Dreaming in Ensemble: How Black Artists Transformed American Opera. By Lucy Caplan.

American opera historiography has developed prodigiously over the quarter century since Opera in America: A Cultural History by John Dizikes (1993) and Elise K. Kirk's American Opera (2001) appeared. Lucy Caplan's Dreaming in Ensemble: How Black Artists Transformed American Opera brings a welcome and fresh perspective to the catalogue, with its finely wrought discussion of African American contributions to the genre, extending across an exceptional range of participants who span decades from 19th-century visionaries through Marian Anderson's renowned 1955 Metropolitan Opera debut. Readers should not expect a panorama of high-profile celebrity careers shattering glass ceilings on legacy stages, as Caplan eschews as "spectacularized" such a framework of white-controlled institutions viewed along their extended paths towards desegregation. Rather, the "ensemble" of her evocative title is explored literally, centering the social collective as a prime locus of aspirational activity.Taking as its focus Black expressive culture well beyond headlining successes that achieved prominence as the long Civil Rights movement gathered force, Caplan delivers a narrative significant for its depth and engagement with influential actors across Black opera's "shadow history," both onstage and behind the scenes: from singers to stage supers and production laborers, operatic impresarios, music critics, creators of new works, and archivists bent on systematic preservation of these efforts, culminating with great artists like Anderson, who is repositioned at the apex of a trajectory enriched by its longue durée conceptual ideal.Caplan devises the unique formulation "Black opera counterculture" to encompass this community-driven artistic world, harking back to Howard Zinn's seminal A People's History of the United States (1980) and its rejection of "Great Wo-man" historiography as a distortion of events unfolding on the ground. Her resolute censure of pervasive racism is bracing and warranted. As well, conditional inclusion attempts on the part of white-majority institutions are identified as unacceptable compromises on the arduous journey to full equality. Of her own role, Caplan notes: "As a cultural practice, Black opera was never lost, and it does not need to be recovered or rediscovered" (5). The book's clearly defined structure follows traditionally chronological—yet avowedly non-teleological—lines, from the post-Reconstruction "Nadir" to the nascent Civil Rights period. Caplan reinscribes ger counterculture thesis at key points as a historical through-line, which effectively unites disparate figures within the "affective contours" of their shared experiential encounters on the cultural spectrum.Opening chapters excavate turn-of-the-century hidden figures in the light of their self-determinist models. These include visionary composer Harry Lawrence Freeman; impresario Theodore Drury, who helmed the first Black-majority company to present complete operatic performances; famed ragtime progenitor Scott Joplin, who aspired to operatic expression; and singer-pedagogue Azalia Hackley, an influential mentor. Caplan also charts the formation of essential infrastructure—the National Association of Negro Musicians (1919), Black Swan Records (1921)—that supported meaningful opportunities for Black artists on their own terms. Central chapters travel backstage and offstage to investigate Black labor and listening practices interwoven with Harlem Renaissance-era integration struggles, returning onstage to consider recreative possibilities inherent in the performance sphere with the touchstone status of Verdi's Aida. The final chapters analyze the uphill battle faced by Black composers to present authentic creative work amid white adaptations of racially static scenarios (Four Saints in Three Acts, Porgy and Bess), concluding with the Met's long overdue desegregation catalyzed by prolonged Black activism.Caplan strategically intersperses contemporaneous critical commentary from Sylvester Russell, Lucien White, Lester Walton, and especially Nora Holt, whose astute observations on infiltrating the interracial sphere are particularly apt. This facet is indebted to the author's plumbing of the digitized Black press, placing her among the vanguard generation of scholars transformed by its revelations. Her writing readily accesses the cultural historian's toolbox, lending an academic tone ("epistemological," "positionality," and the like; Mikhail Bakhtin referenced solely by surname) that is nonetheless balanced by extensive citations to recent work in the discipline that speaks with a progressive voice. Musical discussion as such remains lean, selectively augmented for events such as Shirley Graham Du Bois' panoramic Tom-Tom at the Cleveland Stadium Opera in 1932. Interpretive texts are located among comparatively rare extant primary source collections as well as within the musical scores themselves.Thematically, two countervailing forces remain largely unproblematized. The most visible is a frustrating lack of sustainability that assailed the vast majority of initiatives at the study's core. Even Drury was compelled to downsize—equally disastrous and heartbreakingly premature—despite garnering glittering audiences at his inception. The impediments to marshalling widespread grassroots support (such as that offered by the Met Opera Guild's nickel-and-dime national lifeline during the Great Depression) or sustained patronage on the part of the emerging Black wealth class (socially positioned to pursue the durable "Give, Get, or Go" mandate typical of American arts boards) on the counterculturists' behalf remain unclear.The book's ensemble premise is also at some pains to fit beneath its arc the high-profile "unicorns" who can vex historians by claiming an outsize share of the public imagination, as novel historiographical solutions may function plausibly in theory but not necessarily in practice. Shattering glass ceilings in the brutally unforgiving atmosphere confronted by Black solo artists required an admixture of training, talent, and tenacity fueled by vaulting ambition, a rare tincture. The ways and means of such individuals called to the field of battle often depart drastically from those of the collective in the dual realization of "private self-construction and public-minded group unity," despite retaining devotion to social goals in their own minds. Here, I missed a pedagogical view of the conservatories that contributed to the professional training of this cadre—Juilliard, for example, enrolled so strong a cohort of Black musicians during the Depression that its Student Club presented a 1934 public concert program, "The Negro in Music," that was recreated on its Lincoln Center campus in 2024.Significantly, the book's ambitious central aspirations—toward a paradigm shift that flips a timeworn script via Afrocentric repositioning of its focus as dynamically engaged subject rather than speculative object—are admirably achieved across expressive culture's broad (re)creative continuum. Dreaming in Ensemble responds to a longstanding need in musicology for such bold cross-disciplinary studies, drawing the performing arts closer to the humanities in this respect, and memorializing the tenacious participants in the process with honor.