AMS Panel announcement

AMS-SEM-SMT 2022 Annual Joint Meeting | Hilton New Orleans Riverside | November 12, 2022 9–10:30 a.m.

We are thrilled to announce that our panel, “Discourses of Race in Meyerbeer’s Stage Works,” will take place at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in November 2022. Laura K. T. Stokes, Helena Kopchick Spencer, and Tomasso Sabbatini will present papers that together paint a complex picture of the role played by race in the conception, production, and reception of Meyerbeer’s works. Our deepest thanks to Diana Hallman for chairing this session.

Session abstract: The topic of racial dynamics within nineteenth-century operas has received growing scholarly attention in recent years. Existing discussions of Meyerbeer and race, however, have tended to revolve around his Jewishness and antisemitic aspects of his reception. The sparse scholarship on racial modalities within Meyerbeer’s works focuses on exoticism (Locke 2009, 2021), archetypes in L’Africaine (Parakilas 1993) or Orientalism in Il crociato (Everist 1996).

This session offers three new interpretations of the construction of racial difference in Meyerbeer’s operas, suggesting a perspective in these works that is unusual in the larger realm of nineteenth-century opera. The first paper explores depictions of the Roma (i.e. “Gypsies”) in two of Meyerbeer’s works, the Singspiel Ein Feldlager in Schlesien and the grand opéra Les Huguenots, elucidating Meyerbeer’s “Gypsy” musical idiom and its manifold significance in the depiction of complex social situations. The second paper also examines the Act III “gypsy” ballet from Les Huguenots, as choreographed by Henri Justamant for Lyon (1850s) and Paris (1868). Justamant’s choreography for this ballet, along with his choreography of Robert le diable for Brussels (1863), reveals embodied narratives of racial exclusion and elimination. The juxtaposition of these two papers highlights the multivalence of the Huguenots scene based on performance and staging choices, with the Roma either standing outside of white European violence or the target of its redirected rage.

The final paper offers a nuanced consideration of race in L’Africaine by considering possible inspirations for the first version of the opera, partly set in inland West Africa and written before the abolition of slavery in French territories. It argues that the protagonist and her people embody an ideal of a synthetic, transatlantic Blackness within the liberal European imagination, connecting Africa to the Caribbean and to Black Europeans.

The re-examination of these operas illuminates nuances in Meyerbeer and his collaborators’ engagement with contemporary discourses on race, including their framing of the role of racial Others within European nations and externally through imperialism. These works together suggest a complex engagement with questions of race and their relation to assimilation, multiracialism, and imperialism, and the role of the state.