In her conclusion to Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement, Naomi André writes in reference to a production of Bizet's Carmen in which the title character is a transgender person, that it seems as if ‘opera is approaching a new frontier’. This book – and Andre's previous writing on gender and blackness in opera – already charts opera's journey towards this new, ever-evolving frontier.

The manifestations of opera both musically and theatrically (its performance practice) has been ever changing in spaces outside the Western European setting of its origin and the zeitgeist within which those operas had been composed. It seems logical that beyond the time and space of nineteenth-century Italy, the Risorgimento operas of Verdi would take on a different meaning to audiences. But this could be said of many operas (or performances of historical music) – although it had been composed within a specific context, a contemporary context alters our understanding and value of a work so that it in fact becomes an artistic expression of the present.

Reading this book as an opera scholar living in Cape Town has contributed much to my thinking of how opera is practised in South Africa, but it also creates a bias as to how I have experienced the matters addressed in this book, especially the comparisons between American and South African opera productions and the specific compositions by composers from these countries.

In Black Opera, André frames her discussion with sensible parameters. As the title suggests, she covers manifestations of blackness in opera, explores its history, how power (political in nature on various levels) has impacted performances and negotiated a history of blackness (or the lack thereof) in opera, and she proposes a vantage point that she calls engaged musicology. This type of musicology Andre defines as being involved with ‘the current diverse publics interpreting a work’ (198).