African-American Opera

The movement of African-American opera was both concurrent with, and distinct from, the rise of American opera in the late 19th and 20th century. These works are written by African-American composers and librettists, and feature casts of primarily African-American singers.

Key Dates, Events, & Genres

• 1873 - Formation of the Colored American Opera Company in Washington D.C.
• 1898 - H. Lawrence Freeman has excerpts from Nada performed
• 1900 - The Theodore Drury Grand Opera Company opens its first performance, producing Carmen with an almost entirely African-American team
• 1911 - Scott Joplin’s self-produced first performance of Treemonisha falls flat
• 1914 - H. Lawrence Freeman’s Voodoo is first performed for the Negro Grand Opera Company
• 1932 - First performance of Tom-Tom: An Epic of Music and the Negro to an audience of 25,000 people over two nights.
• 1940 - First performance of De Organizer written by James P. Johnson, teacher of Fats Waller
• 1941 - Mary Caldwell Dawson founds The National Negro Opera Company, in Pittsburgh
• 1955 - Contralto Marian Anderson becomes the first African-American singer to sing at The Metropolitan Opera, New York. In the same year, Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Alabama.
• 1957 - Civil Rights Act signed by President Eisenhower
• 1962 - William Grant Still’s Highway 1, USA has its first performance.
• 1963 - Martin Luther King delivers his "I have a dream" speech
• 1966 - The Metropolitan Opera’s Lincoln Center inaugural performance stars Leontyne Price
• 1968 - Civil Rights Act signed by President Johnson
• 1972 - Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha has its first public performance
• 1986 - Anthony Davis’s X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X first performed
• 1990 - Leroy Jenkins’s opera The Mother of Three Sons is first performed
• 2001 - Shirley Graham Du Bois’s manuscript for Tom-Tom is found among her papers when they were acquired by Harvard University
• 2009 - Anthony Braxton’s Trillium J, part of his longer series of Trillium operas, had its first public performance.
• 2019 - Anthony Davis’s The Central Park Five first performed. It goes on to win a Pulitzer Prize in 2020.
• 2020 - Plans to restage Shirley Graham Du Bois’s Tom-Tom are put on hold due to the Covid-19 pandemic
• 2020 - Denyce Graves launches The Denyce Graves Foundation to support diversity in opera, and plans to restore The National Negro Opera House