I Dream a World: The Operas of William Grant Still

Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2005

285 pages, $24.95

Beverly Soll’s I Dream a World: The Operas of William Grant Still is not a standard anecdotal biography of a relatively obscure African American composer. This is not a book that dispassionately chronicles the events of its subject’s life, his successes and failures, his foibles and eccentricities. Nor is it a ponderous psychological study. Rather than setting out to write a comprehensive biography, she approaches the life of William Grant Still primarily as it relates to his music, concentrating on the close relationship between Still and his operas. In Soll’s words, “[The book] explores the stories behind the operas, stories that reflect his own life, philosophies, and struggles as a man of African descent in the social milieu of twentieth-century America” (p. xi).

While Still composed a good deal of instrumental music, much of which has enjoyed a gratifying number of performances through the years, his greatest passion was opera. But it was in this arena that he suffered a lifetime of disappointment. Only four of his eight operas have been staged with fully produced performances. Although only a relatively few twentieth-century American composers of any ethnicity have ever seen their operas produced even once, Still was certain that, in his case, the prevailing racial prejudice exacerbated the neglect he experienced. He wrote his operas between 1934 and 1958, well before the civil rights movement gained its greatest momentum, and there is ample evidence to support his belief. Scattered within his diaries and letters are expressions of disillusionment and anger over what he sometimes believed was a conspiracy against him: “There are in these United States too many who think it only right for me to be denied the right to live. They connive to stop performances of my work . . .” (p. 26). After he failed again to have one of his operas performed (Troubled Island ), his diary entry lamented, “Discouraged. . . . When will my operas be produced? God, please help me” (p. 25). This opera was eventually produced eight years later by New York’s City Center Opera. Ironically, the most overt show of bigotry came from the reviewers of the Troubled Island premiere. There is evidence that the critics conspired to pan the opera in spite of the audience’s enthusiastic reception. The reviews took no issue with the fact that this black man was moralizing about good and evil in his opera, nor did they criticize him harshly for not conforming to the current rage of atonality. Instead, the criticism was contrived in ways simply to show that a black composer had no place in the opera world. It was Still’s belief that this conspiracy went on unabated for the remainder of his life.