The history of Black opera is a history of exceptions and exceptionalism. From the 1868 premiere of Thomas Douglass’s Virginia’s Ball – the first known opera by an African American composer – to Caterina Jarboro – who in 1933 became the first African American woman to perform with a major US opera company – and Marian Anderson – the first African American to sing a leading role at the Met in 1955 – even the 2021 Met premiere of Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones – the first opera by a Black composer ever to be performed by the company – our understanding is shaped by the 1%.

So argues Lucy Caplan in Dreaming In Ensembles, a book that examines this same history from a different perspective. Instead of looking up at the spot-lit stage she turns her gaze outwards into the wings and backstage, out into the auditorium and further, into the streets and basements, studios and apartments beyond.

We meet the stars, novelties and exceptions in Caplan’s detailed study of Black opera from the postbellum 1890s through to the 1950s and the civil rights movement, but the focus is on all that lies behind and around them, the 'everyday and ephemeral making of opera': the singers who never managed to cross those exalted thresholds, the unperformed composers, the uncredited 'supers' who supplied opera’s crowd scenes, operatic clubs and societies, pedagogues, critics, archivists, amateurs and audiences whose groundswell helped prepare and propel those fortunate few into the limelight, engaging with opera in 'kaleidoscopically varied ways'.

In 1968, musicologist Eileen Southern was asked an infamous question.'Besides jazz,' her colleague enquired, 'what is there?' Southern went on to devise a pioneering course on Black music by way of an answer, but over half a century on and the same doubt still hangs in the air. 'A presumption of absence haunts the study of Black opera’s history,' argues Caplan.

But that presumption is no match for meticulous archival research – research that not only documents forgotten individuals and events, but also teaches us to read the absences and silences that exist in a new way. Much of the most interesting history here is unfulfilled, subjunctive. Sketches, scores and plans for Grand Operas never produced, auditions for opportunities that never materialised, training for careers that remained impossible.

At risk of replicating precisely those patterns Caplan wants to avoid, there are inevitably individuals that leap out. Harry Lawrence Freeman, the pioneering (and prolific) early 20^th-century composer – 'a maximalist artist with a sweeping vision of opera’s role within Black cultural production' – whose creative imagination couldn’t be limited by financial and racial restrictions; Sylvester Russell, the self-fashioned 'elite male intellectual' whose trenchant criticism demanded more of Black opera in its formative decades; Edward Johnson ('Black Carl'), the Met’s door attendant and head carriage manager for more than 25 years, a 'human land-mark' who turned labour into a passionate private act of listening and education; Mary Cardwell Dawson, founder of the National Negro Opera Company, deploying Black opera as both political and social tool for over two decades.

Caplan’s alternative history is clearly documented, but her conclusions are more ambiguous. Black opera becomes, in her thesis, a powerful countercultural site, but that counterculture takes a variety of forms – shifting, slippery, contradictory. An African American soprano singing Aida can be, at once, both an act of assimilation into the operatic mainstream, chasing respectability and elite status, and one of 'radical critique'. To participate in opera could be 'a way to cross the sonic, cultural and legal colour line and claim full artistic citizenship', or a way to reinforce racial stereotypes.

The narrative, unexpectedly, is also far from straightforward. Black opera’s history isn’t one of progress from exclusion to inclusion, marginality to centrality. Caplan demonstrates persuasively the challenges as well as the advantages that emerge from desegregation, an act that risked cutting the legs out from under Black-only institutions and companies without offering a real alternative within mainstream operatic spaces.

Milestones like Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess represented progress of a kind – new visibility and centrality for African American performers – but also reinforced difference, ghettoising Black singers as Broadway entertainers rather than classical artists, spectacularising their race and perpetuating unhelpful racial assumptions. As James Baldwin wrote of the work’s white audiences: 'It assuages their guilt about Negroes, and it attacks none of their fantasies.'

Caplan’s prose is densely and undigestedly academic; her thesis has barely wiped the chalk-dust off its hands before going to press. It’s a shame, because both content and argument demand a general readership, a broader awareness of this vast and persistent history. She also offers a practical philosophy for our opera-going today, as many of these erased operas finally make it to the stage. It’s not enough just to produce them, even to attend them, she contends. To do it properly is to understand and acknowledge the circumstances of their original creation, the ambiguity of their status, the complexity of their political as well as personal context.

Dreaming in Ensemble is out now on Harvard University Press. hup.harvard.edu