Lucy Caplan, "Dreaming in Ensemble: How Black Artists Transformed American Opera" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: New Books Network – Lucy Caplan, "Dreaming in Ensemble: How Black Artists Transformed American Opera"

Date: November 15, 2025
Host: Kristin Turner
Guest: Lucy Caplan, author of Dreaming in Ensemble: How Black Artists Transformed American Opera (Harvard UP, 2025)

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Overview

This episode features an in-depth conversation between host Kristin Turner and musicologist Lucy Caplan about Caplan’s groundbreaking new book, Dreaming in Ensemble: How Black Artists Transformed American Opera. The discussion explores the overlooked yet vibrant history of Black participation and innovation in American opera from the late 19th century through the mid-20th century. Caplan’s study uncovers a "Black operatic counterculture" that was neither centered on mere "firsts" nor solely defined by exclusion, but rather envisioned opera as a terrain for community, self-making, and radical dreaming.

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Main Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins of the Book and Personal Motivation ([02:44]–[05:14])

• Lucy Caplan’s Entry Point: Caplan’s fascination with Black opera began as an undergraduate when she stumbled upon Shirley Graham’s opera Tom-Tom in an archive, a discovery that challenged dominant narratives of both Black music and American opera.
  • "In the classes I'd taken on African American history..., Black music was never really talked about in terms of opera.... It seemed so out of place." (Lucy Caplan, [03:46])
• The project grew into a broader exploration spanning archival research, addressing gaps in both musicology and African American studies.

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2. Why Opera? Black Artists and a Contested Genre ([06:33]–[10:07])

• Caplan details opera’s paradoxical appeal for Black artists, despite its associations with white Europe, elitism, and exclusion:
  • Aesthetics: Opera’s imaginative, non-realist qualities allowed Black artists to transcend demands for sociological "representation".
  • Collectivity: Opera as a collective endeavor—"ensemble"—figured centrally in Black artistic communities.
  • Politics and Experimentation: Opera’s class-coded status became a site to challenge, repurpose, or reimagine social uplift and respectability.
  • Quote: "Opera is an art form that really requires a sort of imagination and departure from the world of kind of pure representation.... That was really intriguing to a lot of artists." (Lucy Caplan, [07:29])

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3. Dreaming in Ensemble: The Power and Limitations of Black Operatic Aspirations ([10:16]–[13:02])

• The idea of "dreams" recurs in artists’ diaries, interviews, and writings:
  • For some, it meant personal artistic ambitions (composing, starring).
  • For others, opera became a canvas to envision alternative futures—worldmaking.
  • Caplan draws inspiration from Robin Kelley’s Freedom Dreams: evaluating the significance of these aspirations, even when unrealized.
  • Quote: "If we look not just at what black artists were able to achieve in opera... but rather what they were hoping for, that's a much more useful and exciting way to understand what they were looking for." (Lucy Caplan, [12:17])

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4. Expanding Beyond “Firsts”: History as Network, Not Icons ([13:02]–[19:08])

• Caplan intentionally avoids a history focused solely on milestone "firsts" or exceptional figures that reinforce dominant narratives (“inclusion” stories).
• By mining the Black press and other archives, she uncovers:
  • Small opera companies, teaching studios, and community performances.
  • The importance of institutions, ephemeral projects, and lesser-known organizers.
  • Many artists were more interested in making opera collectively within Black communities than in breaking mainstream barriers.
  • Quote: “Being a first was not necessarily the goal of a lot of these artists... They were often trying to make opera, create opera, think about opera within existing communities.” (Lucy Caplan, [16:42])

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5. Key Figures: Freeman, Holt, and Drury ([20:36]–[34:03])

H. Lawrence Freeman (composer):

• Born mid-1860s, he wrote over 20 operas, many ambitious and never performed.
• Despite near-impossible odds, Freeman’s creative ambition only grew; his work demonstrates perseverance and radical imagination.
  • Quote: "He just went more and more ambitious rather than making himself smaller or trying to kind of appeal to the norms of his day." (Lucy Caplan, [25:44])

Nora Holt (critic):

• Early Black woman music critic and composer in Chicago; known for vivid, insightful reviews in the Chicago Defender.
• Contributed a unique style and provided rare perspectives on both musical content and the Black experience in elite musical spaces.
  • Quote: "Her writing is just fascinating to my mind.... She takes you into the scene of all these performances." (Lucy Caplan, [29:06])

Theodore Drury (baritone, producer):

• Founded the all-Black Theodore Drury Grand Opera Company in 1900.
• Sought to build Black institutions—not just to integrate existing ones.
  • Quote: "He's really creating these spaces for black artists to produce opera as a group, as a collective.... That distinguishes his work from more conventional kind of first narratives." (Lucy Caplan, [33:27])

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6. Changing Contexts: Segregation and Shifting Goals ([34:03]–[39:04])

• Black opera activity adapted to shifting legal and social realities from the nadir of Jim Crow to the Civil Rights era.
• Early on, the focus was on building autonomous Black spaces; later, with changing possibilities, strategic efforts for desegregation increased (e.g., Marian Anderson at the Met).
• Caplan insists on continuity and interdependence between these two strategies.

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7. “Firsts” as Community Achievements: The Camilla Williams Story ([42:04]–[46:08])

• Camilla Williams, first Black woman to sing with the New York City Opera, benefited from deep networks:
  • Trained at HBCUs; mentored by Cleota Collins and others.
  • Always acknowledged her community roots and teachers—contradicting the myth of solitary trailblazers.
  • The white press erased these communal narratives; the Black press emphasized them.
  • Quote: "She was constantly citing other people who shaped her training, shaped her career...I love that image of them just kind of sitting on the porch looking at the score. It gives us a real sense of all the smaller, kind of more intimate, personal backstage moments that went into making a performance like this possible." (Lucy Caplan, [44:12])

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8. On the Construction of Narrative and Historiography ([47:15]–[48:36])

• Reading events side by side in Black and white newspapers exposes vastly different interpretations and hidden networks.
• Caplan underlines the critical need for attention to archival diversity and context.

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9. Shirley Graham’s Tom-Tom: The Origin Story and Its Significance ([49:26]–[54:17])

• Tom-Tom (1932): An epic three-act opera tracing Black history from West Africa, through the American South, to Harlem.
• Graham drew from diverse musical idioms—percussionist traditions, spirituals, European opera, jazz—reflecting the diaspora’s range.
• Despite a massive premiere, it was only performed once and vanished into the archive.
• Tom-Tom serves as a symbol of expansive Black operatic dreaming and lost possibility.
  • Quote: "[Tom-Tom is] this amazingly ambitious piece, musically, dramatically, that was actually produced at scale...Big success, and then it was never performed again. So it has this kind of big rise and then really precipitous fall right afterwards." (Lucy Caplan, [53:32])

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10. Enduring Value: Beyond Fame and Performance ([54:17]–[56:35])

• Caplan posits that the significance of these operas, companies, and individuals does not rest on mainstream recognition or repeated performances.
• The very act of dreaming, creating, and building community institutions is historically meaningful.
  • Quote: "...Even when that story becomes where it's harder to see how these figures influenced the longer trajectory of American opera...that their work is worth honoring and remembering in its own right, kind of regardless of what impact it had on future generations..." (Lucy Caplan, [55:49])

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11. Future Projects ([56:55]–[59:26])

• Caplan is working on a critical edition of Tom-Tom for possible revival.
• Her new research centers on the history of "blind auditions," tracing their roots and implications for equity in music.

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Notable Quotes – Speaker Attribution & Timestamps

• On Dreaming:
  "If we look not just at what black artists were able to achieve in opera... but rather what they were hoping for, that's a much more useful and exciting way to understand what they were looking for."
  — Lucy Caplan ([12:17])

• On Avoiding "Firsts":
  "Being a first was not necessarily the goal of a lot of these artists... They were often trying to make opera, create opera, think about opera within existing communities."
  — Lucy Caplan ([16:42])

• On Freeman’s Persistence:
  "He just went more and more ambitious rather than making himself smaller or trying to kind of appeal to the norms of his day."
  — Lucy Caplan ([25:44])

• On Community Networks:
  "She was constantly citing other people who shaped her training, shaped her career..."
  — Lucy Caplan ([44:12])

• On Historical Importance:
  "Their work is worth honoring and remembering in its own right... regardless of what impact it had on future generations..."
  — Lucy Caplan ([55:49])

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Memorable Moments

• Caplan’s first-ever archival trip, discovering Graham’s Tom-Tom ([02:46])
• The list of words ("respectability," "ensemble," "drama") taped by Caplan to her desk as she pondered why opera ([06:43])
• The behind-the-scenes stories of overlooked teachers and networks supporting now-celebrated singers ([44:12])
• Caplan’s advocacy for future performances of Tom-Tom ([56:55])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [02:44] – Lucy Caplan’s personal spark: Tom-Tom discovery
• [06:33] – The appeal of opera for Black artists: aesthetic, social, political reasons
• [10:16] – The meaning of “dreaming” in Black opera
• [14:11] – Moving beyond “firsts” and iconic narratives
• [21:47] – Introduction to three key historical figures
• [42:04] – The case of Camilla Williams and the networks behind operatic firsts
• [49:26] – The story of Tom-Tom and Shirley Graham
• [56:55] – Caplan’s new projects: Tom-Tom edition and research on blind auditions

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Conclusion

Lucy Caplan’s Dreaming in Ensemble urges readers (and listeners) to expand how we think about artistic achievement, cultural history, and the legacy of Black opera in America—not just in terms of integrationist "firsts," but as a long process of dreaming, institution-building, and creative resilience. The episode offers a rich tapestry of archival stories, forgotten figures, and collective ambition, opening up new ways to imagine the history of American music.

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Transcript

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[Kristin Turner]

Welcome to the new Books Network hello, My name is Kristen Turner and this is New Books and Music, a podcast of the New Books Network. My guest today is Lucy Kaplan, author of Dreaming an How Black Artists Transformed American Opera, published by Harvard University Press in 2025. Kaplan examines what she calls a black operatic counterculture in the US from the performance of H. Lawrence Freeman's first opera, The Martyr, in 1893 until the 1950s. Rather than centering her analysis on opera as a symbol of uplift, or concentrating primarily on ways that the operatic establishment excluded black participation, Kaplan thinks about opera was part of a project of self fashioning in black communities. She argues that opera could be one way to answer, in the words of black librettist Karen Chilton, how do we become ourselves? Centering institutions and networks while also not ignoring influential figures, Kaplan delves into the rich history of black opera in the US through numerous points of entry. This is not a strictly chronological retelling of a few already well known operatic firsts. Instead, Kaplan writes about everything from critics to short lived opera companies, from celebrities to supernumeraries, and recreates a complex and multifaceted operatic legacy whose story has not been told before. Thank you so much for being with me, Lucy.

[Lucy Kaplan]

Thanks so much for having me, Kristin.

[Kristin Turner]

So what led you to this topic?

[Lucy Kaplan]

Well, this topic is something that I've been interested in for a long time and I First became interested in it, actually, as an undergraduate when I was studying American history and literature, but also doing a lot of performing and making music as a violist. And I was one day looking for something to write a paper about, as many undergrads do, and kind of poking around some library search catalogs. And I came across a listing in a catalog for an archival item, which was the school score of an opera called Tom Tom by a woman named Shirley Graham. And I'd never heard of Shirley Graham. I'd never heard of this opera. But I looked into more about it and found out that it was an opera written by a black woman in the 1930s and a black woman who later became a really fascinating intellectual and activist and figure. And I went over to the archive, my first time ever visiting an archive, looked at the score, and I was totally fascinated because it didn't seem to fit into most of the narratives that I had been learning about in my classes or in my experience as a musician. In the classes I'd taken on African American history and American Studies, Black music was never really talked about in terms of opera. It was often more popular or vernacular genres. So the fact that there was an opera seemed to kind of not fit into that story of black music that I was getting to know. And at the same time, as a classical musician myself, opera rarely included operas by composers who weren't white, who weren't male, who weren't European. So this piece didn't really seem to fit into stories about the history of American opera or opera in general that I had heard. So I was just really intrigued by this archival item and what I found. It seemed so out of place. And I wrote a paper about it. And then I ended up writing a senior thesis about some related stuff. My thesis advisor suggested to me that I think about going to grad school, something I'd never really thought about, and the rest is history. So now I wrote based on something that really originated with that. That archival find.

[Kristin Turner]

I love that this book starts from such a small germ that then you have been thinking about since, you know, for so many years. So it's. It's interesting to see how it's almost like. It is almost like a tree, like that was the seed. And you have all of these different offshoots, because, as I said in the introduction, it really is. This could have been a book that's just like, first there was this opera, and then there was this thing, and then. And you go through like that, and you stayed within kind of a conventional musicological narrative of composers and performers. That's really not what you do at all. So I wanted to start with kind of thinking about the big picture a little bit. Before we get into talking about maybe specific people or something like that. So one question I think is really just why opera? It is a genre that has such strong associations with white Europeans, with colonialism, with really elite, aristocratic spaces. Lots of things that were difficult for black Americans to access. So why would opera be important to black Americans?

[Lucy Kaplan]

Yeah, that's such a great question. And, in fact, while I was writing this book, it's a question I kept returning to. At one point, I had a little piece of paper taped up on the wall next to my desk. That said Opera in the middle. And then it had all these kind of offshoots of the word. That kind of came to mind to help me think through what opera meant to the people in the book. And that was words like respectability and uplift. It was words like ensemble. It was words like drama. It was words like spectacle, beauty. All these different things that opera could mean or be part of. And I think it's a really intriguing and important question. The question of why all these artists and people and listeners and practitioners turn to opera. There's not one simple answer to it. But I think there are many important answers. One is that opera is strange and complicated. It is an art form that really requires a sort of imagination and departure from the world of kind of pure representation. And I think that that was really intriguing to a lot of artists on kind of the aesthetic level. Here was something that wasn't about kind of representing their lives on stage. And a lot of theorists and critics of black artistry address this point, right. That black artists are so often compelled to offer what's called, like, a sociological perspective on their work. Ralph Ellison writes all about this, where he says black artists are expected to just kind of depict their lives on stage for presumably white audiences. And opera doesn't really work like that. It's not about just kind of depicting the real. So I think that's something that was intriguing to a lot of artists on kind of an aesthetic level, on a social level. I think there are a few other things going on. One is that opera is a really collective project, essentially. It always involves a huge number, or at least a semi huge number, sometimes of people involved, right? Whether that's composers and librettists or a group of performers. There's just often a lot of people involved. And I think that collective aspect was really appealing to a lot of artists who Saw it as a way to work together and work collaboratively to create a new artistic practice. And then a third category, which is maybe more political or kind of ideological, of the why opera? Question is that opera did have all these really complicated cultural associations, as you mentioned earlier in your introduction. It has these ties to things like uplift, like respectability, these kind of white, upper classes, elite culture. And I think those associations were interesting as a site of experimentation for black artists. Sometimes that meant using opera as a way to kind of think about how they could fit into a kind of existing elite cultural scene. Sometimes it meant thinking about how they could rethink or reimagine that same cultural scene. But they really used those associations in compelling ways to do this work. So I think there's all sorts of reasons and kind of types of reasons why black artists might be attracted to this art form.

[Kristin Turner]

You call the book Dreaming an Ensemble. What were they dreaming about?

[Lucy Kaplan]

That's a good question. What were they dreaming about? Well, I chose that title because ideas of dreaming came up so, so often in the archival materials that I read and looked at for this book. So often artists would talk about their hopes and dreams in terms of opera. William Grant still has a great line about that where he says that his dream has always been to write operas. J. Rosemont Johnson writes about the dream of opera. Many performers write about opera as kind of a dream for them. So for some artists, it's the chance to perform or compose opera, right? If it's someone like the singer Lilian Avanti, to give an example of one of these black operatic singers, she is dreaming of a career as a star in opera. That's something very appealing to dream about, whether that means performing in the us, performing abroad, getting that recognition as a performer. Many composers similarly dream of their works being performed on stage. So that's kind of the most obvious or basic element of this answer, right? They're dreaming of making, creating, performing opera. But I think it also has to do with this idea of dreaming of a different world through opera and using opera as a place to imagine a world very different from the one that they lived in. I think here there's a wonderful book by the historian Robin Kelly called Freedom Dreams, where he talks a lot about various dreams, aspirations of black social movements. And one of the key points he makes in that book is that it's not useful or productive to evaluate black social movements and freedom struggles purely by whether they succeeded or failed. And that rather, we should really look at the merits and substance of those movements as a Place to draw inspiration, to understand why they were important, to really kind of take them seriously as historical events. And that really inspired my thinking for this title as well. If we look not just at what black artists were able to achieve in opera, in a kind of opera scene that was totally structured by white supremacy, but rather what they were hoping for, that's a much more useful and exciting way to understand what they were looking for.

[Kristin Turner]

That brings me to another thing that is very noteworthy about your book is that it is not a book that is organized around, I would say, the achievements of like the first. Right. So it's. Or the long running. Right. So you of course talk about the National Negro Opera Company, but this is not a book that spends a lot of time with that. You talk about Marian Anderson's debut in 1955, but that's not what this book is about. Instead it's about a lot of other people. A lot of. Ancillary is the wrong word. A lot of things that are short lived or are part of larger networks that eventually culminate or become how it is that these first actually appear. So how did you decide what to move away from? Like, if you're going to move away from these kind of, I would say more well known, almost iconic firsts that, you know, if you like were to open up a Wikipedia article, that's the thing you would read about. How did you go away from those? And how did you pick the things that you actually did talk about?

[Lucy Kaplan]

Yeah, that's such a. Both parts of that question are so good and so helpful. So first kind of how did I decide to move away from that story of firsts? You know, one is that I really felt like it had been told already in a lot of ways and often usefully, helpfully, this story of kind of important firsts. So I wanted to do something different from that. And you know, it seemed to me that that story of firsts was really ultimately often kind of recentering, existing, often kind of white mainstream narratives. Because that story of first is often about people who kind of break into the mainstream. And the idea of Anderson as someone who finally performed at the Met in 1955 is a great example of that. That was really late in Marian Anderson's career and in her life. So if we focus on that one moment, it's actually not even telling the whole story at that first. So yeah, one idea was to kind of move away from a narrative that ultimately just kind of recenters an existing story, but adds in kind of exceptional black figures into that story that's something I didn't really want to do. But the other was that I just found all this fascinating other operatic stuff that was going on. And it seemed really worth telling that story and thinking about what else opera could be if we look kind of outside the opera house, outside those mainstream stages. And I found that mostly in the black press or that was a main place that I found it. Where you see all these listings, reviews, announcements, saying, you know, so and so is singing arias at this church at this time, or here's a concert performance or something happening with this company over here. So and so was offering singing lessons from their home or is trained in opera. And you would just get all these fascinating details. And that to me suggested that there was a whole world of operatic activity that was going on. I don't want to say under the radar, because that's not quite the right frame, but kind of beyond that very mainstream kind of first oriented narrative. And I think kind of building on that idea. Something I learned by reading all these announcements, learning about all these other figures, is that being a first was not necessarily the goal of a lot of these artists. I think we kind of do them a disservice if we think that their only goal was to enter into existing spaces or be kind of the first African American composer to have their music played at a certain institution or something. That often wasn't really what these artists were trying to do. They were often trying to make opera create opera, think about opera within existing communities and performance spaces and venues. And that was their goal. So to talk only about firsts in this very kind of traditional way actually obscures their own motivations in addition to their own achievements and goals. You also asked about kind of how I chose what to right about. That was. That was a whole process. It's always hard to figure out what makes it into the book, what doesn't, as you know from your own work. It's something I think every anyone who does archival work finds is that it's really hard to do that. I really wanted to tell stories where I could create kind of vivid portraits or ideas of the people I was writing about. So in that sense, I did look for places where there was enough archival material to make a vivid story and to really kind of get at the people who were behind all this artistry. At the same time, I was really cognizant that there were real limits to the archival material I was working with and that telling that story in a vivid way would require some creative work on my part. So I thought a lot about scholars in black studies like Sylvia Hartman, whose work on critical fabulation is really inspiring about kind of how. Or Ashley Farmer, a whole host of other fantastic scholars in that field who really think about how to tell rich stories from a very limited archive. And that shaped a lot of my thinking about where to go with this, with this material. But, you know, there are tons more stories that couldn't make it into the book that I wish could have. So there's always, always more to say.

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[Lucy Kaplan]

Wait, what?

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[Lucy Kaplan]

Am.

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[Lucy Kaplan]

Eh?

[Kristin Turner]

The doors have double locks.

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[Lucy Kaplan]

So.

[Kristin Turner]

Maybe now we can turn to some more specifics to sort of give people an idea of some of the things you talk about. We definitely will not be able to talk about all of them in the time we have, but I noticed that there were three people that are in almost every chapter, maybe in every chapter, I'm not sure, but certainly almost everyone. So they become like these figures that of continuity in some way. So one was the composer H. Lawrence Freeman. The other is a critic named Nora Holtz, and the third was someone that you and I share a complete obsession with. And that is Theodore Drury, who is a baritone and a producer and a teacher, which is nice because you have three different ways of approaching opera. One who's primarily thinking about writing opera, one who's primarily thinking about how to perform it, and a third who is critiquing and thinking about sort of classical music and the operatic culture as a whole in Nora Halt. So can you talk a little bit about each of these figures and sort of how you see them as participants in this story?

[Lucy Kaplan]

Yeah, absolutely. I should start by giving a lot of credit to my wonderful editor at hup, Emily Silk, who had the idea or really encouraged me to make these figures more into characters in the story rather than just kind of case study style examples who show up once and then disappear from the book. She had some really great ideas about how to really kind of weave them through this story, which I was very grateful for. And I think, as you said, they're kind of a fascinating set because they were each really interesting, compelling people in their own right. And they each did so much in the worlds of opera and really give a window into kind of black opera more generally. H. Lawrence Freeman was a really fascinating historical figure. He is a composer born in Cleveland in the mid-1860s, and he grows up kind of playing, performing music of all sorts. He sings at church, he plays the organ. Very traditional path. He moves to Denver with some other members of his family in the 1880s, and one night he gets invited by a friend to go see a performance with some opera by Wagner. And he later writes that this is a totally life changing experience, that he can't sleep that night. All he can think of is this music, what he heard, and the fact that he wants to become a composer of opera. So, you know, who knows if that's a true story or one that he kind of later chose to retell often, but it provides some real insight into who he was and he sticks to his word for the rest of his life. He writes more than 20 operas. And this is really unbelievable, I think, to think of this man writing such an ambitious catalog of works in the time and place that he lived in in the Jim Crow United States as a black composer working in the genre of opera, where there were so few black composers working and so few getting kind of the attention that they deserved. But Freeman is totally undeterred by all these obstacles, which is something that I really admire and respect about his work. His first opera is premiered in Denver in 1893. It's a piece called the Martyr. He goes on writing pieces. He moves to New York City, to Harlem later in his life, and he just keeps writing and writing and Writing operas, most of them do not get produced. Some of them do. Some of them get really beautiful productions. His son becomes kind of a business manager for these productions, helps him. He has a strong community of singers and folks around him who try to help him, but at the same time, he often knows that his music will never be heard. But he keeps at it, keeps writing and gets more and more kind of inventive and ambitious in his operas over time. So I love returning to his story time and time again in the book because I think it gives a real sense of how black opera was evolving and changing over the roughly 60 year period that I cover in the book. And I love just thinking about what it took for him to stay committed to opera, stay committed to this field, despite facing so many obstacles and knowing at a certain point that his work was not going to be heard or performed. I think it's something that many composers go through at one point or another, but it's something that he really consistently faced and kind of used almost as an inspiration for his work rather than an obstacle, ultimately. And what I mean by that is that his operas, actually, and this was really surprising to me when I looked at them, they get weirder and weirder and more and more ambitious as he gets older and as he knows that they're not going to be staged or performed. It's like he kind of says, you know, well, if I'm not going to have to deal with putting this piece on stage, I'm just going to go all out and make it as spectacular as it can be. And, you know, maybe someday someone will perform it. So I think it's kind of a fantastic approach to the structural constraints that he faced, that he just went more and more ambitious rather than making himself smaller or trying to kind of appeal to the norms of his day. He just stood really exactly what he wanted with this genre of his time. So I find him a really inspiring figure in that.

[Kristin Turner]

Well, and also so different. I mean, you even have examples. J. Rosemond Johnson said, oh, I wanted to write opera, but who was going to produce it? So I didn't like that is the norm. Like, I have seen so many white women, white women composers of color who've said, oh, I wanted to do this.

[Lucy Kaplan]

But it was never going to be.

[Kristin Turner]

Performed, so why spend time on it?

[Lucy Kaplan]

Totally. And he just has a really different approach that I think carries him through. And he not only keeps thinking about it and composing opera, but he keeps, like, imagining in really spectacular detail what it would look like. One of my favorite Archival items that I include in the book is this letter that he wrote at the end of his life to Eleanor Roosevelt, where he is proposing that she join the board of a foundation to support his operas. And he says, essentially, here's my plan for a tour of the Martyr. His first opera would be in the 1950s. And he writes in this letter, the theaters where it's going to be performed, the dates, potential singers who are going to be in the castall these details. And he knows we have to think that this is not going to happen. It's not as if he's actually supposing that the opera will be produced on this grand scale. But he doesn't let that stop his kind of imaginative vision for the piece and his idea of what he deserves as a composer of this work. And I find it really fascinating and really kind of beautiful that he's able to commit to this vision, in this dream, even though he knows that reality won't catch up essentially, to where he is.

[Kristin Turner]

And what about Nora Holt? Tell us about her.

[Lucy Kaplan]

Absolutely. Nora Holt is another really fascinating figure who is a key part of this book. She is really a fascinating person in a lot of different ways. There's been a kind of a flurry of interest in her in the last couple years among scholars and others, which I've been really happy to see. She is someone who, like Freeman, in some ways, grows up playing music, kind of educated in the Bach church in terms of her musical education, and then becomes really interested in music criticism. She's living in Chicago with her probably third husband at the time. She had a kind of wild social life beyond her work in music. And she starts writing opera and symphony criticism for the Chicago Defender in 1917. And her writing is just fascinating to my mind. She has a really kind of singular style that's hard to imitate, hard to describe. She's a really compelling and original writer who really takes you into the scene of all these performances that she hears. So she goes to the Chicago Symphony, to the Chicago Opera Company, tells you all about what it's like to sit in the audience, what it's like to hear the music, offers really smart and perceptive criticism on what she hears, and often describes not only the music, but the whole kind of social experience. So her criticism really gives us insight into who she is as a person and what it's like to be a black woman attending opera performances in Chicago at this time, as well as really perceptive insight into the music itself that she hears on stage. She's someone who continues to write criticism for a whole variety of publications later in her life, goes on to support a lot of singers in their careers later, maintains this really rich social life as well. And she's just someone who, of all the people in the book, she's the one I would probably like to meet the most because she just seems like she'd be such a fascinating person to spend time with, in addition to her really interesting critical perspective.

[Kristin Turner]

And then finally, Theodore Drury.

[Lucy Kaplan]

Yes, our favorite. So Theodore Drury is someone who I write about, as you said, kind of starting in the very first chapter of the book and going through as well. He is a Kentucky born singer and impresario who is kind of starts off as a baritone, as a performer in the New York area and goes on to found his own opera company, the Theoret Grand Opera Company in the year 1900. And this is an all black opera opera company most of the time. He often would end up engaging a few kind of white singers as needed. But it's kind of imagined, at least as a company comprised of and run by African American artists. And when I mention this to people, they're always kind of shocked that this is happening in 1900. It's so much earlier than we often imagine that kind of institution being built or being created. His company runs for several years, right then at the beginning of the 20th century, producing works like Carmen and Faustinaida, all these kind of canonical classics of the European repertoire. Then it kind of goes on a hiatus for a little bit and then it resurfaces in Philadelphia and a few other places a couple decades later. He's kind of still at it, still producing these works, still attempting to make that space for black artists to perform opera. And I think similar to Freeman in some ways, he's someone who is really persistent in staying committed to opera and what opera can be, regardless of all the structural challenges that he faces. So, you know, not having enough money for these performances, really struggling to find a cast of trained singers, finding a venue, finding funding. He struggles with all these things. And he still maintains a commitment to creating and making opera despite that, and to making a place where black artists can create opera together.

[Kristin Turner]

Right.

[Lucy Kaplan]

In a way that's really distinct from say, a single person like Marian Anderson entering an otherwise all white opera company. He's really creating these spaces for black artists to produce opera as a group, as a collective. And that's something that I think distinguishes his work from more conventional kind of first narratives that are so often about desegregating opera or creating spaces for interracial collaboration in opera that sometimes happened in his work, but it was not the primary objective of the work that he was doing.

[Kristin Turner]

Well, and also interracial collaboration, where a black person was in charge and is hiring white folks to come in, not the other way around, which is the vast majority of these interracial collaborations that you talk about. You know, Marian Anderson is going to the Met, Katarina Yarbo is going to this enormous production of Aida. You know, it's not. It's not the other way around. So I think that's also, as you say in the book, an important distinction as well. You don't really address this in the book, which I think is interesting, but I was thinking about it, and that is that the nature of segregation changes over the course of 1893 to the 1950s. And you also notice that it various times, it seems like the nature of maybe some of the priorities or some of the trends in black opera change. And I'm wondering, how do you see that interaction between what's going on with the story that you're telling and then what's really happening in the larger sort of ecosystem of segregation?

[Lucy Kaplan]

Yeah, it's a really interesting question because there is so much change in this period as we go from kind of the start of the Jim Crow era in the 1890s, this kind of post reconstruction moment, all the way up to the early years of the long civil rights movement. So it's a period of, in some ways, stagnation, because there's not a lot of change in formal law or kind of legal remedies to segregation, but kind of more socially a period of immense change. And, you know, I think that that broader climate shapes what operatic artists are able to do, and it also shapes what goals they choose to pursue. So, for instance, in this kind of very early period where folks like Rui and Freeman are starting their careers, this is the same moment that's often called the nadir of race relations in America. It's a moment of immense violence against black Americans. It's a moment where Jim Crow laws are being instituted and the KKK is rising to power. So it's a really kind of perilous moment for black people and artists included within that category. Right. So. So I think that what operatic artists are trying to do at that time is often about creating autonomous spaces for making opera and making art kind of on their own terms. And we see that in something like Freeman's early productions, where he recruits a cast of black artists to perform his very first operas, things like Drury's productions, kind of these operatic activities that are taking place primarily within black communities and are not so much interested in pursuing desegregation as a goal. By the time we get to the end of the story in the 1950s, that process of desegregation seems much more politically possible. It's kind of on the table as a possibility. There have been countless political campaigns and kind of social activism working towards this goal. World War II kind of accelerates those processes. There's a real sense that the moment of formal legal desegregation is within reach and is getting closer, and operatic artists kind of change their work to reflect that often. So that's when Anderson's performance at the Met becomes kind of the subject of a campaign, with all these people really writing in to advocate for her performance, for the desegregation of the institution more generally. And in a way, it's kind of riding the political winds or kind of being strategic about what is newly possible. And I think that informs a lot of the more activist elements of this work. But I also think that it's work that is built on these earlier foundations. Right? So I try to really tell those stories as continuous rather than separate. And I mean the story of kind of artists creating their own autonomous kind of black operatic institutions and aiming towards desegregation. I don't think they're kind of separate activities, but kind of when they happen, is often determined by these broader political and social circumstances.

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[Kristin Turner]

Hi, I'm here to pick up my son Milo. There's no Milo here who picked up my son from school.

[Commercial Narrator]

Streaming on on Pico. I'm going to need the name of.

[Lucy Kaplan]

Everyone that could have a connection. You don't understand.

[Commercial Narrator]

It was just the five of us. So this was all planned.

[Lucy Kaplan]

What are you going to do? I will do whatever it takes to get my son back. I honestly didn't see this coming.

[Commercial Narrator]

These nice people killing each other.

[Lucy Kaplan]

All her fault.

[Kristin Turner]

A new series streaming now only on Peacock. So there are a number of times where you talk about particular singers who sing roles that are usually reserved for black singers today. Like roles in Aida, Otello, Carmen. Right. And they are important. Like the integration of operatic performance is a big deal. But rather than just talking about, let's say, Marian Anderson, as you said, you talk about how that happened. So we just don't have time to go through all of them. But I would love it if you would pick maybe not Anderson because her story is more well known, but someone like Katy Rainey Yarborough or one of those other singers. Like, can you tell us a little bit? Or Catherine Williams with the New York City Opera, sort of thinking about, tell us the story of the networks that had to be present, that had to be part of the picture for this first to happen. Which could be turned into a story of the triumph of one person, but is really the work of a long standing, institutional. I don't know, not campaign maybe, but a series of moves that eventually culminate in someone being able to be picked by someone like the New York Opera, City Opera to sing with them. Totally.

[Lucy Kaplan]

Yeah. I can definitely stick on that example of Camilla Williams and the New York City Opera because I think it's a great way to kind of get at some of these themes. So Williams becomes the first black woman to sing with New York City Opera and really with any kind of major, major American opera company in the mid-1940s. And she approaches this, I think, in a really fascinating way. So she is a singer who is from Virginia, trained at HBCUs. Really part of this world of black classical music performance that is centered at historically black colleges and universities. Something as kind of a side note that I wish I'd had more time to get into in the books. It's such a fascinating kind of underground, understudied aspect of those institutions history. And that's really where Williams learns opera and kind of learns this music, becomes trained as a singer. And when she gets the call, gets the contract from New York City Opera, she is really cognizant of how important that training was to her and really makes an effort to emphasize that in the press coverage about her. So what I found when I went to read reviews and press around her performance in Madame Butterfly with that company is that she was constantly citing other people who shaped her training, shaped her career. That could be someone like the singer Cleota Collins, who was a soprano, who taught Williams when she was a student, who had had this kind of earlier career within mostly black operatic spaces, never really became part of the opera mainstream, but was this really fantastic singer. And William says, you know, I want people to remember Ms. Collins, my teacher, as someone who's important. Nora Holt, our old friends, also comes to visit Williams backstage before in one of her performances and writes all about it as well. And Holt really plays a role too, in kind of telling these stories and saying, here's this person who is doing this great work, is getting all this well deserved celebration. But she's been singing opera for a long time. She's part of this broader community. She grew up singing opera, performing opera with other kind of black artists. There's one really beautiful image, I think, where she, Williams says that one of the first times she got to know Madame Butterfly, which is the opera she performs in New York, was studying the score on the porch with another singer. And I'm forgetting the singer's name right now, but another person who's kind of part of this network of singers at HBCUs who are doing this work. And I love that image of them just kind of sitting on the porch looking at the score in a way that's really different from this narrative of Williams herself being on stage in New York City at this big time opera house. It gives us a real sense of all the smaller, kind of more intimate, personal backstage moments that went into making a performance like this possible. And, you know, I think that provides kind of a concrete example of what I was trying to get at earlier when I said that these stories aren't separate, right? These stories of kind of desegregation and of this larger countercultural, black operatic sphere that had been in existence for decades and decades. They're often really intimately tied in ways that I think help us understand both of them much more, much more fully.

[Kristin Turner]

Yeah, I think knowing that, you know, at the time, the white press would have said something like, oh, Williams is this sort of flash in the pan. She's the only one. We didn't know there were, you know, black opera singers. And yet underneath that, I guess you call it, you know, that pond, right, Is that, you know, she's on the top, but then all these other people are supporting her. There's this long history, goes all the way back to Jewelry and even before. And I, I also noticed in the black press they try to bring that up, but that's really absent, I think, from, from how it's received in kind of the dominant spaces, the white spaces of opera, where they are, you know, consistently seen as these kind of unicorns that have no, they have no people around them.

[Lucy Kaplan]

Right.

[Kristin Turner]

They have no colleagues, they have no teachers, they have no institutions. They are just somehow appear out of nowhere. And I think your book really shows how that's not true at all.

[Lucy Kaplan]

It's not true at all. And I think what you said about the press is really important because, you know, the one thing that struck me again and again was if you read about the exact same event in a white newspaper and kind of a black newspaper, you've got really different perspectives, right, on what happened, what the music sounded like, who was involved, what the cultural significance of the event was. And that was so telling for me time and time again as I was doing research for this book to just see how different those narratives could be. It was such an important reminder of the necessity of looking at sources by a wide variety of authors, certainly, and kind of looking at white authored and black authored sources about these singers, but also just at the importance of really looking as widely as possible to see all the different kind of details that I could find about a certain event and how to kind of piece together a story from all these very, very partial narratives that are so often shaped by not only kind of the filter of race, but also just by what a particular author would know or have access to. It's just so important to look at a multiplicity of sources for any of these topics.

[Kristin Turner]

Well, Lester Walton, another critic that you mentioned more than once I've read him say, problem with these white authors, they don't know anything. They're so ignorant. He would talk about that over and over. You know, he would get very frustrated that, that, you know, he would be constantly having to talk about in his, in his columns about all the things white people didn't know that was causing problems for everybody else. So, yeah, for sure. I don't want to leave this interview. We are coming to the end of it, unfortunately, and there's so many cool things that we haven't gotten a chance to talk about. But I really think we must talk about TomTom since you said at the beginning that that was sort of the germ of the original seed of this much larger project. So tell us about TomTom and Shirley Graham.

[Lucy Kaplan]

Yeah, so as I said at the beginning, this is where it all started and it is just a marvelous work, I think. Tom Tom. It's a totally fantastic and fascinating piece. Shirley Graham is a. Well, she's really everything. She's a composer, activist, writer, politician, and eventually she becomes the wife of W.E.B. du Bois, although I don't like to start with that fact because I think it's not the most interesting thing about her. Although it's obviously does become very important to her life and legacy. But long before that, she is studying at Oberlin College in Ohio and she gets invited, commissioned to write an opera for a company called the Cleveland Stadium Opera Company that as the name implies, performs opera in a big baseball stadium right by Lake Erie. And she decides to kind of resurrect a piece play that she'd been writing called Tom Tom. The subtitle is An Epic of Music in the Negro. So she's writing this really truly epic piece that is attempting to describe African diasporic history, starting in kind of pre modern West Africa, going all the way up to the 1930s when she's writing, going from place to place, scene to scene, telling that story through opera. So to do that, you might ask, like, how do you compress that into one opera? That's a lot of material. She does it in kind of a three act structure. The first act is set in West Africa and it has these kind of archetypal characters called the boy, the girl, the mother and the voodoo man who are there. And they are confronting the presence of slave traders in their village. And then in Act 2, we are all of a sudden in the US south at the end of the civil war on a plantation. And it's this kind of moment of emancipation. We see these same archetypal characters show up at that time. And act three, we are moving to Harlem in the 1920s again, these same characters. And they're debating at this time whether to stay in the US or go back to Africa in a pretty clearly Marcus Barbie inspired movement. And I won't spoil it too much, but like many operas, it ends with a big tragedy and a lot of bad things. A lot of bad things happen. So musically, Graham pulls on basically everything she could to tell this story. She had a really multifaceted musical background herself and she pulls on that almost like an archivist or curator would. In this composition, the first act is scored only for percussion. It involves mostly West African music that she learned from meeting kind of West African students, from her father and brother who worked as missionaries in Liberia. From her readings and early ethnomusicology. About West African music. Those are kind of where she gets this information. The second act, we hear a lot of arrangements of spirituals, but we also hear a lot of music that I think she learned in her classes at Oberlin. Kind of more like Verdi, Rossini inspired, kind of traditional operatic work. And in the third act, the one that's set in Harlem, we heard a lot of kind of early jazz, kind of cabaret music style, kind of popular song of the day coming into the score as well. So it's this amazingly ambitious piece, musically, dramatically, um, that was actually produced at scale. It was produced in the stadium in Cleveland for audiences of tens of thousands of people in July of 1932. It was on the radio, big success, and then it was never performed again. So it has this kind of big rise and then really precipitous fall right afterwards. And Graham's archive provided a lot of insight into why that happened. And that's kind of part of the story that I tell in the book. Not only what the opera was about, but also how it was produced and then why it kind of eventually left the stage and fell kind of into the archive.

[Kristin Turner]

Well, I think that so many of these examples, I think you have the best title of any book. And. Because the Dreaming thing really works, because that opera in itself is this, like this huge dream. And then she's never, just as Freeman can never really get these operas, you know, get his operas out, just as Theodore Drury couldn't have an opera company that, you know, gave operas every year. You know, all of these things, they're always dreaming, imagining what the future is going to be. And I think, you know, she always wanted to get back to that work as you relate and do some revisions. She wanted to go to Africa to work on it. She wanted to find other ways to perform it. And she just. She just kept dreaming about it, but she was never able to really convert that. And. But that doesn't mean that what she was doing and the afterlife of that opera in the archive isn't important. And I think that's so much of what your book is about, is reminding us that one performance doesn't. Just because something has one performance, or just because not every opera's performed, or just because people never become famous and they never get to sing in the mat, doesn't negate what they're doing as still being meaningful.

[Lucy Kaplan]

Yeah, I think still being meaningful and still being historically important, too. Right. I think there's, like, we all have a tendency as scholars to kind of prioritize people where we can really trace their impact or how they kind of shaped the next generation, or kind of what they did that led very clearly and obviously to further developments. That's kind of the most obvious historical path to trace. But I think part of what I'm maybe implicitly arguing in this book is that even when that story becomes where it's harder to see how these figures kind of influenced the longer trajectory of American opera, first of all, it doesn't mean that they didn't do it. I think they absolutely did, just in ways that we have to look a little harder to see. But also that their work is worth honoring and remembering in its own right, kind of regardless of what impact it had on future generations, that it is something that's really worth studying and thinking about in and of itself.

[Kristin Turner]

So, as you said at the beginning, this is a project you've been working on really, in some ways since you were an undergraduate, and now you are a professor at a school and everything. So that's a long, long time that you've been working on this. So now that this book is out, what have you turned your attention to?

[Lucy Kaplan]

Yeah, a whole bunch of things, I would say. There are two main things I'm working on at the moment. One is, I guess I just can't get away from TomTom, ever, because I'm working with a wonderful team of collaborators on preparing a critical edition of TomTom, which we're all super excited about. The prospect of getting this work out in the world in a way that scholars and especially performers can actually take a look at it and maybe, you know, produce it. So hopefully some opera companies out there will be interested enough to finally bring this work back to the stage almost 100 years after it was first performed. So that's been really great to return to that piece with kind of a different perspective, thinking about it less as, like, a music historian per se, and more about thinking about preparing an addition of the score of her performers and scholars to use. The other thing that I'm working on still in the very early stages, is a project looking at the story of the blind audition. So the blind audition is essentially a strategy, I guess, where a performer performs music from behind a screen so that the people listening, often judges or adjudicators of some kind, don't know anything about the person's identity. They just hear the sound. It's often tied to American orchestras in the 50s and 60s as a technique that was used to increase gender parody in these orchestras. But I'm looking at a much longer, more complex kind of history of this going all the way back to black performers in the 19th century who would use a similar strategy and all the way up to the present where we have weird reality shows where people perform like the Voice or something, the masked Singer, where people perform without revealing their identity. So it's kind of a fun American studies cultural history project in some ways, but I think also has these pretty deep roots in musicology and also has, I think, interesting things to say to our current moment of debates and around merit and equity and diversity and inclusion. So I'm hoping that this work will help eliminate some of those ideas as well.

[Kristin Turner]

Well, both those projects are amazing and I love that they are, you know, one rooted in this long term interest in, in TomTom and Shirley Graham and another sort of moving into another aspect of musical performance and also ways of creating equity that may or may not work. So I'm interested to see how all that works in the future. So thank you so much for joining me, Lucy. My name is Kristin Turner and this is New Books and Music, a podcast of the New Books Network. And I've been talking to Lucy Kaplan, author of Dreaming in How Black Artists Transformed American Opera, published by Harvard University Press in 2025.

[Lucy Kaplan]

Thanks so much for having me.

[Kristin Turner]

Of course.