H. Lawrence Freeman and the Harlem Renaissance

For Freeman, “Negro Grand Opera,” although conceived as distinctly American, should build on the global mytho-historic project he had already embarked upon. “We also claim the right,” Freeman writes, “to depict certain episodes of the other dark skinned races, such as the [American] Indian, Mexican, Mongolian and other oriental peoples, especially those who have made their abode in Africa from time immemorial, such as the Egyptian and the Arab.”6 Among Freeman’s operas were: Valdo (1895), a “Romantic Opera,” about a nineteenth century Mexican caballero (Freeman later named his son after the title character); The Octoroon (1904), a romance about “miscegenation” in the antebellum South based on Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s serialized novel of 1861-62; An African Kraal (1903), set in Kaffirland; The Tryst (1911) and The Prophecy (1911), both about American Indians; Athalia (1916), set in the South during the Civil War; Vendetta (1923), set in Mexico; and the Zululand “African Music Drama” tetralogy (ca. 1917-43) based on the novel Nada the Lily by H. Rider Haggard.

To produce his operas, which he continued composing even as they mostly went unperformed, Freeman began to work out plans as early as 1913 for a black opera company. Originally to be called the Colored Grand Opera Company of New York, the organization was eventually incorporated as the Negro Grand Opera Company in 1920. Seeking to sell stock in the Company at $100 a share, Freeman and his son Valdo printed flyers appealing to racial pride: “The Negro composer has not had this same opportunity for public presentation, the Caucasian not deeming it within his province to accept the Negro’s creative ability in the realms of higher art seriously . . . Hence the successful presentation of these works by a superb organization . . . who will forthwith establish irrefutable proof of the creative achievement of the great Races of the World.”7 Selling stock did not prove successful, and the Negro Grand Opera Company only managed to put on a few performances over the next decade, including Vendetta in 1923 at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem, and Voodoo in 1928 at the Palm Garden on 52nd street in the Broadway district.

Cut short owing to poor ticket sales, the 1928 run of Voodoo at the Palm Garden nevertheless received a significant amount of attention in both New York’s white and black presses. This may have been partially owing to advertisements that designated the work with the intriguing, au courant label: “Negro Grand Jazz Opera.” In fact, Freeman had completed Voodoo in 1913 or 1914, before the word “jazz” had entered mainstream use, and in his own writings he generally referred to the work simply as “grand opera.”8 Reviews were notably mixed. The predominant criticism leveled at Voodoo in the white press when it was premiered was that it exemplified an anxiety-ridden and even perverse attachment to a rapidly receding nineteenth-century European Romanticism. One reviewer complained, “The work is supposed to be a jazz-opera, so a jazz orchestra was selected. But ‘Voodoo’ is not jazz. It is attempt to produce under the guise of negro forms the old Italian form of opera. There are arias that ape Verdi and Donizetti. There is a plot that reaks [sic] of the tragedic school.”(9)

In 1933 Freeman convinced Alfredo Salmaggi to produce and conduct Voodoo at the Hippodrome Theater, with the excellent house orchestra, provided that Freeman himself raise $2,000 for scenery and costumes. Hoping to entice Salmaggi into staging his father’s work, Valdo Freeman bombastically estimated that a production of Voodoo would “attract most of the 350,000 Negroes in greater New York.” Despite a letter-writing campaign in support of Freeman carried out in the New York Amsterdam News, the necessary funds were never raised and the Hippodrome production never took place. But the 1930s also contained some notable successes for Freeman. In 1930 he was awarded the Harmon Prize. On 25 January 1934, three one-act operas by Freeman were presented at Salem M. E. Church in Harlem to a capacity audience of 2,500 people. Later that year, Freeman’s work reached an even larger audience when he was chosen to participate in “O, Sing a New Song,” a “musical extravaganza” presented at Chicago’s Soldier Field that was “conceived to display Negro Music in an Historical way.”(12)

The stakes and criteria for considering Freeman as modern were obviously different for Harlem society and the black press, for whom artistic innovation was almost inevitably bound up with questions of socio-economic progress and philosophies of racial uplift. Writing for the New York Amsterdam News, theater critic Obie McCollum incisively commented on a dialectic of conservatism and innovation in Freeman’s life and work. Upon stumbling into Freeman’s studio, the reviewer conceded, one might be forgiven for exclaiming: “‘Here is an old school music teacher who lives in the past.’” “Certainly,” McCollum continues, “the Elizabethan period paintings, the wall masks recalling the glory which was the Moor’s, the alabaster bust of Shakespeare, bard of Avon; the mullions and furniture in Doric, Louis IV and Ionic, and the paneled walls and ceiling in ebony, red, gold and pale green would suggest a leaning toward yesterday.” But to dwell on appearances, the author suggests, would be to entirely miss the deep strain of innovation in the work of this “pioneer composer.”10 Similar rhetoric could be found in reviews of Voodoo published in black newspapers. A headline subtitle in the Baltimore Afro-American, for example, reads “‘Voodoo,’ Race Opera Opens Up New Field—Lawrence Freeman’s Play Takes Pioneer Step in New Race Culture,” while an advance publicity blurb in the New York Amsterdam News was given the martial title, “The Negro Invades the Grand Opera Field.”(11)

In 1933 Freeman convinced Alfredo Salmaggi to produce and conduct Voodoo at the Hippodrome Theater, with the excellent house orchestra, provided that Freeman himself raise $2,000 for scenery and costumes. Hoping to entice Salmaggi into staging his father’s work, Valdo Freeman bombastically estimated that a production of Voodoo would “attract most of the 350,000 Negroes in greater New York.” Despite a letter-writing campaign in support of Freeman carried out in the New York Amsterdam News, the necessary funds were never raised and the Hippodrome production never took place. But the 1930s also contained some notable successes for Freeman. In 1930 he was awarded the Harmon Prize. On 25 January 1934, three one-act operas by Freeman were presented at Salem M. E. Church in Harlem to a capacity audience of 2,500 people. Later that year, Freeman’s work reached an even larger audience when he was chosen to participate in “O, Sing a New Song,” a “musical extravaganza” presented at Chicago’s Soldier Field that was “conceived to display Negro Music in an Historical way.”(12)

Despite a dearth of performances in his later years, Freeman seems never to have stopped imagining that his contributions to American opera would eventually achieve critical and popular acclaim. During the late 1940s he began to draw up plans for an organization to be called the Aframerican Opera Foundation, a kind of Bayreuth-in-America that would provide a platform for the performance of his works. The plan included the construction of an opera house to be built “on the outskirts of New York City, with a seating capacity of seven thousand people, and parking lot for two thousand automobiles.” Perhaps we are not quite there yet, but the conference and two sold-out performances of Voodoo at Columbia University’s Miller Theater in the summer of 2015—almost ninety years since it was last heard—is a pretty good start.