The Time of Our Singing opera review – a powerful and disquieting debut work
The Time of Our Singing, which premiered at La Monnaie/De Munt, Brussels, on 24 September, tells a story of turbulent US race relations starting from the moment fabled contralto Marian Anderson, an African American, sang in a concert in front of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939. “A” story. This is not intended to be a comprehensive historical documentary. It is illustrative.
The action unfolds against the Watts Riots of 1965 to the Los Angeles turmoil in 1992. Anderson had been banned on the grounds of race from singing at Washington’s Century Hall. President Franklin Roosevelt and his feisty wife Eleanor helped arrange the Lincoln Memorial concert. The Washington Mall was packed, horizon to horizon.
The opera’s libretto is inspired by Richard Power’s 2002 novel of the same name. Kris Defoort is a musical chameleon, a talented avant-garde jazz pianist who has written his first opera score blending classical style with pulsing jazz rhythms.
Occasionally clunky transition passages apart, the blend works powerfully. He has found his feet in the operatic medium on his first trip around the block.
Defoort writes intentionally sharp, mixed-genre music, mirroring the mixed-race Strom family and the dilemmas it faced, living through yet another of America’s turbulent eras of race relations; scarred by conflict on the one hand, but buoyed by the hope of healing by President Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Act of 1964, on the other.
The plot of The Time of Our Singing is the tragedy of race in America, told through the lives and choices of one family caught on the cusp of contrasting identities. Complicating the mix is the European naivety of David Strom, the pater familias, a German Jewish physicist on the run from Hitler’s Endlösung, (The Final Solution).
Arriving in America, he is immersed in a version of the very prejudice he thought he had left behind in Germany. He is innocent rather than naive.
He meets Delia Daley, an African American, at the Anderson concert, falls in love, and they marry, against the better judgement of Delia’s father, Dr William Daley. As a doctor in Philadelphia, he bears the burden of day-to-day experienced prejudice stoically. David Strom is an annoying challenger to his received views. Will this “mixed marriage” work?
Jonah, Ruth and Joseph are the children. Delia and David are determined to raise them beyond time, beyond identity, steeped in song. Music is the catalyst of their relationship, and it will evolve to be the shield with which they protect the family from an ignorant, prejudiced world.
This works in the privacy of a family home, blind to race and ruled by tolerance. But their happy bubble cannot be protected from the world forever. Conflict enters their lives when the children step outside the “safe house” their mother and father provide. They reflect that in increasingly bitter dialogues with their parents. They grow to believe that they are neither black nor white, persecuted for falling between conventional stools.
Each is affected differently. All question the significance of their mixed racial heritage in different ways. Even as Jonah becomes a successful young tenor, the opera arena remains fixated on his race.
Spurned in the US, he builds his career in Europe. Ruth turns her back on classical music and disappears, dedicating herself to activism and a new relationship with her Black Panther husband.
As the years pass, Joseph – the middle child, a pianist and our narrator – must battle not just to remain connected to his siblings but also to forge a future of his own. He starts out promoting his more talented brother but decides that his responsibility to his sister requires him to stay home, and he becomes a hard-working piano bar jockey.
Delia dies tragically in a house fire. Subsequently, when a suppressed report is found, it reveals that accelerants were involved, a racial attack against a mixed marriage. But, from which side of prejudice did the murder come? That is the vital question left hanging intentionally in the air. David Strom eventually dies of cancer just as Joshua triumphs on stage at La Scala, Milan, and Ruth is absent in San Francisco.
The work ends with the reconciliation of the children. By now, Ruth’s husband has been shot “resisting arrest” in a road traffic incident. She is teaching in a school she has founded for deprived children. Jonah, performing at the Los Angeles Opera house visits her school. Music reconciles the siblings, but Joseph is caught up in a riot, and fatally injured. His last act, lying onstage, is to sing into a telephone, “they can’t come after me”. Perhaps the only freedom from prejudice is to be found with his parents in the world beyond.
Narrated on a blank page, this opera sounds like a depressing morality tale, mirroring Black Lives Matter white superiority memes. In a pre-performance interview, conductor Kwamé Ryan made that read across. But that oversimplifies Defoort’s achievement. It is a subtle work, which reaches no firm conclusions. There are none to be reached, frankly.
The audience is immersed in the maelstrom of David and Delia’s good intentions and the contrarian outside forces determined to destroy their ideal – colour blindness. Defoort deploys a risky theatrical device. As Delia and David die, they transform into ghostly onstage presences, watching over their children and occasionally chipping in when their advice is needed.
Overdone, this beyond the grave intervention would have jumbled the narrative, but the alternately seated backstage or slow-moving characters add depth and dignity to the action. They remain a powerful presence.
In The Time of Our Singing, staging is simple. An empty set, apart from a series of tables which are moved by members of the cast, as needed to represent hearth and home, schoolroom, hotel, hospital bed for David. There is an ever-present upright piano – the music in their lives. On the rear stage, there is a screen on which is projected film, ranging through the Marion Anderson concert to events featuring racial conflict over the years. The screen is the outside world, the wedge driving this happy but disputatious family apart.
Defoort mixes conventional singing with directly delivered speech. It is not singspiel. The expression of thought is more direct. I think it is an effective device. The audience is sucked in, becomes more involved. He brings an important development to the operatic medium,
The concept is not totally original. Single voices speaking to the audience, with musical accompaniment, as distinct from set-piece arias, have been around since Baroque opera, evolving into the long recitatifs in Handel and Mozart’s works. However, no highlights disc of the recitatifs in Don Giovanni has ever been issued. For good reason. The music is necessarily formulaic to allow the voice to drive on a complex narrative comprehensibly and in short order.
Later genres stripped music from words completely to enforce the power of dialogue. Defoort comes closer to those. The forgotten medium of 19th century orchestral melodrama was based on directly spoken words with background music – more than incidental as in a play, but in sequence with the dialogue rather than in conjunction. Although symbiotically working with the timing of word delivery, both music and narrative stood on their own.
A variation on a theme. Gilbert and Sullivan were maestros of complex patter songs. Think of “I Am The Very Model of a Modern Major General” from The Pirates of Penzance, which Tom Lehrer would later bag for his 1960s “Elements” song. Sure, there was music, but it never got in the way of the machine gun delivered words.
If not singspiel, what is Defoort’s style? It is certainly distinctive, more a development of Schoenberg’s sprechgesang (spoken word) technique deployed to such effect in his 1912 Pierrot Lunaire. It has a great dramatic impact.
Where will this opera be staged next?
On Monday the Metropolitan Opera in New York reopened the Lincoln Center with Fire Shut Up In My Bones, by Terence Blanchard, a none too subtle hat tip to the current taking the knee mood in metropolitan New York.
The Time of Our Singing is a strong candidate for addition to the Met’s future repertoire. It defies the intolerance of tin-eared woke theorists. Fire is focused on the moving personal dilemma of an abused Louisiana African American, 20-year-old Charles Blow. It has a limited horizon.
The Time of Our Singing is painted on a more sweeping historical canvas. It brings deeper issues to the audience. Perhaps because it doesn’t kneel at today’s fashionable altar of white privilege critique will keep it confined to Europe.
That would be a loss. American audiences need to see this fine, disquieting debut work.