There is one key difference between the opera about a historic meeting between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley that Opera Theatre of St. Louis mounted in 2021 and the opera they are mounting on March 19. Says Nicole Ambos Freber, the company’s managing director, “It’s not in a parking lot.”
At the time of the opera’s world premiere in 2021, Opera Theatre was eager to again bring its art to St. Louis—but pandemic restrictions and fears of COVID-19 made a traditional season impossible. So the company offered The Tongue and The Lash, as well as the summer’s other productions, not in Loretto-Hilton Center, but in a parking lot on its grounds, with seating carefully set up to allow parties to sit six feet from each other. It was an unusual festival season, to say the least.
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The Tongue and the Lash, which imagines a conversation between Baldwin and Buckley after their 1965 debate at the Cambridge Union Society, has since gone on to be performed in New York City. The free March 19 performance at WashU’s Graham Chapel marks its return to St. Louis, starring baritone Markel Reed, who originated the role of Baldwin in 2021. He’ll be joined by tenor Andrew Morstein playing Buckley and longtime Opera Theatre favorite Robert Mellon as the adjudicator.
As Freber explains, the small cast and simple staging make this an easy one to present for a one-night run—and the short running length, just 25–30 minutes, makes it a good introduction to opera for anyone who might be interested in Buckley, Baldwin, or race in America but not yet accustomed to hearing their protagonists sing all their lines.
“It’s such a good conversation spark, this opera, in a way that maybe not every opera is,” Freber says. “I think it has real legs, because it’s easy to do with relatively small forces of people, and it’s such a great conversation starter.”
The real-life event that inspired the opera was a debate between Baldwin, the author and civil rights activist, and Buckley, the conservative founder of the National Review on the motion, “The American dream is at the expense of the American Negro.” The audience determined that Baldwin had won in a landslide. Buckley later called it “the most satisfying debate I ever had”; it was televised live by the BBC and later rebroadcast in America.
Frebere says the opera seemed timely in 2021, but may be even more timely today. “I hope that it makes people think about how we interact with each other, and that it reminds us of the importance of being able to talk about challenging topics and to listen to the opposing viewpoint, because that’s really what this opera is about,” she says. “We need to be able to have that conversation. We need to be able to debate, but also still to collaborate with each other.”
The opera will be followed by a panel discussion moderated by WashU Law professor Adrienne Davis. Participants will include composer Damien Sneed; Naomi André, a founding member of the Black Opera Research Network; Nicholas Buccola, author of The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate Over Race in America; and Lauren Eldridge Stewart, an assistant professor of ethnomusicology at WashU.
The performance is co-sponsored by WashU’s Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity (CRE2) and WashU’s Department of Music in Arts & Sciences. The performance is open to the public and free to attend, but reservations are recommended.
