Freeman, Harry Lawrence

The African-American opera composer Harry Lawrence Freeman, son of Lemuel Freeman and Agnes Sims-Freeman, was born in 1869 in Cleveland, Ohio. The Freeman family had been free landholders in Cleveland for several decades before the Civil War. Agnes is said to have had a beautiful singing voice, and young Harry showed exceptional musical abilities at an early age. By age 12, he organized a boy's vocal quartet, in which he sang first treble, and worked as a church organist. Self-taught, he began composing at the age of 18, after being inspired by a performance of Wagner's Tannhauser. By 1891, Freeman had organized the Freeman Grand Opera Company in Denver, Colorado. His first operas, Epthalia and The Martyr, were performed by the Freeman Grand Opera Company in Denver's Deutsches Theater in 1891 and 1893 respectively. Freeman wrote the libretti as well as composing the music for these two pieces, as he did for all of his operas except for Uzziah.

In 1893 Freeman returned to Cleveland, where The Martyr had its second production at the German Theatre in 1894. Around 1893 Freeman began studying theory and composition formally with Johann Beck, then the conductor of the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra. Beck identified Freeman's promise as a composer immediately, saying, "Freeman has some of the important qualities of character that made Wagner great. His compositions are wonderfully big in conception, the music faithfully portraying the sentiment of the words." Perhaps because of this comment, Freeman was dubbed "the colored Wagner" in the press, a sobriquet that stayed with him all his life. Freeman's music shows Wagner's influence in his use of leitmotifs and orchestration; also, Freeman planned to write a cycle of four music-dramas based on African myths, probably inspired by Richard Wagner's 'Ring Cycle' of four operas based on Norse mythology.

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