Jubilee at Seattle Opera / Photo: Sunny Martini

‘The most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas’ is how W E B Du Bois characterised the African American spiritual – and his encomium to the genre finds moving validation in Tazewell Thompson’s new opera Jubilee. The world premiere production by Seattle Opera additionally crowns the legacy of former general director Christina Scheppelmann, who extended the company’s commitment to contemporary opera and closer community engagement. (She leaves to take on the reins at La Monnaie/De Munt in Brussels at the beginning of 2025.)

Celebrating both the beauty and the balm that spirituals communicate, Jubilee uses their remarkable malleability to tell the story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a vocal troupe that inspired widespread appreciation of this rich but misunderstood musical heritage. Thompson’s opera honours the courage and resilience of the Singers, who formed an ensemble at the recently founded Fisk University – a leading historically Black institution of higher learning in Nashville – in the years immediately following the US Civil War.

The opera dramatises the emergence of the ‘Jubes’ as they set out to raise funds for the financially precarious school by performing concerts. Against all odds, they achieve enormous success through tours that take them first around the US and later to Europe. Their programmes defy minstrelsy-based stereotypes and instead showcase the power and dignity of the spirituals that many of these singers learned growing up as enslaved persons.

Despite the ever-present backdrop of racism – one scene depicts a harrowing confrontation with a white mob that beats them at a railway depot – they not only help ensure the future of Fisk University but become international ambassadors, promulgating the artistic value of spirituals.

Aundi Marie Moore (Maggie Porter) in Jubilee at Seattle Opera / Photo: Sunny Martini

Thompson, an acclaimed director and writer, initially developed this material as a musical play, with dialogue weaving in and out of an array of spirituals being sung a cappella. That version premiered at Arena Stage in Washington, DC, in 2019. But Thompson had long sensed the operatic dimension both of the Jubilee Singers story and of the original spirituals and was commissioned by Scheppelmann to develop Jubilee into a full-scale opera in two acts.

The result is a curious case in which the opera’s composer per se is an anonymous collective. A total of 35 traditional spirituals comprise the basic score. Vocal arranger Dianne Adams McDowell used Thompson’s dramatic cues to determine the particular harmonic colourations of her new settings, which dazzle with their variety and dramatic aptness.

Though he’s listed merely as ‘orchestrator’, Michael Ellis Ingram should get more credit for enhancing the atmosphere and emotional resonance of the source material: using a standard opera orchestra, he also supplies an overture and connective musical tissue as underscoring for spoken dialogue. With some more tightening – above all, a more-optimal balance of proportions between spoken and sung material – Thompson’s labour of love seems likely to travel well.

Donald Eastman’s bare-bones set is easily transformed into varying locations through Shawn Duan’s projections and Robert Wierzel’s lighting, while Harry Nadal’s wonderfully detailed costumes anchor the sense of period.

As you would expect, Jubilee is a quintessentially ensemble opera, for which Thompson assembled an excellent cast of 13 singers, most of them making their Seattle Opera debuts. The traveling ensemble is itself the protagonist, singing spirituals at times as a diegetic part of the action, at others as an allegorical response to a moment of reflection or crisis situation, not unlike a Greek chorus – and, in a memorable sequence involving ‘Wade in the Water’, in a way reminiscent of the layered meanings of spirituals, which could be used as coded messages against the oppressing enslavers.

Some individual parts stand out as well. Actress and soprano Lisa Arrindell morphed convincingly from Ella Sheppard, who played a leadership role with the Jubilee Singers, into various characters – including Queen Victoria (who receives the group with a long, eccentric spoken monologue). Soprano Aundi Marie Moore balanced vocal beauty and comic chutzpah as the diva-ish Maggie Porter. As Edmund Watkins – all of the characters are historical personages – Darren Drone’s baritone boomed with vitality.

Conductor Kellen Gray shaped a skilful whole from the interplay of a cappella singing, underscored dialogue and fully accompanied choruses. 
 

To October 26 seattleopera.org