AMERICAN APOLLO
Des Moines Metro Opera Festival and Blank Performing Arts Center, Indianola, Iowa
July 13–19, 2024
When John Singer Sargent’s nude portrait of Thomas McKeller was revealed to the world in 2020, it incited speculation about the artist’s sexuality and his relationships with his male models. Ignacio Darnaude, who wrote about the painting in this magazine (Sept.-Oct. 2021 issue), characterized it as the pièce de résistance in a trove of “intimate, sensual, voyeuristic, and openly homoerotic male nude drawings [that]surfaced after [Sargent’s] death.” For many, the painting betrays Sargent’s romantic feelings for McKeller, a young African-American bellhop whom Sargent used as the body model for his classically-themed murals at Boston’s MFA.
Sargent and McKeller’s relationship is the subject of American Apollo, a new opera composed by Damien Geter with a libretto by Lila Palmer, which had its world premiere at the Des Moines Metro Opera Festival on July 13, 2024. The opera dramatizes the possibility that Sargent and McKeller had a years-long love affair, albeit one strained by racial and class differences—and by the fact that McKeller’s personal and racial identity is erased in the murals. The result was a poignant, tender opera, anchored by rising star baritone Justin Austin, who sang the role of McKeller with captivating intensity. Geter’s eclectic musical score, which ranged from classical impressionism to blues jazz, sonically charted McKeller’s constant movement between Sargent’s rarefied studio and the African-American spaces of early 20th-century Boston.
Although the stage was typically dominated by life-size versions of Sargent’s famous paintings, it soon became clear that this is McKeller’s opera, not Sargent’s. “He wants me to be a god,” McKeller says about Sargent after one of their early meetings, subtly hinting at his awareness of Sargent’s complex, and ultimately untenable, feelings toward his favorite male model.
Joseph M. Ortiz
