As one of the earliest genres of music to emerge from the United States, spirituals were once tools for communication and comfort for Black people enslaved in the South. They could offer messages of strength and unwavering faith, or be a balm for moments of sorrow.
While the origins of particular spirituals can be difficult to pin down, their rise in popularity isn’t. In 1871, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a student ensemble from the historically Black Fisk University, embarked on their first tour of the United States. Offering an example of Black artistry that differed from the popular minstrel shows – which included white performers in blackface – the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ acclaimed performances and recordings took spirituals to larger audiences, propelling them to new heights of popularity.
Now, 150 years later, over 40 spirituals will be brought to the operatic stage in the world premiere of Jubilee, created and directed by the internationally acclaimed director, playwright, and librettist Tazewell Thompson. Throughout his multifaceted career, Thompson has premiered works with major theaters and opera houses around the world. He has acquired over 150 directing credits, including his EMMY-nominated direction and production of Porgy and Bess Live from Lincoln Center.
Running October 12-26 at Seattle Opera, Jubilee chronicles the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ first tours, which helped raise money for newly emancipated Black Americans. Thompson weaves both well-known and more obscure spirituals through the new production, which features orchestrations by Michael Ellis Ingram and vocal arrangements by Dianne Adams McDowell. The opera’s focus on the early years of the Fisk Jubilee Singers offers a unique opportunity to delve into the personal histories of those who built one of the most influential musical ensembles in the country.
Tazewell Thompson, Aundi Marie Moore, Lisa Arrindell, Tyrone Chambers II, Hannah Jones, Martin Luther Clark, Ibidunni Ojikutu, Martin Bakari, and Natalie Lewis in staging rehearsal for “Jubilee” — Photo by Sunny Martini
Your a cappella musical, Jubilee: Fisk Jubilee Singers, premiered at Arena Stage in 2019. What were the major differences in your approach to that production and this new opera?
First, it was Christina Scheppelmann of Seattle Opera. After the premiere at Arena Stage, where Jubilee, the a cappella musical, played to five solid extended weeks of SRO attendance, I contacted over a dozen opera companies where I had a history, including: New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Atlanta, Detroit, Montreal, Amsterdam, London, Cape Town, Tokyo.
I decided I wanted to take advantage of the new infusion of great Broadway musicals that opera companies are now including in their seasons. The top contenders: West Side Story, The Sound of Music, South Pacific, Man of La Mancha, Fiddler on the Roof, A Little Night Music, My Fair Lady, Rent, Sweeney Todd, The Music Man. I submitted and pitched my musical, Jubilee. Christina Scheppelmann wanted to produce Jubilee, and immediately responded: “No, not as a musical. Come to Seattle Opera with your work as an opera, with new orchestrations and with forty-eight musicians in our pit and with outstanding singers.”
I began to edit out a great, great deal of the spoken words, monologues and dialogue. So much of the storytelling is told through the selection of over forty spirituals, the heart and soul of Jubilee, that musically provides us the emotional world of the Jubilee singers: faith, hope, dreams, grief, loss, pain, anguish, struggle, determination, pride, renewal, resilience, joy, celebration, love, and community.
The Original Fisk Jubilee Singers: Minnie Tate, Greene Evans, Isaac P. Dickerson, Jennie Jackson, Maggie Porter, Ella Sheppard, Thomas Rutling, Benjamin Holmes, and Eliza Walker — Courtesy of Fisk University
The spoken words, I discovered, while important to me, and while providing the scaffold, blueprint and spine of Jubilee, helping to introduce us closer to the complex personal lives of the outrageously courageous and explosively talented Fisk Jubilee Singers; I realized the text was doing double duty in the now-opera form. I also knew I needed, regarding the text, to cut back, edit and capsulize, to allow the new orchestral content the room to overwhelmingly share center stage and play an immense central role in the opera.
I knew that one performer was needed to be cast, an artist from the theater world, not an opera singer, to take the heavy load of playing a myriad of characters, young and old, male and female, Black and White—including Queen Victoria, who was engaged, entertained and captivated by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, not just enraptured by their singing skills, but by their various skin-tone colors. Queen Victoria commissioned a floor-to-ceiling painting to celebrate the commanding performance of the singers and to showcase the Black and Brown flesh palette of the Jubilee Singers. The painting was eventually bequeathed to Fisk University and continues to hang in Jubilee Hall.
How do you envision the medium of opera supporting the story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers and the legacy of spirituals as a genre?
Jubilee was always meant to be an opera. Opera is where Jubilee belongs. The stuff of opera: the assault and explosiveness to the senses from astounding music and the fun challenge of making a scenic theatrical world and adding real dimension to sometimes outsized human beings. The original outrageously courageous Fisk Jubilee Singers are almost mythological unreal heroic figures in their determined quest to preserve their school against all impossible odds.
The spirituals remain extremely recognizable. What’s added are the spectacular soaring voices of opera singers, taking the form of spirituals to an exciting dimension. The opera will send the spirituals soaring throughout the house. The Jubilee Singers toured the world raising funds to save their school—Fisk University. Now the voices will tour into all the senses of those in attendance.
Of the 40+ spirituals featured in Jubilee, which one speaks to you the most, and why?
“Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child.” At a very early age I was taken from my parents, who were deemed unfit to raise children. I was made a ward of the state and spent 8 years in a convent run by the Dominican Order of nuns. It was in that convent where I was first introduced to spirituals, by my music teacher, Sister Benvenuta, who played for me new records she acquired of great Black artists: Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson, Roland Hayes, Leontyne Price, Mahalia Jackson.
Although loved and protected, and completely taken of care of, I yearned for my birth mother. “Sometimes I feel like motherless child; Sometimes I feel like a motherless child; Sometimes I feel like a motherless child; A long way from home.”
Tazewell Thompson — Photo by Jeffrey Henson Scales
What do you find most challenging about creating a story from historical events?
No challenge at all. I love American history, in general; African American history, in particular. It’s a jumping off point for me. I create, not a documentary, but my own story from the stimulation of real historical events. I especially feel obligated to share the non-fiction stories of Black American characters. They must continue to be relevant and represented. Without their inclusion only half the history of our country is told.
In Jubilee, that history is also the history of the spiritual. The earliest songs sung in America are those songs sung by slaves — as early as the beginning of the 17th century — known as field songs, folk hymns, cabin songs, secret songs, plantation melodies, hand-me-down songs, shouts, spirituals, or jubilees. The men and women who sang and composed them expressed their faith, pain, anguish, hope, loss, love, and joy through these songs as they struggled to survive from day to day — even as they helped shape and build this country and planted the roots of gospel, blues, jazz, R&B, and hip-hop. Spirituals are still sung all over the world, in dozens of languages, in churches, concert halls and opera houses.
As someone who has championed important Black stories, how has the reception of these underrepresented perspectives changed throughout your career?
I’m so fortunate to work in both opera and theater, for more than 50 years. I have watched, witnessed and participated, in the lively arts; the change is astoundingly unbelievable everywhere: movies, television, music, dance, leaders of performing arts organizations and conservatories. More than promising. Work still needs to be done. Onward!
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