Chicago-based baritone Will Liverman is booked and busy. He’s become a regular fixture at the country’s premier opera houses and orchestras, including at the city’s own Lyric Opera and the storied Metropolitan Opera in New York.
But five years ago, Liverman was stuck in the same limbo as the rest of us, locked down in his Wrigleyville apartment without a gig for months. The lull gave the opera singer the latitude to try something new: writing music. He spent more hours tinkering behind the keyboard — his “first love” as a young musician — than he had in decades. He even completed an entire opera set in a South Side barbershop: “The Factotum,” which premiered at Lyric in 2023.
“Branching out was healing,” Liverman told WBEZ in an interview from the Berkshires, where he was working with young singers at the prestigious Tanglewood Music Festival. “It’s something I felt was always in there.”
The whole time, Liverman was also at work on a two-album project called “The Dunbar/Moore Sessions,” inspired by the poetry of married African American writers Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson. Both albums — which feature Liverman on voice and keys, plus guest performances by the likes of opera star Isabel Leonard and Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Mykal Kilgore — were just issued as a complete collection.
Much like “The Factotum” — which, he still insists, was “meant to be a mixtape” — Liverman didn’t set out to complete an entire album, at least not initially. While he was writing his opera, soprano Lauren Snouffer formally commissioned him to write a short song. He responded with “A Golden Day,” which became the second song on “The Dunbar/Moore Sessions.”
Dunbar, Liverman’s muse, may be a familiar name to some Chicagoans. While still in his 20s, the poet had already gained wide acclaim in the U.S. as a leading Black voice, writing about racism and African American life with unflinching directness. He briefly moved to Chicago to seek work during the 1893 World’s Fair, during which time he befriended Frederick Douglass. Today, Bronzeville boasts both a park and a vocational school named in Dunbar’s honor.
Sitting with Dunbar’s verses for long hours stirred something in Liverman. He delved into another poem: Dunbar’s “Good-Night,” which ends the album. And another. And another.
At that point, Liverman wasn’t responding to any commission at all. He just wanted to set Dunbar’s verses to music himself.
“Seeing the breadth of work that he put out in his very short life, I felt a deep connection to his writing,” Liverman said. “[I thought], ‘Why not? What do I have to lose by not waiting for permission and not waiting for someone to tell me to do something?’”
Liverman stresses that no survey of Dunbar’s life and work would be complete without Dunbar-Nelson, also a prolific poet. She was a pathbreaker in her own right: Her poetry and short story anthology, “Violets and Other Tales,” was considered the first known work of its kind by a Black woman upon its publication in 1895, and she advocated for anti-lynching laws and on behalf of Black women and girls.
Their marriage, however, was fraught. Dunbar was physically abusive, and though they never divorced, they lived apart from 1902, when Dunbar-Nelson left him, to 1906, when Dunbar died of tuberculosis. Ultimately, Liverman set to music five of Dunbar-Nelson’s poems as part of the project, including “Farewell” and “To the Negro Farmers of the United States.”
“I had no idea that Alice was a poet,” Liverman confessed. “I was just really blown away by her writing. When things were good, they wrote poems together.”
As a music student at suburban Wheaton College, younger Liverman surely would have been baffled by the very notion of “The Dunbar/Moore Sessions.”
“In undergrad, my teacher would assign me a Fauré or Schubert song. Then I’d look at the poetry and I’d have no connection to it,” he recalled. “I was like, ‘I don’t want to sing about some flowers and a German river!’”
He’s come around, of course. “The Dunbar/Moore Sessions” seeks to bring other genres, such as gospel and R&B, into dialogue with the classical tradition.
In that spirit, Liverman recorded the project with a cast of singers who could straddle styles. Opera stars Isabel Leonard and Joshua Blue sing on “The Threefold Heart,” a triptych of songs. “Night” features Kilgore, an R&B and musical theater artist. Jacqueline Echols, who recently portrayed Rosa Parks in Chicago Opera Theater’s “She Who Dared,” sings a powerhouse balladic setting of Dunbar-Nelson’s “A Plaint.” Though in demand as an operatic soprano, Echols had left a lasting impression on Liverman after a fiery rendition of Kurt Carr’s “For Every Mountain” on a concert bill they shared.
In a new turn for Liverman, he accompanies his colleagues on piano throughout the album, in addition to singing a few songs himself. “[Playing piano] was really fun to come back to — and it was a challenge too,” he said.
Not that he has ever backed down from one of those.