A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Samuel Dwinell January 2017 © 2017 Samuel Dwinell BLACKNESS IN BRITISH OPERA Samuel Dwinell, Ph.D. Cornell University 2017 Focusing on British opera, this dissertation reassesses the relationship between British national culture and the racial systems of British society since 1945 by presenting a history of British opera that centers nonwhite lives and histories. Rather than simply asserting a connection between British opera and Britishness, this dissertation emphasizes the institutionalization of opera under the auspices of the post- World War II British welfare state as a technology of national identity. In doing so, it responds to changes in British society that followed from unprecedented, large-scale migration of nonwhite people in the second half of the twentieth century from British colonies and former colonies in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean to the imperial metropole of mainland Britain. Stated differently, it situates the history of postcolonial migration to Britain as an integral component of British opera and British national culture, thereby bringing into conversation historical themes of the postwar and the postcolonial that have often been juxtaposed but rarely integrated. By revealing empire’s afterlife within the national institution of British opera, this dissertation calls attention to a widespread neglect of race in much of the scholarly literature on British opera and art-music, and it contributes a new understanding of postwar Britain’s national culture as a critical site of contestation over the meaning and significance of British national identity in the postcolonial period. This dissertation argues that a racial history of British opera helps illuminate and explain the centrality of race to the British nation-state and the historical processes by which the United Kingdom has been constituted in the postwar period as a modern racial state. iii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Samuel Dwinell completed a Bachelors of Arts degree in Music at the University of Oxford in 2005. He then graduated from Trinity Laban College of Music and Dance with a Post-Graduate Diploma in Performance (bassoon) in 2006. He received a Masters of Arts degree in Music with a graduate minor concentration in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Cornell University in 2010. In 2010–2011 he was a visiting student at Columbia University under the Exchange Scholar Program. He has taught at Cornell University as a Graduate Teaching Assistant in the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, a Graduate Teaching Assistant and an instructor of record in the Department of Music, and as a Visiting Lecturer in the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines. He lives in Akron, Ohio, where he holds the position of Assistant Professor of Instruction in the School of Music at the University of Akron. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank the members of my Special Committee, Benjamin Piekut, Arthur Groos, David Rosen, and Nicholas Salvato for their guidance and support throughout the completion of this dissertation. I also wish to acknowledge those scholars whose work has sustained and challenged me, any list of whom must start by mentioning Ashley Dawson, Jed Esty, Marc Matera, Jodi Melamed, Kwesi Owusu, Anna Marie Smith, Stephen Tuck, and Imogen Tyler. In addition, I wish to thank the composer David Blake and the conductor Jonathan Butcher for their willingness to discuss details of this project with me by phone and in person. The staff of Cornell University’s Sidney Cox Library of Music and Dance provided invaluable services throughout my work on this project, and I also thank the staff of the National Archives in London, the Library and Archives of the Britten–Pears Foundation in Aldeburgh, and the Black Cultural Archives in London for their gracious assistance. I also wish to thank Lisa Cutmore for her assistance in preparing the final document. It is not possible to acknowledge everyone who has had a hand in shaping this dissertation, but I would like to thank several of my friends, colleagues, and mentors who supplied intellectual, emotional, and in some cases literal nourishment. That list includes Caroline, Evan, Michael C., Natalie, John W., Wendy, Dag, Bryan, Peter, Amit, Jane, Steve M., Matt K., Brooks, and above all Rachel. Through their thoughtfulness and kindness, my sister Abigail and her husband have also made possible the completion of this dissertation, as have my parents. This dissertation is dedicated to the late Michael Tillett (1922–2009), an amanuensis and editor to the composer Michael Tippett (see Chapter 1!). I first met Michael (Tillett) in the late 1990s when he attended concerts at my secondary school, Maidstone Grammar School, of which he was an always-young “old boy.” One afternoon at the Dartington Summer School in 2005, Michael listened with some bemusement to my hazy plans to earn a Ph.D. in musicology, before suggesting that such endeavors would likely bear only bitter fruit: “You’ll end up writing the history of the minim rest,” he warned wryly. As Michael may have been relieved to learn, this is not the history of the minim rest. Black lives matter. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Institutionalizing Opera in the British Racial State 1 Chapter 1 Intimate Opera: Michael Tippett’s The Knot Garden, and the Cultural Production of Liberal Race Relations Discourse 47 Chapter 2 Music and Surveillance: Staging Liberal Multiculturalism in Thatcherite Britain 126 Chapter 3 Performing Black British History in Postracial Times 211 Chapter 4 Revisiting Haiti: British Opera and the Black Radical Tradition 279 Bibliography 356 vi INTRODUCTION INSTITUTIONALIZING OPERA IN THE BRITISH RACIAL STATE Legislation under the United Kingdom Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 introduced a citizenship test into U.K. nationality law for the first time in British history.1 The citizenship test was to serve the stated purpose of proving “sufficient knowledge of British life” and “sufficient proficiency in the English language,” even though it is in fact possible to take the test in Welsh or Scottish Gaelic.2 An official study guide, Life in the United Kingdom: A Guide for New Residents, provides applicants with help in preparing for the test. Under the new legislation, an adult seeking Indefinite Leave to Remain in the U.K. or naturalization as a U.K. citizen must apparently receive a score of 75 percent or higher on the test in order for the U.K. government to proceed with her application. Policymakers and government spokespersons generally framed the introduction of a citizenship test into U.K. nationality law as a state response to a purported climate of insecurity and terrorism after September 11, 2001,3 implying that “proficiency in the English language” and “knowledge of British life” evince or inspire a disinclination toward violence. In 2013, the U.K. government changed the content of the citizenship test to reflect a new focus on the cultural, political, and social history of the British nation.4 While earlier versions of 1 See John Greenwood and Lynton Robbins, “Citizenship Tests and Education: Embedding a Concept,” Parliamentary Affairs 55 (2002): 505–22. 2 Jenny Wales, Life in the United Kingdom: A Guide for New Residents, 3rd ed. (Norwich, UK: TSO, on behalf of the Home Office, 2013), 10–11. 3 Anne-Marie Fortier, “What’s the Big Deal? Naturalisation and the Politics of Desire,” Citizenship Studies 17, nos. 6–7 (2013): 697–711. 4 Thom Brooks, “The British Citizenship Test: The Case for Reform,” Political Quarterly 83 (2013): 560–66. 1 the test examined aspects of civic rights and procedures, such as eligibility to serve on a jury for a criminal trial, and matters of “home economics,” such as how to read a domestic electricity meter, in 2013 the U.K. Minister of State for Immigration Mark Harper announced that what he called the “mundane information” of the old test material would be replaced by a revised test on British cultural history.5 Reflecting these changes, the 2013 edition of Life in the United Kingdom features an account of British history that constructs “British life” via a history of the nation’s culture. As the study guide explains, possible topics on the new test include Shakespeare, Monty Python, the Beatles, “British composers” (such as Henry Purcell, Benjamin Britten, and Andrew Lloyd Webber), and “our national love of gardening.”6 In light of this new focus on British culture, the advocacy group Migrants’ Rights Network compared the 2013 test to an obscure initiation ritual of the British upper classes.7 Yet, any opacity in the test may not be accidental: the recent changes to the test coincided with renewed government promises to reduce net permanent migration to Britain by placing greater obstacles to legal immigration and increasing the use of forced deportations. The changes to the U.K. citizenship test in 2013 mean that an official form of British cultural studies now assumes a state role in adjudicating transnational mobility at the border of postcolonial Britain and contributes to the post-9/11 securitization of citizenship across European and North American nation states.8 Under the revised version of the test, U.K. nationality and 5 Quoted in Robert Booth, “Want to Become a British Citizen? Better Swot Up on Monty Python,” The Guardian, January 27, 2013). <http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jan/27/british-citizenship-test>. 6 Wales, Life in the United Kingdom, 82–109. 7 Quoted in Booth, “Want to Become a British Citizen?”. 8 The U.K. citizenship test functions differently from historical precedents such as techniques for disenfranchising black voters in the U.S. south during the late nineteenth century, whereby black citizens were disbarred from voting on account of “failing” various “literacy tests,” abstruse algebraic conundrums, or “general knowledge” exams; “failing” the test was seemingly the intended—and sometimes the only possible—outcome.