“I do think it’s a great opera, and I do think at the time it was written, it was revolutionary because it allowed a huge cast to work in the field of opera.… For me to be the first African-American to have a piece done at the Met is a huge honor. “I have mixed emotions about it,” Blanchard responded when asked about Porgy and Bess. The Metropolitan Opera Guild publishes the premier magazine Opera News, which carried a cover story on Blanchard and the new opera in September. Johnson, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Anthony Davis, Leroy Jenkins, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton. Black composers who have written operas include Joseph Bologne, William Grant Still, Scott Joplin, H. The days of white performers portraying roles like Verdi’s Moor Otello in blackface are over. There are Black characters in a number of operas, and since Marian Anderson became the first Black singer in a featured role at the Met in 1955 (Ulrica in Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera), doors have opened for Black singers increasingly on a race-blind basis. That show premiered on Broadway in 1935 and has since found its way into many opera houses, offering generations of Black performers sophisticated and dignified roles granting them access to operatic stages. What about Porgy and Bess? Yes, an almost all-Black cast, but the composer and librettist, George and Ira Gershwin, were both white, and DuBose Heyward, author of the 1925 book Porgy, was also. Every character in the opera is Black, and all the performers in the large cast are also Black. 1970), a New York Times columnist, relating his difficult Louisiana childhood as a sensitive boy in a tough, macho world. 1961) to Fire Shut Up in My Bones is based on the best-selling memoir by Charles Blow (b. History was made at New York City’s world-famous Metropolitan Opera when it opened the season on September 27 with its first work written by a Black composer, jazz musician, and well-known scorer of many Spike Lee films, Terence Blanchard (b. Angel Blue, Walter Russell III, Latonia Moore, and Will Liverman in ‘Fire Shut Up in My Bones’ / Metropolitan Opera
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