the heart and soul of what became gospel, blues, jazz, R&B, country, folk and hip-hop.
These glorious spirituals, songs of certain proportion and dimension, worthy of unearthing, not once, but time and time again, provide an intense work of the human spirit that has within it a deep accumulation of human substance, both of belief and empathy. It is from this richness that this work derives both its power to entertain and captivate and, simultaneously, to change people’s recognition of themselves and their world. To see ourselves more in each other. To educate. That was what those young, intrepid students sought as they sang their songs to the world: leaving a legacy to educate and save their institution of education.
Seattle Opera performs ‘Jubilee’, created and directed by Tazewell Thompson and conducted by Kellen Gray, from October 12 to 26 at McCaw Hall. www.seattleopera.org
