Ulysses Kay

In October2021, we announced As Told By: History, Race, and Justice on the Opera Stage, the most extensive and ambitious presentation of opera by Black composers to ever take place in the US. Ulysses Kay’s Frederick Douglass is the second installment of five operas that depict vital figures of Black liberation and thought across 250 years of history.

Frederick Douglass, Ulysses Kay’s final opera and his second on themes of Black American equality, premiered in 1991. With a libretto from Kay’s frequent collaborator Donald Dorr, the opera depicts the abolitionist’s final years and his second marriage through Kay’s style of “enlightened modernism” which brings his lyrical instinct together with a contemporary angularity. As Dorr noted in the program note for the opera’s premiere, while their earlier opera Jubilee had been imbued with the spirit of Frederick Douglass, the team was excited to embrace the man himself: “The words of the great leader would be our companion, guide, challenge.”

They chose to set their semi-fictionalized story in the years following the Civil War, when Douglass’s image and reputation were chal­lenged by rumors and criticism. Dorr summarized the central ques­tions of the opera: “How much of Douglass’s fall was perpetrated by unseen hands? Frederick Douglass had won the war. Could he survive the peace?” Though Kay considered the work his magnum opus, it has not been performed in full since its premiere. BMOP is proud to return this work to the stage after nearly 35 years and to release the first commercial recording of the opera.