Harry Lawrence Freeman

Harry Lawrence Freeman (October 9, 1869 – March 24, 1954) was an American neoromantic opera composer,[1] conductor, impresario and teacher.

[3] At the age of 18, he was inspired to begin composing his own music after attending a performance of Richard Wagner's opera Tannhäuser.

It was also produced by the Freeman Opera Company, and concerned an Egyptian nobleman put to death for accepting the religion of Jehovah.

[6] The Martyr is also listed by John Warthen Struble as "produced in Denver, first known opera by an African-American composer.

[4] For the next decade, the new family lived in Cleveland, Chicago, and Xenia, Ohio, where Freeman was director of the music program at Wilberforce University in 1902 and 1903.

In 1912, ragtime composer Scott Joplin, who was then living in New York, asked Freeman's help in revising his three-act opera, "Treemonisha," production of which had stalled the previous year.

[4] Freeman's wife Carlotta and his son Valdo, a baritone, sang principal roles in many of the Negro Grand Opera Company's productions.

[4] At New York's Steinway Hall in 1930, Freeman accompanied at the piano a performance of excerpts from The Martyr, The Prophecy, The Octoroon, Plantation, Vendetta and Voodoo.

[4] Freeman composed at least twenty-three operas,[2] Many, including a massive tetralogy Zululand which filled over 2,000 pages of score, were never performed.

While Elise Kirk cites several operas composed by African-Americans earlier in the nineteenth century, it appears that none of these ever were staged in their entirety before Freeman's Epithalia in 1891.

Harry Lawrence Freeman