Yeah! Let's watch an opera about one of the best Americans ever! A natural subject, or so it would seem. Apparently there are several contemporary operas with her as a subject, but...this is one of them. I don't know how I planned to end that sentence.
Hey, remember when there were plans for Tubman to replace the odious Jackson on the twenty? Yeah...in retrospect, it should have been obvious that that would never happen once T**** got elected. I think at first we (okay, maybe just me) didn't quite realize what hardcore white supremacists he and his cohort are. Still, I suppose you could make the case that doing it would just be empty symbolism allowing us to feel good about ourselves while not addressing our country's festering problems. Or, indeed, that getting her all mixed up with American capitalism is more insult than honor.
Anyway. The question is, how do you shape her life into a compelling narrative arc, exactly? Obviously you have to decide where to start and where to end and what to emphasize. Well, we start with her as a young girl named Araminta, or Minty for short. One of her owners bashes her on the head with a piece of metal, which gave her visions and sleeping spells that lasted her whole life and probably made her become an abolitionist. She gets married, argues with and leaves her husband, escapes, comes back for her family and others, and that's about what she's doing as the opera concludes.
It is, I have to admit, a little bit jumbled, and there are a few eyebrow-raising moments, like when Harriet's come back south and her father comes in wearing a blindfold, and everyone asks, hey dad, why the blindfold? and he sings a comic aria about how he's wearing it so if anyone asks if he's seen her, he can truthfully say no, and...lol? What kind of tone are we trying to strike here, exactly?
Still, it's more compelling than not. The music is really great, mixing folk, gospel, blues, and soul together. Most operas that take place in a historical time and place make, it must be admitted, zero effort to evoke the given era musically, so it's nice to see this one do that, and get it so right.
You can see this on The American Opera Project, along with some others. It's an unlisted youtube video that I could just link to, but I think it's only fair that you register, as they ask you to. It's a very good performance; notably, Janinah Burnett is revelatory in the title role, with a steely-eyed determination and, in softer moments, a smile that lights up the stage. I want to see a lot more of her. Briana Elyse Hunter is also excellent as her sister Rachel. Unfortunately, there are technical aspects of the video that make it not-ideal. First, the sound isn't perfect; in places, especially the second act, it has a distinct echo-y and tinny feel, and a lot of the singing is simply impossible to understand--this problem compounded by the fact that this has what must be the worst subtitle track I've ever seen, in the sense that it just cuts out after the first few minutes and never comes back. The piece deserves better.
Still, I liked it a lot, and I hope it doesn't just sound like tokenism when I note that it's my first opera by a black woman. But it is, and I'm happy about that. I mean, happy to have seen it. Not happy that it's thusfar the only one. Shut up.
I was looking through the wikipedia page for Harriett Tubman, and it's pretty darned dispiriting reading about her postwar life, and the mighty struggles she had to undergo to get even the most modest pension from the government. She was well-known and celebrated in many circles, but the overwhelming level of white supremacy that pervaded the country was not an easy force to overcome, as demonstrated by the fact that we still haven't.
I was, however, amused by the following passage, which describes how she met her second husband:
Tubman spent her remaining years in Auburn, tending to her family and other people in need. She worked various jobs to support her elderly parents, and took in boarders to help pay the bills. One of the people Tubman took in was a 5-foot, 11-inch tall farmer named Nelson Charles Davis.
You would think, reading this, that his height would be in some way relevant to something later on in the article, but nope! It's just a completely random fact about him shoved in for no clear reason. Good times.
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