In 1903, in his classic The Souls of Black Folk, the influential sociologist and activist W E B Du Bois famously declared that the African American spiritual ‘stands today not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side of the seas’. Du Bois singled out a group of performers for their role in bringing widespread attention to this legacy: ‘The Fisk Jubilee Singers sang the slave songs so deeply into the world’s heart that it can never wholly forget them again’.

The Fisk Jubilee Singers appear as the collective protagonist of Jubilee, an opera created by the prolific director and playwright Tazewell Thompson, which receives its world premiere at Seattle Opera in October. ‘Jubilee is my personal tribute to these young, outrageously courageous students,’ says Thompson. ‘The Fisk Jubilee Singers introduced and gave these songs to all Americans’ – songs that in turn form ‘the scaffold, spine, blueprint of all genres of American music that follow from the birth of the spirituals’.

Tazewell Thompson (photo: Jeffrey Henson Scales)

This intrepid vocal ensemble was formed in 1871 by students at Fisk University in Nashville to raise funds to save their school, then on the brink of bankruptcy. Fisk University had been recently founded to provide access to higher education in the aftermath of the Civil War, when newly emancipated African Americans were systemically excluded from white institutions.

Taking the name ‘Jubilee Singers’, the ensemble proved to be successful beyond all expectations. Fisk University, hitherto housed in a former Union Army barracks, was able to build its first permanent structure, the proudly towering Jubilee Hall, thanks to the fortune these impoverished student musicians earned through a series tours during the 1870s – the first domestic, the other two to Europe.

But the impact of the Fisk Jubilee Singers reverberated far beyond the Nashville campus. Although the original group disbanded in 1878, they left an indelible mark on music history by elevating the perception of spirituals so that they became recognised as a form of art music, according to the musicologist Naomi André. ‘Spirituals had been seen as coming out of the fields or out of the pains of slavery in the antebellum period’, says André, who recently completed a term as Seattle Opera’s inaugural scholar-in-residence. ‘Now they were shown to have great potential as songs performed not just off to the side but centre stage’.

Jubilee is the latest contribution to an ongoing renaissance in American opera that, in recent years, has been centering Black creativity. Tazewell Thompson made his Seattle Opera debut in 2022 directing Blue, for which he collaborated as librettist with composer Jeanine Tesori.

Jubilee, however, finds the multifaceted writer and theatre artist venturing into new territory, synthesising roles as librettist, director and creator of an opera that has no identifiable composer. Instead, Thompson has drawn on a treasury of anonymous source material and shaped it into a unified musical dramatic experience through his collaborations with Dianne Adams McDowell as arranger and Michael Ellis Ingram as orchestrator.

The New York-based Thompson, who had fallen in love with opera as a child, later became obsessed with the Fisk Jubilee Singers after seeing an in-depth documentary about the group. For years he amassed a substantial collection related to spirituals – old vinyl, CDs, books, variations in lyrics, sheet music (which the Jubilees made available at their concerts to help disseminate knowledge about these songs) – and eventually sensed that opera would be the ideal medium through which to dramatise their story.

In the meantime, Thompson received a commission to write a play for Arena Stage, the Washington, DC theatre company with which he has enjoyed a longstanding association, and developed his material into an a cappella musical titled Jubilee, which was staged in 2019. ‘But I’d always felt that this wants to be an opera’, says Thompson. Following the success of Blue, he found backing from Christina Scheppelmann, who just concluded her tenure as Seattle Opera’s general director.

For its operatic incarnation, Jubilee calls for a cast of a dozen first-rate singers and a 48-piece orchestra. Thompson also assigns a key role for an ‘outstanding actress’ who can transform into a variety of characters and also sing as part of the ensemble. She primarily plays the part of Ella Sheppard, a soprano who also conducted the Jubilees and accompanied them at the piano, but also depicts such characters as the ensemble’s tyrannical white music director and Queen Victoria after one of their most-celebrated performances, shown fixating on the variety of skin tones among the singers. In this way, Thompson was able to cut down the amount of spoken material and reassign much of it to one performer.

Taking on this challenge is the actress Lisa Arrindell, who also performed Ella Sheppard in the Arena Stage musical. To prepare for the role, she spent a day at Fisk University, where a student ambassador walked her through each building. ‘She told me the history in detail, how each brick was summoned into existence’, Arrindell recalls. ‘Those people were destitute financially. But spiritually they were giants’.

What were Thompson’s criteria for selecting the 42 spirituals at the heart of Jubilee? ‘There are over seven thousand spirituals. I knew of several hundred. I chose spirituals that fulfilled a specific situation of a scene, that could stand alone in moving the story forward while revealing the character’s needs and motivations and challenges. The songs are chosen for their built-in rhythms, tempi, call-and-response dynamics – always reminding the audience that they are watching a group ensemble’.

Dianne Adams McDowell, a longtime collaborator with Thompson, says that in deciding how to arrange the spirituals for the singers, ‘each and every setting had to be drawn directly from the dramatic moment which Tazewell so carefully curated. The songs had to flow within the libretto as if from one vision, and I strove to never lose sight of that’.

Michael Ellis Ingram, who is also active as a conductor based in Dresden, not only created orchestrations for McDowell’s vocal arrangements but composed an overture, interludes and underscoring by ‘incorporating the DNA of the relevant spiritual melodies’. Ingram’s orchestrations also create ambient effects, from ‘a bustling London street scene’ to a vicious white mob that attacks the Jubilees when they begin touring. ‘I took a dozen spiritual melodies and folded them on top of each other in jagged, atonal variations,’ he says with regard to the latter. ‘I did violence, as it were, to the musical material, just as the mob does violence to the characters onstage’.

‘The journey of the Fisk Jubilee Singers is very much the story of the birth of the Negro Spiritual’, says Thompson. His hope is that audiences attending Jubilee will experience ‘an expansion of the mind, a connection to the heart, and a respect for, and curiosity about, the kingdom of spirituals, and these young, courageous Black students who, through their campaign and mission to save Fisk University by performing spirituals, introduced them to the world’.

Jubilee by Tazewell Thompson is at Seattle Opera 12-26 October: seattleopera.org

This article originally appeared in the Autumn 2024 issue of Opera Now. Never miss an issue – subscribe today