In January 1856, Margaret Garner--an enslaved woman on a Kentucky
plantation--ran with members of her family to the free state of Ohio. As
slave catchers attempted to capture the fugitives in Cincinnati, Garner
cut the throat of her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter to prevent her
return to slavery. Toni Morrison first imaginatively treated Margaret
Garner's infanticide in her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved
(1987). In 2004, it became the subject of her libretto Margaret Garner:
Opera in Two Acts, a lyrical text designed to be paired with music and
sung operatically. Grammy Award-winning composer Richard Danielpour had
tapped Morrison to write the libretto for his opera Margaret Garner: A
New American Opera, which world premiered in Detroit in 2005.
La Vinia Delois Jennings's edited volume records key events, debates,
and critical assessments of Morrison's success with Garner's story as a
libretto. It also includes essays by individuals who played central
roles in bringing the opera to the stage and recovering Garner's story.
The collection opens with a foreword by mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves, for
whom Danielpour composed the title role. The other contributors range
from literary and opera scholars to specialists in American slavery
studies and scholars of Toni Morrison's oeuvre. Their essays position
her libretto within the African American operatic and libretto
tradition, a tradition not fully known to performance scholars and
heretofore unexamined.
