The Lost Opera

JOHN MAUCERI devotes a good part of his busy career to restor­ing lost music. The Amer­i­can con­duc­tor and schol­ar, who recent­ly served as the music advis­er for the Acad­e­my Award-nom­i­nat­ed Tár, uncov­ered and put back vital miss­ing pieces of Leonard Bernstein’s operetta Can­dide. He recon­struct­ed the over­ture to Ben-Hur, after MGM had inex­plic­a­bly thrown away the sheet music of that clas­sic film score, for a per­for­mance at the Hol­ly­wood Bowl with the ail­ing com­pos­er Mik­lós Rózsa onstage in a wheel­chair. Mauceri jok­ing­ly calls him­self a cross between Indi­ana Jones and Dr. Franken­stein, and depend­ing on your point of view, he is either an exca­va­tor of rare arti­facts or a man stitch­ing up cadav­ers. Over the past two years, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with anoth­er con­duc­tor, Michael Gildin, he has been restor­ing a work ardent­ly cov­et­ed by music afi­ciona­dos but giv­en up for dead: a lost opera writ­ten by two emi­nences of the Great Amer­i­can Song­book — com­pos­er Harold Arlen (“Over the Rain­bow,” “Stormy Weath­er”) and lyri­cist John­ny Mer­cer (“Sky­lark,” “Moon Riv­er”).
     The work is called Blues Opera. It took shape between 1954 and 1958 but was nev­er per­formed as con­ceived by its cre­ators. An adul­ter­at­ed ver­sion called Free and Easy, with a jazz band instead of an orches­tra, opened under the music direc­tion of Quin­cy Jones, then 26, in Ams­ter­dam in late 1959 and closed in Paris in ear­ly 1960. Mauceri recalls once run­ning into Jones at the for­mer Sta­ples Cen­ter and, famil­iar with the opera’s his­to­ry, inquir­ing about the exis­tence of a score. “Quin­cy told me the whole band played from mem­o­ry, and that I would nev­er find a score, because there was none,” Mauceri says.
     Jones, who declined to be inter­viewed for this arti­cle, was mis­tak­en. After con­sid­er­able detec­tive work by Gildin and Mauceri, assis­tance from librar­i­ans at spe­cial col­lec­tions in U.S. cities all over the map and a good deal of luck, there is a com­plete piano vocal score of Blues Opera in Mauceri’s New York apart­ment. The opera lacks only a final step — orches­tra­tion — to be made ready for a debut that could take place as ear­ly as next year. G. Schirmer, the New York-based music pub­lish­er, has con­clud­ed a deal to pub­lish the piano and orches­tral scores. The few peo­ple who have been grant­ed access to the recon­struct­ed opera — includ­ing, on a recent morn­ing, the author of this arti­cle — can attest that it is a superla­tive work, one that will fun­da­men­tal­ly change the music world’s per­cep­tion of Harold Arlen, today most­ly remem­bered as the Hol­ly­wood tune­smith who wrote the songs for The Wiz­ard of Oz. Mauceri is thrilled. “Blues Opera is the most impor­tant restora­tion I’ve done,” he says. “What a mas­ter­piece we have unearthed and made viable.” As word gets out, cer­tain music lovers may greet the restora­tion of Arlen and Mercer’s opera as the equiv­a­lent of an art schol­ar find­ing a lost Car­avag­gio. That excite­ment should have opera com­pa­nies clam­or­ing for the pre­miere.
     There is, how­ev­er, one prob­lem. Blues Opera was writ­ten for an all-Black cast by two white men. At a time when movies are boy­cotted and book tours can­celed over charges of “cul­tur­al appro­pri­a­tion,” this is no tri­fling mat­ter.
     In the case of Blues Opera, there may be enough mit­i­gat­ing fac­tors to off­set the objec­tions that are like­ly to arise. Unlike George Gershwin’s Por­gy and Bess, the opera to which it will unavoid­ably be com­pared, its source is not a nov­el and play by white South­ern­ers, but rather a nov­el and the­atri­cal adap­ta­tions by Black authors of the Harlem Renais­sance. And unlike Por­gy, its pro­tag­o­nists are not the illit­er­ate pau­pers of Cat­fish Row, but rich, suc­cess­ful cham­pagne-drink­ing mem­bers of late 19th cen­tu­ry St. Louis soci­ety. For these rea­sons, even Gar­rett McQueen, the not­ed “clas­si­cal agi­ta­tor” and activist who co-hosts the acclaimed Tril­lo­quy pod­cast and is a spokesman for the Black Opera Alliance, seems favor­ably dis­posed toward Blues Opera. “We could use more operas that don’t tell the same old sto­ry of the down­trod­den, abused, oppressed Black per­son,” he says. “There’s more to the Black expe­ri­ence than pain.” Black sopra­no Angel Blue, one of opera’s great­est stars, wants to debut the lead role. “I haven’t heard the whole score, but what I have heard is stun­ning,” she tells Bill­board.
     Still, it would be naïve to think that the race issue won’t be raised. “Any way you slice it, there’s going to be push­back,” says McQueen. In May 2021, Mauceri and Gildin pru­dent­ly added a third mem­ber to their restora­tion team, Black lin­guis­tics pro­fes­sor John McWhort­er, who is also a colum­nist for the New York Times. The libret­to, con­sis­tent with the Harlem Renais­sance source mate­r­i­al, uses ver­nac­u­lar Black Eng­lish. “I was brought in to vet Blues Opera for Black Eng­lish authen­tic­i­ty,” McWhort­er says. To help head off the expect­ed con­tro­ver­sy, he wrote a col­umn for the Times in August 2021 titled “Can White Men Write a Black Opera?” While McWhorter’s own answer is an emphat­ic yes, he does not pre­sume that his appro­ba­tion clos­es the sub­ject. “There are going to be peo­ple who artic­u­late­ly insist this thing should be kept under wraps,” he says. “They should be heard from.”

IF BLUES OPERA does set off a debate, it will be part of a larg­er dis­cus­sion that began to gain momen­tum in recent years and accel­er­at­ed after the mur­der of George Floyd. A racial reck­on­ing in the world of opera has long been over­due. Until quite recent­ly, opera stages in New York, Los Ange­les, Lon­don and else­where were some of the last places where you might see actors in black­face or yel­low­face as an accept­ed norm. Hard­ly any­one thought twice about a Cau­casian sopra­no made up with bat-wing eye­lin­er in the title role of Puccini’s Turan­dot, or a white tenor blacked up to sing the lead in Verdi’s Otel­lo.
     Nao­mi André, the Seat­tle Opera’s schol­ar-in-res­i­dence and advis­er on mat­ters of racial and gen­der equi­ty, admits that for years even she accept­ed black­face and yel­low­face on opera stages as “some­thing you just didn’t talk about.” In her award-win­ning book Black Opera: His­to­ry, Pow­er, Engage­ment, she tells of an after­noon in 2012 when she invit­ed a col­league, like her­self a Black woman, to a Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera Live in HD per­for­mance of Otel­lo. André, raised in sub­ur­ban New York, is a life­long opera fan and a trained singer, with a Ph.D. in musi­col­o­gy from Har­vard. Her guest was a South African lan­guage pro­fes­sor from a Zulu town­ship. “I was excit­ed to share this won­der­ful opera with my col­league,” she recalls, but her excite­ment turned to mor­ti­fi­ca­tion. The singer who played Otel­lo, Johan Botha, was not only a white tenor in black­face but even worse, an Afrikan­er who had done com­pul­so­ry mil­i­tary ser­vice for South Africa’s apartheid gov­ern­ment. It was an epiphany. For hav­ing so long uncrit­i­cal­ly accept­ed the cul­tur­al con­ven­tions of opera, André says, “I hold myself account­able.”
     At the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera, the largest per­form­ing arts orga­ni­za­tion in North Amer­i­ca, the epiphany — or, more apt­ly, wake­up call — took three years longer. In 2015, the Met mailed a brochure to sub­scribers tout­ing its upcom­ing sea­son, which would open with direc­tor Bartlett Sher’s much-antic­i­pat­ed new pro­duc­tion of Otel­lo. On the cov­er was an image of Lat­vian tenor Alek­san­drs Anto­nenko, look­ing, in the words of music writer Ali­son Kin­ney, “like he’d had a bronz­er mal­func­tion.” The back­lash caught the Met off guard, and the opera company’s media-savvy GM, Peter Gelb, real­ized the time had come to aban­don a tra­di­tion that had per­sist­ed since the Met’s pre­miere of Otel­lo in 1891. No longer would Cau­casian tenors at the Met be dark­ened to sing the Moor of Venice. “I will be white,” Anto­nenko told a New York Times reporter in his dress­ing room with a shrug.
     Oth­er major opera hous­es have eschewed black­face, but by no means all. Last July, pho­tos from a pro­duc­tion of Aida at the Are­na di Verona in Italy cir­cu­lat­ed on social media, show­ing the Russ­ian opera star Anna Netre­bko and oth­er mem­bers of the com­pa­ny in dark make­up. The 1871 opera con­cerns an Ethiopi­an princess enslaved by Egyp­tians, and well into the 21st cen­tu­ry, opera hous­es, the Met includ­ed, rou­tine­ly dark­ened the skin of white sopra­nos in the title role and did the same for oth­er cast mem­bers por­tray­ing Ethiopi­ans. Netre­bko advo­cates the tra­di­tion; when she sang the role at the Met in 2018 and was advised of the new pol­i­cy against dark make­up, she spent hours at a tan­ning salon. In Italy last sum­mer she blacked up and post­ed pho­tos of her dark­ened self on Insta­gram. It was all too much for sopra­no Angel Blue, who prompt­ly with­drew from a pro­duc­tion of La Travi­a­ta at the Are­na di Verona, and in an online state­ment con­demned the “offen­sive, humil­i­at­ing and out­right racist” use of black­face as “a deeply mis­guid­ed prac­tice” that had “no place in mod­ern soci­ety.”
     The dark make­up con­tro­ver­sy is some­times ren­dered moot by what André terms “true-to-col­or cast­ing,” by which she prin­ci­pal­ly means Black singers in Black roles. Many opera fans main­tain the great­est Aida of the past cen­tu­ry was the Black spin­to-sopra­no Leon­tyne Price. No opera lover, André includ­ed, wants to ban white sopra­nos from singing Aida or, for that mat­ter, thinks only Chi­nese sopra­nos should be cast as Turan­dot, or Japan­ese singers as Madama But­ter­fly. Indeed, one of the most acclaimed per­form­ers in recent years in the role of But­ter­fly is the Black sopra­no Lato­nia Moore. In opera, the voice, more than almost any oth­er con­sid­er­a­tion, dri­ves the cast­ing deci­sion.
     Con­se­quent­ly, the opera world was decades ahead of the the­ater world in cast­ing peo­ple of col­or in tra­di­tion­al­ly white roles, at least once the race bar­ri­er in opera began to lift in the mid-20th cen­tu­ry. In 1956, when col­or­blind cast­ing in the­ater was still a rar­i­ty, the Black bari­tone Robert McFer­rin (father of Bob­by McFer­rin) sang the title role in Rigo­let­to at the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera. In 1960, Black Amer­i­can tenor George Shirley por­trayed Rodol­fo, the lead­ing man in Puccini’s La Bohème, at the Teatro Nue­vo in Milan. The fol­low­ing year, at the Bayreuth Fes­ti­val House in Ger­many, the the­ater built by Richard Wag­n­er, the Black mez­zo-sopra­no Grace Bum­bry was cast as Venus in the composer’s Tannhäuser. Per­haps most strik­ing was Leon­tyne Price’s per­for­mance in the title role of Tosca on nation­al TV in the Unit­ed States in 1955, oppo­site the white tenor David Poleri as her lover, Cavara­dos­si.
     It would be spu­ri­ous to sug­gest that these and oth­er col­or­blind cast­ing deci­sions were made in the cause of racial equal­i­ty. Even as opera com­pa­nies fea­tured Black singers in notion­al­ly white parts, there was no push for diver­si­ty in the hir­ing of, say, stage direc­tors. The take­away is that opera lovers place a high­er val­ue on vocal excel­lence than oth­er fac­tors in a pro­duc­tion. It helps explain why André her­self bare­ly paid heed to racial­ly insen­si­tive con­ven­tions in opera for so long. One of her vivid mem­o­ries of oper­ago­ing was her first time at the Met, in 1985, when she got a stand­ing room tick­et to see Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkava­lier, with the Black sopra­no Kath­leen Bat­tle as Sophie, the young daugh­ter of a wealthy bour­geois in 18th cen­tu­ry Vien­na. André thinks she remem­bers that the pro­duc­tion also had a non-Black boy dancer with dark­ened skin in the silent role of Mohammed, a young Moor­ish ser­vant in the Vien­nese court, but she isn’t sure. It did.
     Make­up is not the only indel­i­cate mat­ter. The libret­tos of many stan­dard operas teem with offend­ing racial and gen­der tropes. “Oh, my God,” was the reac­tion of Ale­jan­dra Valar­i­no Boy­er, founder of BIPOC Arts, a data­base to pro­mote diver­si­ty hir­ing in opera, when I brought up the sub­ject of Mono­statos, the Black com­ic vil­lain dri­ven by lust in Mozart’s The Mag­ic Flute. “This is where I dif­fer from some of my col­leagues,” Boy­er says. “They say, ‘This is the composer’s inten­tion, and you can’t touch a note.’ I say redo it, so it makes sense for today, or make cuts.” Boy­er does not sug­gest remov­ing the opera from the reper­toire, how­ev­er.
     Few would make such a sug­ges­tion, not only because The Mag­ic Flute is ranked among the great­est operas ever writ­ten, but because it has a secure place in the small canon of operas that are rou­tine­ly per­formed. Though the medi­an age of oper­a­go­ers may have declined since the pan­dem­ic, as a class they remain old­er, more musi­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive and have set­tled on a core reper­to­ry of around 100 works. The 18th cen­tu­ry is rep­re­sent­ed large­ly by Mozart and Han­del, and cer­tain 20th cen­tu­ry operas, such as Ben­jamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, which pre­miered in 1945, are solid­ly in the main­stream. By far, the most-per­formed operas, such as La Bohème, Car­men and La Travi­a­ta, are from the 19th cen­tu­ry.
     Nev­er­the­less, opera com­pa­nies delight in pre­sent­ing works of liv­ing com­posers. Christi­na Schep­pel­mann, gen­er­al direc­tor of the Seat­tle Opera, says it would con­sti­tute a fail­ure if in 50 years opera com­pa­nies were still large­ly muse­ums of the 19th cen­tu­ry canon. “We have to do new pieces, believe in them and repeat them,” she says. “Even pieces that right now would not fill the house.”
     At the tail end of 2022, the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera announced plans to dou­ble down on operas by liv­ing com­posers in future sea­sons, an unex­pect­ed turn­about for a com­pa­ny that his­tor­i­cal­ly has nev­er been at the fore­front of new music. That dis­tinc­tion has always belonged to the Met’s scrap­py Lin­coln Cen­ter neigh­bor, the New York City Opera, which in 1949 became the first major com­pa­ny in the world to stage an opera by a Black com­pos­er, William Grant Still’s Trou­bled Island. In 1986, the NYCO gave the for­mal world pre­miere of Black Amer­i­can com­pos­er Antho­ny Davis’ X, The Life and Times of Mal­colm X.
     Well into the 21st cen­tu­ry, the Met had yet to stage any work by a Black com­pos­er, an issue that drew more atten­tion in Sep­tem­ber 2019 when the com­pa­ny opened its sea­son with Por­gy and Bess. A few days before the debut per­for­mance, the New York Times ran a not alto­geth­er approv­ing arti­cle, not­ing, “The fact that the most-per­formed opera about the African-Amer­i­can expe­ri­ence is the work of an all-white team has not been lost on black com­posers who have strug­gled to get their music heard.” That same day, the Met announced plans for a pro­duc­tion of Fire Shut Up in My Bones, an opera by Black com­pos­er Ter­ence Blan­chard. Based on Charles M. Blow’s trau­ma-nar­ra­tive mem­oir, the opera tells the sto­ry of a young Black man from a Louisiana back­wa­ter strug­gling to over­come the wounds of pover­ty, parental neglect and sex­u­al abuse. The Met vague­ly promised to sched­ule the opera in “a com­ing sea­son,” and was unclear about whether the stag­ing would take place at its 3,800-seat opera house in Lin­coln Cen­ter or at a small­er venue of a col­lab­o­ra­tive part­ner. No fur­ther infor­ma­tion was forth­com­ing by ear­ly 2020, when opera com­pa­nies world­wide began shut­ting down in response to the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic.
     Then, in May 2020, a police offi­cer knelt on George Floyd’s neck for more than nine min­utes, asphyx­i­at­ing him. No cor­ner of cul­tur­al life in Amer­i­ca was unaf­fect­ed, opera included.

BY THE SPRING OF 2021, the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera was in finan­cial per­il. A Met sea­son runs from Sep­tem­ber to June, and the pan­dem­ic had trun­cat­ed one sea­son, wiped out anoth­er entire­ly and erased an esti­mat­ed $150 mil­lion in box-office rev­enue. Most of the company’s work­force had been fur­loughed with­out pay since April 2020. Nego­ti­a­tions with the stage­hand union had bro­ken down, and the work­ers who built sets found them­selves locked out. In prepa­ra­tion for reopen­ing in the fall, the Met turned to nonunion shops in Cardiff, Wales, and else­where to have sets con­struct­ed, draw­ing over 1,000 pro­test­ers, many with pick­et signs. In a state­ment, the com­pa­ny said it was “fac­ing the worst eco­nom­ic cri­sis in the 137-year his­to­ry of the Met and [we] must reduce our costs in order to sur­vive.”
     Peter Gelb, the GM, was vil­i­fied and called a union buster, but he held firm. Yet in the depths of the COVID-19 lock­down and amid the dras­tic cost-cut­ting, he added a senior man­age­ment posi­tion that had not exist­ed in the Met’s his­to­ry: chief diver­si­ty offi­cer. It went to Mar­cia Lynn Sells, dean of stu­dents at Har­vard Law School. Gelb said her hir­ing was essen­tial at “a time when social jus­tice right­ly demands that we address the inequities of our art form.”
     When the Met final­ly emerged from the lock­down on Sept. 27, 2021, it reopened with Fire Shut Up in My Bones. In an inter­view with the Asso­ci­at­ed Press, Gelb made no secret of what had moti­vat­ed that choice. “The ear­li­est we thought we could sched­ule [Blanchard’s opera] was in the 23–24 sea­son,” he said, but the opera was put on a fast track and made the sea­son open­er due to “the huge upheaval and social change that is tak­ing place in Amer­i­ca right now.” He saw fit to add that Blan­chard was “a bril­liant com­pos­er,” a sen­ti­ment echoed by many music crit­ics. In 2023, the Met will stage two addi­tion­al works by Black com­posers: Cham­pi­on, a Blan­chard opera from 2013 about box­er Emile Grif­fith, and X, The Life and Times of Mal­colm X, some 37 years after X had its debut next door.
     The upheaval referred to by Gelb hit home at oth­er opera com­pa­nies. In Octo­ber 2020, the Seat­tle Opera pub­lished a three-year “Racial Equi­ty Plan.” In lan­guage bor­der­ing on self-con­dem­na­tion, the SO vowed to redi­rect itself “toward becom­ing an anti-racist and mul­ti­cul­tur­al orga­ni­za­tion” bent on “the erad­i­ca­tion of insti­tu­tion­al racism in this art form.” In truth, com­pared with the Met, the Seat­tle Opera had been ahead of the curve. It had hired Nao­mi André as schol­ar-in-res­i­dence in 2019, and in Feb­ru­ary 2020, just before the pan­dem­ic stopped every­thing, gave the West Coast pre­miere of Char­lie Parker’s Yard­bird, an opera about the fabled jazzman, with a pre­dom­i­nant­ly Black cast. In Feb­ru­ary 2022, the SO staged Blue, an opera in which the teenage son of a Black police offi­cer is shot and killed by a white police offi­cer.  Com­mis­sioned in 2019 by the Glim­mer­glass Fes­ti­val in upstate New York, Blue was regard­ed high­ly by music crit­ics; the Wall Street Jour­nal called it “wrench­ing and remark­ably orig­i­nal.”
     Char­lie Parker’s Yard­bird, Blue and Cham­pi­on are inter­ra­cial col­lab­o­ra­tions, the first two the work of a white com­pos­er and Black libret­tist, and the third the reverse. Last March, Emmett Till, an opera based on the true sto­ry of a 14-year-old Black boy lynched in Mis­sis­sip­pi, with music by Black com­pos­er Mary D. Watkins and a libret­to by white play­wright Clare Coss, pre­miered at John Jay Col­lege in New York. Coss’ libret­to includ­ed one invent­ed char­ac­ter, a white school­teacher who, she said, “rep­re­sents white peo­ple who care but who remain silent.” The pro­duc­tion drew on the tal­ents of the large­ly Black cre­ative team of Opera Noire Inter­na­tion­al and the Harlem Cham­ber Play­ers, and the con­duc­tor, like the com­pos­er, was a Black woman.
     But this inter­ra­cial col­lab­o­ra­tion was greet­ed with acri­mo­ny, because for some, a white libret­tist insert­ing a fic­tion­al white char­ac­ter into the sto­ry of Emmett Till, or dra­ma­tiz­ing it at all, was a bridge too far. “We denounce the telling of this his­toric sto­ry by a white woman from a white van­tage point,” the Black Opera Alliance pro­claimed in a social media post. A peti­tion to can­cel the opera, start­ed by a John Jay stu­dent who learned about it on Tik­Tok, drew 12,000 sig­na­tures. Two sched­uled per­for­mances of Emmett Till took place, but the opera’s cre­ators, both women in their 80s, were clear­ly stunned by the con­dem­na­tion of their work.

THE METROPOLITAN OPERA’s Por­gy and Bess pro­duc­tion, by com­par­i­son, came off with less con­tro­ver­sy than antic­i­pat­ed; at any rate, the loud approval seemed to drown out the faint cen­sure. Angel Blue, who would lat­er star in Fire Shut Up in My Bones, played Bess, oppo­site Eric Owens as Por­gy. The New York Times review was sprin­kled with adjec­tives such as “mag­nif­i­cent,” “over­whelm­ing,” “author­i­ta­tive” and “grip­ping.” The musi­col­o­gist Gwynne Kuh­n­er Brown, who wrote a Ph.D. dis­ser­ta­tion on Por­gy and Bess, found Angel Blue’s inter­pre­ta­tion of the female lead rev­e­la­to­ry. “Bess is a hard char­ac­ter to play,” Brown says. “She makes bad choic­es. Angel Blue had her mak­ing those choic­es con­scious­ly, know­ing they are not the right ones, in a way that was plau­si­ble and very pow­er­ful.” Some crit­ics won­dered whether the title roles of Gershwin’s 1935 opera had ever been per­formed bet­ter.
     It was the Met’s first pro­duc­tion of Por­gy and Bess since 1990, and it broke box-office records. The opera com­pa­ny uses dynam­ic tick­et pric­ing, and demand so exceed­ed sup­ply that one per­for­mance took in 113% of pro­ject­ed rev­enue. The Met had nev­er in its mod­ern his­to­ry extend­ed the sched­uled run of an opera; for Por­gy and Bess, it added three more per­for­mances. The Live in HD pre­sen­ta­tion of the opera set atten­dance records for the cin­e­ma series.
The Met pro­duc­tion made a strong case for knock­ing down the idea that Por­gy and Bess is an overblown Broad­way musi­cal by a Tin Pan Alley com­pos­er, rather than a legit­i­mate opera — a per­sis­tent claim that the late James Levine, who con­duct­ed the Met debut of Por­gy in 1985, called “utter non­sense.” Gersh­win always had clas­si­cal aspi­ra­tions, wrote many con­cert works — Rhap­sody in Blue and Con­cer­to in F among them — and enjoyed the friend­ship and rec­i­p­ro­cal admi­ra­tion of Mau­rice Rav­el and Arnold Schoen­berg. He prob­a­bly did him­self no favors by des­ig­nat­ing Por­gy and Bess a “folk opera,” on the grounds that his work was an orig­i­nal folk tale set to orig­i­nal folk music “in oper­at­ic form.”
The sto­ry of the beg­gar who wins the heart of the woman of ill repute began as a 1925 nov­el, Por­gy, by white South­ern­er DuBose Hey­ward. The author and his wife, Dorothy, adapt­ed the nov­el two years lat­er as a hit play that ran on Broad­way for 367 per­for­mances. The Hey­wards wrote the libret­to of the 1935 opera, with addi­tion­al lyrics by Ira Gersh­win, the composer’s broth­er and long­time col­lab­o­ra­tor. The set­ting of the nov­el, play, and opera is Cat­fish Row, a Black ghet­to based on a Gul­lah com­mu­ni­ty that once exist­ed near DuBose Heyward’s birth­place in Charleston, S.C.
     Many jazz greats have mined the opera’s melod­ic rich­es, from num­bers such as “Sum­mer­time,” “My Man’s Gone Now,” “I Loves You, Por­gy,” “It Ain’t Nec­es­sar­i­ly So” and the love duet “Bess, You Is My Woman Now.” Miles Davis devot­ed an album to Por­gy and Bess, as did Ella Fitzger­ald and Louis Arm­strong, Oscar Peter­son (twice), Joe Hen­der­son, Ray Charles and Cleo Laine, and the Mod­ern Jazz Quar­tet. Nina Simone’s icon­ic record­ing of “I Loves You, Por­gy” was her first hit and helped estab­lish her career. In her book Black Opera, Nao­mi André writes that the music of Por­gy and Bess “touch­es us and gets under our skin in such a way that it feels like a part of us. And this,” she adds, “is what makes Gershwin’s opera so easy to love and so dif­fi­cult to stay mad at.”
     The “mad at” ref­er­ence needs no expla­na­tion to any­one famil­iar with what many con­sid­er the opera’s degrad­ing depic­tion of peo­ple of col­or. In the open­ing scene, the men of Cat­fish Row shoot craps until Crown, a bru­tal steve­dore, stabs anoth­er gam­bler to death with a cot­ton hook, then leaves Bess, his lover, to fend for her­self. Bess calms her nerves by snort­ing “hap­py dust,” which she buys from Sportin’ Life, a dope deal­er. Lat­er, Por­gy recoils in super­sti­tious fear when a buz­zard flies over­head. Anne Brown, who played Bess in the orig­i­nal pro­duc­tion, recount­ed in a 1995 inter­view that her physi­cian father attend­ed the pre­miere and was “very dis­ap­point­ed and very sad that Negroes had been pic­tured in the usu­al clichés, as igno­rant and dope ped­dlers and users and crim­i­nals and super­sti­tious — all those things. He said, ‘We’ve had enough of that.’”
     Brown her­self was a strong sup­port­er of the opera, not in small part because of her col­le­gial rela­tion­ship with George Gersh­win, who treat­ed her with def­er­ence. When Gersh­win cast her, Brown was a 22-year-old Juil­liard grad­u­ate who had audi­tioned for the com­pos­er with a Massenet aria in French and art songs in Ger­man and Eng­lish. Still com­plet­ing his score, Gersh­win con­sis­tent­ly turned to Brown for help in tai­lor­ing his vocal lines to fit the ranges of his singers, Brown includ­ed. “I even made a few changes in ‘I Loves You, Por­gy,’ notes which fit my voice bet­ter, and he would say, ‘That’s good, let’s use that,’” Brown recalled in 1995.
     Gersh­win fur­ther endeared him­self to his cast by for­bid­ding any black­face in his opera. Al Jol­son, a big box-office star, had want­ed to play Por­gy; Gersh­win would not con­sid­er it. To this day, the Gersh­win estate insists on — but can­not enforce — true-to-col­or cast­ing for every per­former, includ­ing cho­rus mem­bers, in all pro­duc­tions of Por­gy and Bess. (At the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera in 1985, a union rep­re­sen­ta­tive for the Met cho­rus object­ed, in vain, to the exclu­sion of white singers.) There are five white char­ac­ters in Por­gy and Bess, rang­ing from unlike­able to con­temptible, and none sing; indeed, the moment any white per­son sets foot onstage, the music stops. In 1935, Gershwin’s insis­tence on race-con­scious cast­ing meant that no Amer­i­can opera house was amenable to stag­ing his work. Two years ear­li­er, the Met had debuted Louis Gruenberg’s The Emper­or Jones, with Lawrence Tib­bett in the lead role — in black­face.
     Por­gy and Bess instead opened at the Alvin The­ater on Broad­way on Oct. 10, 1935. It ran there for only 124 per­for­mances and lost its entire $70,000 invest­ment, about $1.5 mil­lion in today’s mon­ey. Two years after the pre­miere, Gersh­win, 38, died of a brain tumor, believ­ing his opera a fail­ure. Por­gy fared bet­ter in a 1942 Broad­way revival, for which it was dras­ti­cal­ly cut down to a musi­cal play.
     In 1952, the­atri­cal pro­duc­er Robert Breen co-found­ed the Every­man Opera Com­pa­ny, orig­i­nal­ly with one mis­sion, to restage Por­gy and Bess as an opera. A suc­cess­ful world tour fol­lowed. Breen then fixed on the idea of com­mis­sion­ing a new work to be per­formed in reper­to­ry with Por­gy — an Amer­i­can opera as acces­si­ble as Gershwin’s. As Breen lat­er told the sto­ry, he com­piled a list of eight songs, among them “Stormy Weath­er” and “Blues in the Night,” con­vey­ing the mood and idiom he was seek­ing, then showed the list to Cab Cal­loway, who played Sportin’ Life in the tour­ing pro­duc­tion. The jazz singer pro­nounced all eight songs the work of a sin­gle com­pos­er: Harold Arlen. Cal­loway knew Arlen from the Cot­ton Club in Harlem where, in the 1930s, he was a per­former and Arlen a song­writer. Breen was famil­iar with the music but not its creator.

TO THIS DAY and in his own life­time, Harold Arlen has nev­er been as famous as his songs. He once took a crosstown ride in a New York taxi and heard the dri­ver whistling “Stormy Weath­er.” Arlen asked the dri­ver if he knew who had writ­ten the tune. “Sure,” the cab­bie said. “Irv­ing Berlin.”
     Arlen was born in Buf­fa­lo, N.Y., on Valentine’s Day in 1905 to Jew­ish immi­grant par­ents from Vil­na, Poland. His father, Samuel, was a can­tor. Harold had lit­tle for­mal musi­cal train­ing but was a nat­ur­al singer and pianist. He began per­form­ing in jazz bands as a teen, and by 1925 he was gig­ging in New York, where he befriend­ed the band­leader Fletch­er Hen­der­son. Four years lat­er, Hen­der­son asked Arlen to sub for him as the rehearsal pianist for a trou­ble-plagued Broad­way show. While impro­vis­ing at the piano in a moment of bore­dom, Arlen hit on the tune that became his first suc­cess­ful song, “Get Hap­py,” with lyrics by Ted Koehler.
     By the fol­low­ing year, Arlen was a staff song­writer at the Cot­ton Club, work­ing with Koehler. The alche­my of Arlen’s musi­cal influ­ences — Black Amer­i­can idioms and his father’s freeform can­to­r­i­al chant — had made him, in Gershwin’s words, “the most orig­i­nal of us all.” The Arlen song­book abounds with “tape­worms,” songs exceed­ing the stan­dard thir­ty-two bars, and his melodies are free and impro­visato­ry. It was Gersh­win who point­ed out to him that the first eight bars of “Stormy Weath­er” con­tain not a sin­gle repeat­ed phrase. Arlen was bemused. “I nev­er gave it a thought,” he said.
     If there is a dis­tin­guish­ing ele­ment in Arlen’s song­writ­ing, it is the genre of the blues. Though there are Arlen tunes out­side the genre — such as “My Shin­ing Hour” and “Let’s Fall in Love” — his song­book is marked­ly blue­si­er than that of his non-Black peers. In the ear­ly 1930s, when Gersh­win was tai­lor­ing songs for Ethel Mer­man and Gin­ger Rodgers, Arlen was at the Cot­ton Club, writ­ing “Between the Dev­il and the Deep Blue Sea” for Aida Ward, “Ill Wind” for Ade­laide Hall and “As Long as I Live” for Avon Long and a teenage new­com­er, Lena Horne. On the night of April 6, 1933, when Ethel Waters debuted “Stormy Weath­er,” the audi­ence demand­ed 12 encores. Waters called Arlen “the Negro-ist white man I have ever known.”
     In 1938, MGM hired Arlen and lyri­cist E.Y. “Yip” Har­burg to write the songs for The Wiz­ard of Oz. Since Arlen’s inspi­ra­tion came at unpre­dictable moments, he always car­ried music paper to notate his “jots” — ker­nels of melodies that popped into his head. One after­noon while rid­ing in a car on Sun­set Boule­vard in Los Ange­les with his wife at the wheel, he yelled for her to pull over, and wrote down the jot for “Over the Rain­bow.”
     Arlen’s next movie project, in 1941, paired him with John­ny Mer­cer, a lyri­cist the stu­dio, Warn­er Bros., had under con­tract. Ten­ta­tive­ly called Hot Noc­turne, the movie had a provoca­tive theme, whether white peo­ple could be authen­tic jazz and blues musi­cians. Arlen and Mer­cer were mir­ror images — a Pol­ish immi­grants’ son from the indus­tri­al North and a Savan­nah, Ga., gen­tle­man whose great-great-grand­fa­ther had fought in the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War — but as a song­writ­ing team they were ide­al­ly matched. The movie’s sig­na­ture song was an instant clas­sic, an earthy blues that starts tra­di­tion­al­ly and then shifts into unchart­ed ter­ri­to­ry. Warn­er Bros. renamed the pic­ture for the song: Blues in the Night.
     Arlen, who had set­tled in Los Ange­les, had com­posed for Broad­way musi­cals, but none with a mem­o­rable score. He was not done try­ing, and a Broad­way project offered to him in 1945 caught his fan­cy. The pro­duc­er Edward Gross had come across a play called St. Louis Woman, writ­ten by two men known chiefly as poets, Harlem Renais­sance authors Arna Bon­temps and Coun­tee Cullen, with uncred­it­ed assis­tance from Bon­temps’ clos­est friend, the poet Langston Hugh­es. Based on a Bon­temps nov­el called God Sends Sun­day, the play con­cerns a late 19th cen­tu­ry ath­let­ic star, a Black jock­ey named Augie Rivers, mod­eled on Bon­temps’ great uncle, Joe Ward. Augie’s love inter­est, Del­la Green, the play’s title char­ac­ter, is what the 19th cen­tu­ry French called a demi­monde, a glam­orous cour­te­san in the fash­ion of Alexan­dre Dumas’ Lady of the Camelias.
     Gross believed the play, set in a bustling Black com­mu­ni­ty at a time when horse rac­ing was America’s most pop­u­lar sport and every­one con­nect­ed with it had mon­ey and style, was ide­al mate­r­i­al for a musi­cal. He signed Arlen and Mer­cer to write the songs, and Bon­temps and Cullen to write the book of the musi­cal, which, like the play, would be called St. Louis Woman. Gross hoped to get Lena Horne, who had become an MGM movie star, for Del­la.
     Bon­temps, in let­ters he exchanged with Hugh­es, chart­ed the project’s highs and lows. A seri­ous low point was a racial con­tro­ver­sy, aimed not at Arlen and Mer­cer but at Bon­temps and Cullen. In mid-1945, the NAACP con­demned the musi­cal, still in progress, for “offer­ing roles that detract from the dig­ni­ty of our race.” The actress and civ­il rights activist Fre­di Wash­ing­ton became a harsh crit­ic of St. Louis Woman, and Horne with­drew from con­sid­er­a­tion. Bon­temps, Cullen and Hugh­es furi­ous­ly dis­put­ed the crit­i­cism. In a let­ter to Hugh­es dat­ed Aug. 16, 1945, Bon­temps fumed that the crit­ics were pre­judg­ing a book none of them had read and attrib­uted the attack from “the high­ly moral Fre­di” to “sour grapes” — Cullen had informed him that “she had hoped to play Del­la in St. Louis Woman her­self!” Cullen, who suf­fered from high blood pres­sure, died of ure­mic poi­son­ing of the kid­neys in Jan­u­ary 1946, before the start of rehearsals, and Bon­temps blamed the racial con­tro­ver­sy for has­ten­ing his death.
     St. Louis Woman opened at the Mar­tin Beck The­atre in New York on March 30, 1946. It starred Ruby Hill as Del­la, Harold Nicholas as Augie and the scene-steal­ing Pearl Bai­ley in the comedic role of But­ter­fly. In years to come, the orig­i­nal cast album would become a collector’s item; with num­bers such as “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home” and “I Had Myself a True Love,” St. Louis Woman is rec­og­nized as Arlen’s best Broad­way score, con­tain­ing some of Mercer’s finest lyrics. The show’s undo­ing was the book, which lacked cohe­sion, and made the bond between the lead char­ac­ters more trans­ac­tion­al than roman­tic — Augie pre­vents Del­la from leav­ing him by win­ning the cli­mac­tic horse race. The show closed after 113 per­for­mances.
Eight years lat­er, when Robert Breen of the Every­man Opera Com­pa­ny was search­ing for a com­pan­ion piece to Por­gy and Bess, he pro­posed that Arlen and Mer­cer expand St. Louis Woman into an opera, with recita­tive replac­ing the dia­logue. The work, to be called Blues Opera, would be sung through, effec­tive­ly mak­ing Mer­cer the libret­tist, using char­ac­ters and plot­lines cre­at­ed by Bon­temps, Cullen and Hugh­es. For Bon­temps, the endeav­or seemed the right­ful apoth­e­o­sis of a sto­ry that had orig­i­nat­ed with his nov­el. “Cer­tain­ly it would be poet­ic jus­tice if at this date a true blues opera could evolve from it,” he wrote in a 1954 let­ter to Breen asso­ciate Warn­er Wat­son.
     Work pro­gressed slow­ly. Arlen was in poor health, in and out of the hos­pi­tal with a stom­ach ulcer so severe he dubbed 1954 “the Year of Trans­fu­sion.” A piano was wheeled into his hos­pi­tal room. When Arlen was too weak to get out of bed, the con­duc­tor Samuel Mat­lowsky wrote down melodies Arlen hummed to him. Amid pages of new music, Arlen embell­ished his score with songs from St. Louis Woman, along with blues num­bers he had writ­ten with Mer­cer for var­i­ous movies, includ­ing “That Old Black Mag­ic,” “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Pos­i­tive” and “Blues in the Night.” To Mercer’s dis­plea­sure, Arlen also inter­po­lat­ed “Ill Wind” and “I Got­ta Right to Sing the Blues,” songs he had writ­ten with Ted Koehler for the Cot­ton Club.
     After sev­er­al delays, Blues Opera was giv­en a pre­view at the 1958 Brus­sels World’s Fair and offi­cial­ly opened at the Roy­al The­ater Car­ré in Ams­ter­dam on Dec. 14, 1959. By then it was no longer Blues Opera. Breen had lost a pow­er strug­gle with his co-pro­duc­er, Stan­ley Chase, who renamed the work Free and Easy and staged it as a musi­cal with dia­logue, using a jazz band instead of an orches­tra. The band­leader, Quin­cy Jones, was told the pro­duc­tion would tour Europe for sev­er­al months, then open on Broad­way, with Sam­my Davis Jr. as Augie. Instead, after a brief run in Paris in Jan­u­ary 1960 — French clas­si­cal com­pos­er Fran­cis Poulenc report­ed­ly attend­ed a per­for­mance — Free and Easy shut down, strand­ing the cast, crew and musi­cians, some of whom need­ed to bor­row mon­ey to get home. In a pref­ace for a pho­to­book memo­ri­al­iz­ing the ill-fat­ed pro­duc­tion, Jones called the tour “one of the dark­est peri­ods of my life.”
     Arlen nev­er got to hear Blues Opera per­formed as clas­si­cal­ly con­ceived, apart from a 25-minute instru­men­tal extract. In 1957, at the invi­ta­tion of con­duc­tor Andre Koste­lan­etz, Arlen cre­at­ed a sym­phon­ic suite of melodies from his opera, which was then orches­trat­ed, under his super­vi­sion, by Samuel Mat­lowsky. On Nov. 2, Koste­lan­etz, lead­ing the New York Phil­har­mon­ic, con­duct­ed the Blues Opera Suite at Carnegie Hall, with Arlen in atten­dance. Arlen was awed to see his name in a con­cert pro­gram along­side those of Berlioz, Prokofiev, Vil­la Lobos and Rach­mani­noff — some­thing Gersh­win would have tak­en for grant­ed.
     Over the years, the suite has turned up on con­cert pro­grams. John Mauceri, con­duct­ing the Hol­ly­wood Bowl Orches­tra, record­ed it for Philips in 1996. Mauceri did not know much about the opera at the time except that it was con­sid­ered lost, a word that always piques his inter­est. “When some­one says, ‘You’ll nev­er find it,’ it brings out my inner Indi­ana Jones,” Mauceri says. “My reac­tion is, you just don’t know where to look.”

AT 77, Mauceri is ani­mat­ed and youth­ful, with a full head of hair neat­ly swept back. He was a Leonard Bern­stein pro­tégé and counts as an achieve­ment the time he got Bern­stein, always the fun­ni­est per­son in the room, to roar with laugh­ter. Tom Wolfe once dubbed Bern­stein “the Vil­lage Explain­er,” a man who turned every con­ver­sa­tion into a sym­po­sium. Like his men­tor, Mauceri writes books and has been known to wear down the lis­ten­er with his broad knowl­edge of sub­jects that include 20th cen­tu­ry archi­tec­ture, French lit­er­a­ture, psy­chol­o­gy and reli­gion — not to men­tion music. “Mauceri’s grasp of the his­to­ry of West­ern music-mak­ing is breath­tak­ing,” con­clud­ed Gramo­phone in a review of his book The War on Music, pub­lished last year by Yale Uni­ver­si­ty Press. The book turns on a tan­ta­liz­ing ques­tion: “Why, if the Nazis lost the war, do we still not play the music Hitler banned?”
     The arche­ol­o­gist in Mauceri, his inner Indi­ana Jones, makes it hard for him to accept that any worth­while music should be neglect­ed or lost. In the 1990s, he record­ed sev­er­al albums for Dec­ca of music banned by the Third Reich as entartete, or degen­er­ate, most­ly because its com­posers, such as Erich Wolf­gang Korn­gold, were Jews. He helped put togeth­er a com­plete score of Marc Blitzstein’s Regi­na from the composer’s man­u­scripts, prompt­ing a reeval­u­a­tion of the work as a sig­nif­i­cant Amer­i­can opera. Fans of Broad­way musi­cals are indebt­ed to him for prized stu­dio cast albums of the Gersh­wins’ Strike Up the Band and Rodgers and Hart’s On Your Toes. Along the way, Mauceri has won an Emmy, a Tony and mul­ti­ple Gram­mys, lack­ing only an Oscar to join the exclu­sive EGOT club.
     In 2019, Mauceri was intro­duced to con­duc­tor Michael Gildin, then 28, by an archivist for the Rodgers and Ham­mer­stein estate. “Michael knows more than any­one I have ever met about the Amer­i­can musi­cal the­ater,” Mauceri says. The two men began dis­cussing pos­si­ble restora­tion projects, if their busy sched­ules ever per­mit­ted it.
     Then the pan­dem­ic hit. “In March of 2020, Michael is con­duct­ing a bus and truck nation­al tour of Fid­dler on the Roof, nine shows a week,” Mauceri says. “I’m pack­ing my bags to make a record­ing in Berlin. And what hap­pens? The sound of screech­ing brakes. Full stop. Every­thing is can­celed.”
     Gildin, a Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty grad­u­ate, had stud­ied there with Wal­ter Frisch, an author­i­ty on Harold Arlen. “One day,” Mauceri says, “Michael shows up with a score he got from Frisch,” a patched togeth­er piano vocal score of Blues Opera, copy­right­ed in 1955 by the Every­man Opera Com­pa­ny. It was a pho­to­copy of a pho­to­copy and bare­ly leg­i­ble. “You can’t tell if a note has a sharp or a dou­ble flat. But you can see that it starts with the over­ture and ends with the finale.” The two men got down to work.
     They locat­ed a clean­er copy of the score, and then came an even big­ger dis­cov­ery. Harold Arlen and Robert Breen owned reel-to-reel tape recorders and between them had record­ed most of the opera, in bits and pieces. On some tapes, Arlen sang while he or Mat­lowsky played the piano; oth­er record­ings con­tained the voic­es of opera singers, still uniden­ti­fied but prob­a­bly mem­bers of Breen’s Por­gy and Bess troupe. There were also tapes of rehearsals of the Free and Easy com­pa­ny in Ams­ter­dam and Paris. Gildin dogged­ly tracked down record­ings scat­tered across spe­cial col­lec­tions at Ohio State, George Mason Uni­ver­si­ty in Wash­ing­ton D.C., and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Los Ange­les. “I’m always hound­ing librar­i­ans to look under every stone,” Gildin says.
     When he first heard the record­ings, Gildin says, “it was like my birth­day and Christ­mas rolled into one. It’s still sur­re­al when I think about it. If it weren’t for us hav­ing this crazy idea and dig­ging into this, who would have known these record­ings exist­ed? These are invalu­able trea­sures and pieces of our col­lec­tive his­to­ry.”
     Mean­while, Frisch pro­vid­ed man­u­scripts of nine addi­tion­al arias writ­ten for Blues Opera that were not includ­ed in the Every­man Opera score — unpub­lished Arlen and Mer­cer songs that, to date, few peo­ple have heard, with titles such as “Many Kinds of Love,” “Snake Eyes” and “Blow the Whis­tle.”
     Assem­bling the record­ings into a com­plete opera meant piec­ing togeth­er the libret­to, in some ways the most daunt­ing chal­lenge. A good deal of Blues Opera is instru­men­tal music to accom­pa­ny pan­tomime, a con­ven­tion in opera (think of the word­less sev­en-minute open­ing of Act III of Der Rosenkava­lier). The score didn’t con­tain any stage direc­tions. Mauceri and Gildin gath­ered all the source mate­r­i­al they could find, includ­ing sev­er­al ver­sions of the St. Louis Woman play and notes from the Breen archive writ­ten in pen­cil or typed on onion skin. It was clear the opera had been giv­en a rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent end­ing than the musi­cal, one in which Augie los­es the race but gets Del­la. “In los­ing, he wins,” Mauceri says. Con­trast­ing Del­la Green with the vain and mer­ce­nary Manon Lescaut, the hero­ine of operas by Massenet and Puc­ci­ni, he adds, “Del­la is a Manon who learns that dia­monds and gold are not what life is about. Manon dies feel­ing sor­ry for her­self. In Blues Opera, these char­ac­ters grow up in front of us.”
     Mauceri and Gildin knew they need­ed a third mem­ber of the team. “It was essen­tial to have a Black voice in our edit­ing work,” Mauceri says. There are only two white char­ac­ters in Blues Opera — police offi­cers — who do not even speak. In May 2019, Mauceri watched Real Time With Bill Maher on HBO and became con­vinced that one of Maher’s guests, Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty lin­guis­tics pro­fes­sor John McWhort­er, was the expert the project need­ed. In 2017, McWhort­er had writ­ten Talk­ing Back, Talk­ing Black, a book in which he makes the case for Black Eng­lish as a “cul­tur­al­ly rich” Amer­i­can dialect.
     Mauceri obtained an email address for McWhort­er and was cau­tioned not to expect a speedy reply, since the pro­fes­sor had to sift through hun­dreds of mes­sages dai­ly. McWhort­er wrote back almost imme­di­ate­ly, say­ing he would be delight­ed to work on Blues Opera. Mauceri did not know it, but McWhort­er is a self-styled “show­tune geek,” with a vast col­lec­tion of cast albums. He is also a tal­ent­ed pianist and singer who a decade ago host­ed and per­formed in a cabaret series at the Cor­nelia Street Café in New York, includ­ing one show devot­ed to John­ny Mer­cer. When McWhort­er flew to Los Ange­les to appear on Real Time, he was lis­ten­ing to Mauceri’s record­ing of On Your Toes. “It’s as if this was meant to be,” McWhort­er says.
     The Black Eng­lish of Blues Opera is con­sis­tent with the ver­nac­u­lar used by Bon­temps, Cullen and Hugh­es. McWhort­er cites, as an exam­ple, this line of Della’s: “Until that day, Mon­sieur Augie, you in the back row.” He defends this as dialec­ti­cal­ly accu­rate and not demean­ing. Blues Opera avoids the “dis” and “dat” of Por­gy and Bess.
     Blues Opera has one notable com­mon­al­i­ty with Por­gy and Bess — a love tri­an­gle. In Gershwin’s opera, Bess must choose between the bul­ly Crown and the sen­si­tive Por­gy. In Blues Opera, Del­la falls for the sen­si­tive Augie and throws over the loutish Biglow, who man­ages the Rock­ing Horse Social Club in St. Louis, where much of the action takes place. All sim­i­lar­i­ty ends there. Bess is drug-addict­ed and weak and allows Crown to seduce her after she has declared her love for Por­gy. Del­la is clear­head­ed and empow­ered. “I’m a card-play­ing woman, and I don’t use a jok­er,” she says. When Biglow gets too rough with her, she decks him with a hay­mak­er, a moment like­ly to have the audi­ence cheer­ing.
     Blues Opera is set in 1889. It is the cen­te­nary of the French Rev­o­lu­tion, and Del­la has spent a month in Paris enjoy­ing the World’s Fair and the open­ing of the Eif­fel Tow­er. The Rock­ing Horse crowd reads in the news­pa­per that today’s the day Del­la Green comes back to St. Louis with “trunks and trunks” of styl­ish French clothes. This is a world of afflu­ence. “They pour cham­pagne just like it was rain,” Del­la sings in the wist­ful aria “I Won­der What Became of Me,” her lament that lux­u­ry has not brought ful­fill­ment. We are a long way from the squalor of Por­gy and Bess.
     Mauceri was delight­ed when the opera star Angel Blue recent­ly con­firmed to him by email her desire to debut the role of Del­la. Last Octo­ber she por­trayed Vio­let­ta — the Lady of the Camelias — in Verdi’s La Travi­a­ta at the Hous­ton Grand Opera, and she is quick to point out the dif­fer­ences between the two cour­te­sans, Vio­let­ta and Del­la. Violetta’s jeal­ous lover, Alfre­do, is abu­sive — in some pro­duc­tions, like the one in Hous­ton, he hurls her to the floor. Vio­let­ta takes it. “I imag­ine Del­la and I are quite sim­i­lar in that if some­one were to hit me, I’m going to come back at them,” Blue says. “Know­ing that Del­la is a woman who is not going to be tak­en advan­tage of, that’s won­der­ful.”
     Last fall, for a New York Times vir­tu­al event co-host­ed by McWhort­er, Blue and pianist Bryan Wag­orn made a video of “I Won­der What Became of Me.” She found the occa­sion inspir­ing. “My father was a pas­tor and a gospel singer, and I got to incor­po­rate that into Della’s aria,” she says. “That allowed me to bring in things from my child­hood, from my roots. I don’t often get to do that in the stan­dard opera reper­toire.”
     Blue admits that when Mauceri first told her about Blues Opera in late 2020, the name Harold Arlen was not famil­iar to her, though she had pre­vi­ous­ly sung “Over the Rain­bow” and “Come Rain and Come Shine.” She now recalls that when she was 10, watch­ing The Nut­ty Pro­fes­sor on TV, her father walked in dur­ing the scene in which Jer­ry Lewis, as Bud­dy Love, sings “That Old Black Mag­ic.” “I remem­ber my dad say­ing, ‘Harold Arlen.’ And I was like, ‘Who is that?’”
     Apart from the opera itself, Blue is drawn to the project because of Mauceri. “I’m hon­ored John thought of me for Blues Opera, and I trust him a lot,” she says. “Some­times I think John knows my voice bet­ter than I do.” In 2017, Mauceri con­duct­ed the Lon­don Phil­har­mon­ic in Richard Strauss’ Four Last Songs, with Blue as the soloist. “There was a phrase I worked so hard to sing in one breath,” she recalls, but kept falling short by two bars. “He leaned over and said, ‘If you need a breath, you can take a quick one right here.’ And I thought, ‘This man is impec­ca­ble. He knows singing.’”
     Blue also finds Mauceri’s loqua­cious­ness more charm­ing than off-putting. “When he starts talk­ing, I’m like, ‘OK, pay atten­tion, here it comes, a his­to­ry les­son of every­thing,’” she says, laugh­ing. “The amount of infor­ma­tion in his brain is wild.”

BY THE END OF AUGUST 2022, rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the Arlen and Mer­cer estates had signed con­tracts grant­i­ng Blues Opera House LLC, the cor­po­rate enti­ty for the recon­struct­ed opera, all the nec­es­sary rights. Sep­a­rate agree­ments were nego­ti­at­ed with the estates of Bon­temps and Cullen. The libret­to was com­plet­ed Sept. 11.
     Two weeks lat­er, I was invit­ed to Mauceri’s apart­ment in New York to hear a record­ing of the com­plete work, which he had assem­bled from the dig­i­tized reel-to-reel tapes and orches­tral selec­tions from the Blues Opera Suite. Mauceri con­sid­ers Matlowsky’s orches­tra­tion of the suite, which Arlen super­vised, a “Roset­ta Stone” mod­el to guide who­ev­er is ulti­mate­ly cho­sen to orches­trate the full opera.
     Michael Gildin and John McWhort­er were on hand that day. I con­fess to some trep­i­da­tion. Mauceri had pre­vi­ous­ly sent me a 20-minute sam­pler of excerpts from the opera, and though the music was beau­ti­ful it was large­ly famil­iar, replete with songs such as “That Old Black Mag­ic” and “Come Rain or Come Shine.” I won­dered: Will this turn out to be some sort of juke­box opera?
     Decid­ed­ly not. Blues Opera is every­thing Mauceri claims it is, a sung-through work of two-and-three-quar­ter hours with per­haps eight min­utes of dia­logue, filled with music of strik­ing orig­i­nal­i­ty and inge­nu­ity. Arlen’s recita­tives are unlike any I have ever heard. Two extend­ed recita­tives, “Then Sud­den­ly” and “Rain­bow,” are seam­less strings of Arlen “jots” — each indi­vid­ual phrase could have been turned into a song. “Lit­tle Angel Face,” a blues lul­la­by Augie sings to a young boy, melts Del­la, and may have a sim­i­lar effect on some lis­ten­ers. “I can­not hear it with­out cry­ing,” Mauceri says.
     Even the famil­iar songs take on a new vital­i­ty in the con­text of the opera. Encoun­ter­ing “Blues in the Night” as it is used in Blues Opera is akin to hear­ing “Alaba­ma Song” in Kurt Weill’s opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagony after hav­ing pre­vi­ous­ly known only the cov­er ver­sions record­ed by The Doors and David Bowie.
     “Who thought Arlen could do this?” Mauceri says. “Imag­ine Gersh­win with­out Por­gy and Bess — that’s where we are now with Arlen. Most peo­ple just think of him, if they know his name at all, as the man who wrote ‘Over the Rain­bow.’ I believe this work will trans­form our eval­u­a­tion of Arlen, and Mer­cer, too.”
     Of the three-man restora­tion team, McWhort­er seems the most con­cerned about Blues Opera being passed over for a pro­duc­tion because of its white author­ship. “You think to your­self, ‘This must be heard,’” he says. “And it scares me to death to imag­ine some­body say­ing, ‘No, this is Black­ness fil­tered through a white sen­si­bil­i­ty.’ There comes a time when you have to tell the per­son who says that, ‘No, you are tak­ing this too far. Let art breathe.’”
     McWhort­er acknowl­edges he is not the ide­al ambas­sador for Blues Opera, because some of his views on race are con­tro­ver­sial. In his 2021 book Woke Racism, he inveighs against what he sees as a “mis­im­pres­sion” in some peo­ple of col­or that “what makes us inter­est­ing, what makes us mat­ter, is a curat­ed per­sona as eter­nal­ly vic­tim­ized souls.” McWhort­er says he is viewed as a trai­tor by some in the Black com­mu­ni­ty. His fel­low New York Times colum­nist, Charles M. Blow, whose mem­oir is the basis of the opera Fire Shut Up in My Bones, “stu­dious­ly avoids engag­ing me beyond polite greet­ing,” he says.
     Blues Opera seems des­tined to become a test case for the issue raised by the movie Blues in the Night, though in 1941 the term for it was not yet in vogue — cul­tur­al appro­pri­a­tion. A Wash­ing­ton Post arti­cle on the con­tro­ver­sial Emmett Till opera was head­lined “Whose Song Is This to Sing?” McWhort­er frowns upon that ques­tion. In an opin­ion piece pub­lished in the Times on Sept. 16, 2022, he wrote: “I think the idea that only Black peo­ple should depict Black peo­ple in art and fic­tion is less antiracist than anti-human.”
     Arnold Ram­per­sad, author of the two-vol­ume The Life of Langston Hugh­es, agrees with McWhort­er. “The idea of ban­ning whites from writ­ing about Blacks is offen­sive,” he says. He notes that when com­pos­er Kurt Weill and play­wright Elmer Rice need­ed a lyri­cist for their opera Street Scene, a dra­ma deal­ing almost exclu­sive­ly with white peo­ple, they passed up “scores of vet­er­an white lyri­cists” in favor of Hugh­es. “There’s no doubt which side Hugh­es would be on regard­ing Blues Opera,” Ram­per­sad says. “He would look for­ward to see­ing it, and he’d be there to applaud it.”
     Nao­mi André says of Blues Opera, “It absolute­ly should be per­formed. I want to see it. I want to hear what it says. Is ‘Black opera’ only for Black com­posers, Black libret­tists, Black peo­ple singing Black sto­ries? My feel­ing is no, it’s more capa­cious than that.” She adds, “Anoth­er thing I like about Blues Opera is that it’s not the typ­i­cal trau­ma dra­ma. You get to see upper-class Black peo­ple for a change. And that’s nice.”
     This last point has not been lost on Gar­rett McQueen, spokesman for the Black Opera Alliance, which led the charge against Emmett Till. “We have to cel­e­brate hap­pi­ness and not just boil every­thing down to trau­ma and pain, as so many Black operas have in the past,” he says. “Think about what hap­pens in Por­gy and Bess, even in Fire Shut Up in My Bones.” Blues Opera appeals to McQueen because “we need more sto­ries of joy in our art spaces about Black folks.”
     McQueen also con­sid­ers it “a big deal” for Blue to be cham­pi­oning the project. “Angel Blue is an artist who real­ly put her neck out there and stood against oper­at­ic black­face,” he says. Her involve­ment “gives the cre­ative team a lot of cred­it.”
     He does, how­ev­er, sound a note of cau­tion about a pro­duc­tion of Blues Opera. “I would hope that top-lev­el deci­sions are made not only by peo­ple who are Black, but peo­ple with some sort of his­tor­i­cal, aca­d­e­m­ic and cul­tur­al con­nec­tion to the com­mu­ni­ties that this music is sup­posed to be about,” he says. “If that’s not hap­pen­ing, I think there’s going to be more room for more peo­ple to have an issue with it.” ♦