Harry Lawrence Freeman

Harry Lawrence Freeman (October 9, 1869 – March 24, 1954) was a United States opera composer, conductor, impresario and teacher. He was the first African-American to write an opera (Epthalia, 1891) that was successfully produced. Freeman founded the Freeman School of Music and the Freeman School of Grand Opera, as well as several short-lived opera companies which gave first performances of his own compositions. During his life, he was known as "the black Wagner."

Harry Lawrence Freeman was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1869, to parents Lemuel Freeman and Agnes Silms-Freeman. Freeman learned to play the piano and was an assistant church organist by the age of 10. At the age of 18, he was inspired to begin composing his own music after attending a performance of Richard Wagner's opera Tannhäuser.

By the age of 22, Freeman had founded the Freeman Opera Company in Denver, Colorado. His first opera, Epithalia, was performed at the Deutsches Theater in Denver in 1891. His second opera, The Martyr, premiered at the same theater on August 16, 1893. It was also produced by the Freeman Opera Company, and concerned an Egyptian nobleman put to death for accepting the religion of Jehovah. The Freeman Opera Company went on to produce The Martyr in Chicago in October 1893 and in Cleveland in 1894. This was the first opera in the United States to be produced by an all-Black production company.The Martyr is also listed by John Warthen Struble as "produced in Denver, first known opera by an African-American composer." Although this is clearly incorrect given the staging of Epithalia two years earlier, Freeman was certainly a pioneering classical composer in the African-American community.

In 1894, Freeman returned to live in Cleveland, and began formal training in music theory under Johann Heinrich Beck, conductor of the Cleveland Symphony (a different organization from the Cleveland Orchestra, which was founded in 1918). In 1898, Freeman married Charlotte Loise Thomas, a woman from Charleston, South Carolina who sang soprano. Two years later, Charlotte (who was also known as Carlotta) gave birth to Freeman's son Valdo, and the same year, the Cleveland Orchestra gave readings of excerpts from Freeman's operas. 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.

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