NPR.org: Unearthed In A Library, 'Voodoo' Opera Rises Again

 Harry Lawrence Freeman, the Harlem Renaissance composer of the opera Voodoo.

H. Lawrence Freeman Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University

National Public Radio

Unearthed In A Library, 'Voodoo' Opera Rises Again

June 24, 2015 4:28 PM ET

Jeff Lunden

About eight years ago, as a grad student, Annie Holt was working in Columbia University's Rare Books and Manuscripts Library when she was assigned to catalogue the work of Harry Lawrence Freeman, a largely forgotten Harlem-based composer from the early 20th century.

"It was fabulous!" she says. "I had the honor of going through all the cardboard boxes that came right from his family's house and unearthing everything, and I, for myself, discovered how amazing his story was and how amazing his music is."

 

Voodoo in rehearsal.

Jeff Lunden for NPR

Since that experience, Holt has been trying to get one of Freeman's operas produced. Now, as the artistic director of Morningside Opera, she has collaborated with Harlem Opera Theater and the Harlem Chamber Players to present two concert performances of Freeman's 1928 opera, Voodoo.

Holt says Freeman wrote both the music and libretto for Voodoo. He set the opera on a Louisiana plantation in the Reconstruction period, a choice Holt says attracted her to the work from a historical perspective.

"For me, that was a really interesting topic," she says, "especially looking at Freeman's historical moment during the Harlem Renaissance and the idea of African-Americans reflecting upon racial identity in the 75 years after the Civil War."

Freeman was born in Cleveland, Ohio shortly after the Civil War. He began to write operas when, at the age of 18, he heard German composer Richard Wagner's Tannhauser. Freeman moved to Harlem in 1908, established both a music school and the Negro Grand Opera Company, and was a friend and colleague of Scott Joplin. Freeman wrote more than 20 operas in his lifetime

.

 

Voodoo in rehearsal.

Jeff Lunden for NPR

Harlem Opera Theater's artistic director, Gregory Hopkins, says while he hears Wagner's influence in Freeman's music, he hears a lot of other influences, too.

"Certainly you hear the colloquial music of the time — there's a cakewalk, there's a buck dance, there's even a voodoo dance," Hopkins says. "And you hear the interpolation of spirituals, which were so important to development of the entire artistic tapestry of the Renaissance."

The use of spirituals in the context of Voodoo is very much plot-driven. The story, which is a classic love triangle between two women and one man, hinges on a spurned lover's turning her back on her faith to use the magical powers of voodoo. She conjures a giant python and a magic tree and even kills her rival — who is then revived, miraculously, by holy water, says stage director Melissa Crespo.