The main source today is from America's National Public Radio. Politically, it is normally left, and is no fan of Pres. Trump. But other stories can be quite informative. I urge all to follow the link to the story, aired Monday 3 January 2025. https://www.npr.org/2025/02/03/nx-s1-4868011/oldest-black-american-opera-premiere
Below are some of my comments on that story. I know little of opera, in New Orleans or anywhere. But the idea that NO was a center of opera in the US during the 19th century does raise the question of possible connections with other musical forms, especially with jazz, which was developing in New Orleans later in that century. My story, with amazement, is below:
National Public Radio aired this report about the New Orleans French Opera House. It is 6 minutes if you listen or the reading material contained in the link too. Some of tin the 20th century, he FPCs Free People of Color may have been free for generations. Unlike the CR Movement in much of the South, which was intertwined with black Protestant churches, the FPCs were generally light skinned, and Roman Catholics. And they had considerable influence in NO.
As an unofficial tour guide in 1963 with the instruction (AVOID ARRESTS), i took 4 foreigners to the Knights of Peter Claver Building, which housed the local NAACP. We entered their offices and they kindly agreed totalk to our group presenting a summary of its activities. I think Ernest Morial gave the talk (he would become the first black mayor of NO in the 1970s. While he was speaking, one of the young foreigners whispered to me,"Is he a Negro?" I was shocked by the question, and then I realized the NAACP attorney was much closet to my skin color than to the young man from
Ouagadougou. the capital of what was then called Upper Volta in West Africa. His skin was very black, and his was an innocent question. And the situation must have been an echo of when newly arrived Marcus Garvey went to the offices of the NAACP a century ago and saw only whites and W. E. B. Du Bois. Garvey went on to found an openly black nationalist organization. The point is that the black leadership in NO, was different from that in other parts of the South, lighter skin, better off financially, often well educated in Catholic schools, sometimes with French language heritage.. Bryant Gumble (formerly on Today on NBC) and his brother are descendants of FPCS.
There was opera in NO going back to the late 1700s, but the French Opera House, which opened just a year before the war, would become the social center for much of NO. At the same time, blacks were less welcome.. But opera was not the only musical for. There was also a German newspaper in NO, which may have also contributed to the brass bands. My friend John is a relation to Hahn, an editor of the German newspaper, and the only Republican Mayor of NO. If he served, it was around 1867.
Who were the other French speaking FPCs who may have left NO for a more successful careers in France? By the 1850s FPC womenin NO were not required to wear yellow stars, but a certain kind of headgear so everyone would know their race.
How did this contribute to jazz? Or did it? Jazz, the word akin to jizz, or the emission from the penis during sex, does seem to connect jazz to the cat houses in the French Quarter.
The composer of the opera, Edmund Dede. It is now being produced in full for the first time, though written over a century ago. There were other Louisianans who went to France to find a place for their arts. Later, most know Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, Claude McKay, Richard Wright and others including jaz musicians,but most of these were general Americans, not born with a French cultural tradition. But it does say something of the free spirit allowed in France.
In the 1950s Anne Braden wrote a book about segregation in the South THE WALL BETWEEN. And in the mid 50s, I began to cross the invisible wall between the races in NO, going to sit-in a history class at Dillard U. I knew the professor, a refugee from Hamburg, Georg Iggers, and he alternated between the Unitarian Church (where I met him) and a synagogue. In his class, I met a young woman and we chatted. Shirley Dede. Was she related to the composer? She subscribed to a Trotskyist newspaper, Workers World, and was active in the NAACP. We went to a few places together where we would not be arrested. I crossed the wall in NO long before I crossed the wall in Berlin. New Orleans is a most intersting city.
Hugh Murray
the link should get you to a tape on Opera in NO and beyond. Hugh
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