Amid the familiar sounds of Puccini, we are taken from the nightlife of San Francisco's Chinatown to the fallout from Pearl Harbor, as told through voices and perspectives of Asian Americans during a critical time in American culture and history. The Chinese American nightclub scene peaked during World War II when Asian Americans of all backgrounds were commanding nightclub stages while defying racial and cultural barriers. Many performers presented publicly as Chinese American due to growing anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States. In this new production, Butterfly works as a singer in a nightclub while contributing to the war [...]

Our new Madama Butterfly is directed by choreographer, dancer, author, and co-founder of Final Bow for Yellowface Phil Chan. This new production moves the story to 1940s San Francisco on the eve of Pearl Harbor. When Butterfly, a nightclub performer contributing to the war effort, meets Pinkerton, a young soldier, an unstoppable series of events is set in motion. Through the eyes of Butterfly, audiences will follow her journey from San Francisco to a Japanese incarceration camp, a journey many Japanese Americans lived during a critical moment in U.S. history. Today's deeper dive focuses on Japanese incarceration during WWII. [...]

Welcome to CODA! Coda comes from the Latin word for “tail,” and in music, it indicates an additional passage at the end of a piece of music, a final flourish that compliments what’s come before. CODA goes beyond the curtain call to explore this unique and astonishing art form. Whether you’re a first-time opera-goer or a seasoned audience member, CODA is for you. Attention parents: enrollment in our annual Opera Camp has begun! In collaboration with our friends at VOICES Boston, Opera Camp is designed for rising 3rd-9th graders who have an interest in all things music, singing, and [...]

Summer is finally here, and BLO has lots of excitement ahead. After a season filled with new highs and artistic successes, we kick off the summer with the world premiere of The Wanderer’s Tethering, a BLO commission from City of Boston Poet Laureate Porsha Olayiwola and Boston-based composer Mason Bynes. What excites me about this project is the intersection between art forms - poetry and music; spoken word and sung performance; chamber ensemble and narrative - and the powerful impact they make when telling a story. This project, our second partnership with the Boston Poet Laureate program, embodies and builds [...]

[EXCERPT] Joseph Bologne, “Chevalier de Saint-Georges” (ca. 1739-1799) was a Parisian celebrity, acclaimed swordsman, composer, violin virtuoso, and conductor of one of the best orchestras in Europe. He also fought in at least one, perhaps two revolutions. Bologne was born to a teenaged enslaved woman, Anne “dit Nanon” on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. There is no record of his baptism, and primary sources have conflicting information regarding his date of birth. Bologne’s father, a wealthy plantation owner, brought the boy and his mother to Paris and introduced the young “Chevalier de Saint-Georges” into French society while ensuring he [...]

By Allison Chu “It's all made up. The Omar that I wrote is a made up Omar. It's not the real Omar, because the real Omar we cannot know. We can only try to evoke the spirit of Omar passed down to us.”1 With this declaration, composer Rhiannon Giddens lays out the limitations and creative possibilities of recounting Omar Ibn Said’s autobiographical writing through opera. The fifteen short handwritten pages of The Life of Omar Ibn Said comprise the only surviving slave narrative written in Arabic in the United States. What we know of the real Ibn Said is largely pieced together from his written voice, documented [...]

Dive In by Leigh Webber leighwebber.com By Lucy Caplan  “The act of imagination is bound up with memory,” writes Toni Morrison. In her foundational essay “The Site of Memory,” Morrison takes up the question of how her fiction responds to and extends upon the slave narrative, a genre that is at the heart of the African American literary tradition. Slave narratives – in which fugitive and formerly enslaved people documented their experiences in order to communicate slavery’s brutality, advocate for abolition, and assert the writer’s humanity – were acts of testimony through which African Americans, under conditions [...]