Denyce Graves looked into the distance, toward the Ohio River, and softly recited words from a spiritual: “Before I’ll be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave, and go home to my Lord to be free.”
For Graves, singing the title role of “Margaret Garner,” opening tonight in Music Hall, is deeply personal.
“This was a story of my own lineage, my own heritage,” she thought when composer Richard Danielpour approached her with the idea about six years ago. She knew that this story also inspired Toni Morrison’s novel “Beloved.”
“This was a story of my people, something that made it very personal, as a woman, as an African-American, as an American. It was me on so many different levels,” she says.
But she couldn’t have known that she would be performing it as a new mother with a 1-year-old infant. In the opera, the fugitive slave kills her child rather than see her returned to bondage. (more…)
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