When “Voodoo,” an evening-length warning against using magic for romantic fulfillment, was performed in a semi-staged production in New York in 2015, it was the first time the work had been performed since 1928. The piece has Wagnerian affinities, with Rhinemaiden-like music in the early going. But this influence is often suavely merged with spirituals and African percussion accents — often deployed in the service of love triangles and mystic conjuring spells.

Shirley Graham Du Bois, ‘Tom-Tom’ (1932)

Before she married W.E.B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham was known as perhaps the first black woman to have an opera performed, in 1932, for an audience of 25,000 at Cleveland Stadium. The score for that epic work, “Tom-Tom” — which traces the black experience from West Africa to the Harlem Renaissance — was long thought lost. (The full work was found in Ms. Graham Du Bois’s papers.) A performance at Harvard in 2018, organized by the scholar Lucy Caplan and the American Modern Opera Company, introduced tantalizing excerpts — some merging jazz harmony with European operatic influences.

James P. Johnson, ‘De Organizer’ (1940)

The writer of the hit song “Charleston” was also a composer with theatrical experience. This one-act opera about labor politics, with a libretto by Langston Hughes, was performed in 1940. (The deliverance that a working-class community seeks is provided by the labor organizer of the title, who aides in the creation of a union despite the opposition of the local overseer.)