“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” “Steal Away.” “Deep River.” Once the only people who knew the classic spirituals were the generations of the dispossessed who sang them in the days of slavery. Then came Reconstruction, and the trailblazing Fisk Jubilee Singers took them on the road to raise money for their faltering new university in Nashville, Tennessee. Seven of the nine ensemble members were formerly enslaved persons, and several were still in their teens. “They had no money, no reputation, no experience performing on the road,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough has said, “and the ridicule and menace they faced, because of their color, were all too real in a land where, by then, everybody supposedly had equal rights.” A quarter century ago, PBS told the Jubilee Singers’ story on the series American Experience; for the record, the ensemble survives and performs to this day. Now Tazewell Thompson, who at 76 is Black American theater royalty, has dramatized the Jubilee Singers’ history for the opera house, building to a climactic command performance before Queen Victoria. Vocal arrangements are by Dianne Adams McDowell, orchestrations by Michael Ellis Ingram. Kellen Gray conducts. —Matthew Gurewitsch