The Delta King’s Blues is the first full opera commissioned by IN Series, and will be another Washington-area world premiere opera from composer Damien Geter, whose Loving v. Virginia had its first performances this past spring with Virginia Opera and the Richmond Symphony (I was fortunate to have the opportunity to interview him and others about that). Geter’s scoring for this opera includes instrumentation and stylistic elements drawn from both classical and blues elements.
The performance will be directed by Alicia Washington, who is Founder, Co-Director and Board Chair of Good Company Theatre in Ogden, Utah. Conducted by Matthew Lynch and Darren Lin, the production features Melissa Wimbish, Christian Simmons, Marvin Wayne Allen II, and Anthony Ballard; tenor Albert R. Lee makes a return to IN Series, having been in The Ordering of Moses in 2023.
Vocalist, consultant and writer Jarrod Lee wrote the libretto for The Delta King’s Blues (he was also the librettist for Spirit Moves, commissioned by IN Series), which plays upon a generations-old legend around blues titan Robert Johnson (1911–1938), whose talent was extraordinary enough to spur rumors that he must have sold his soul to the devil to acquire it. Although his entire discography consists of just 29 songs, recorded in two sessions in Texas in 1936 and ’37, Johnson remains a powerfully influential figure, both within the blues genre and well beyond it. Composer Damien Geter says that Johnson “is arguably the most important American musician whose influence is still heard today.”
Librettist Jarrod Lee is a Cardwell Dawson Artist Fellow (named in honor of Mary Cardwell Dawson, who founded the National Negro Opera Company in 1941) with IN Series, which launched this fellowship program in 2021 to encourage and support “singers of color to develop into leaders of color in the opera industry,” as Artistic Director Timothy Nelson has explained.
Nelson says that The Delta King’s Blues “lifts up a wholly and truly American story, and tells with mystery and joy of the advent of the original fundamentally American musical language — the blues — setting it proudly and audaciously beside the Western classical canon to both spar and dance. This production centers an untold story with roots outside historical power structures, and it heals opera’s damaged canon in a generative way, by expanding and making it more whole.”
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