Opera, ‘Race Fear’, and the Present Reckoning
By Mia Pistorius Last week, the Los Angeles Review of Books published a wide-ranging survey of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Anthony Davis’s operas. In the profile, which provides captivating experiential descriptions of Davis’s compositional style, author Thomas Larson quotes the composer’s explanation for opera’s diversity problem: [S]ome “give lip service,” he says, to diversity and all-Black …