The story appears on

Page A11

September 25, 2021

GET this page in PDF

Free for subscribers

View shopping cart

Related News

Home » Feature

First opera by Black musician to open Met’s season

Charles Blow recalls being in the audience at the premiere of the opera based on his memoir “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” and watching the scene that depicts his sexual abuse as a child by an older cousin.

“To be honest,” he said, “it was more uncomfortable watching everybody watching me. Because they were so unnerved by it they worried about my reaction.”

They needn’t have been concerned, Blow said in an interview.

“When I wrote the book, I’d already dealt with all that,” he said. “I don’t have the residual trauma that a lot of people expect me to have.”

Blow, a columnist for The New York Times, will again be in the audience when the opera opens the Metropolitan Opera season on September 27. It will be the first operatic performance in the house since the pandemic-induced shutdown 18 months ago.

More history making is the fact that “Fire,” with a score by jazz trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard, will be the first opera by a Black musician presented at the Met in its 138-year history.

“Of course you’re filled with pride to be labeled with that,” Blanchard said after a rehearsal last week. “But there’s a certain sense of, not guilt, but sorrow, because I know I’m not the first who was qualified.”

For example, Blanchard said he was at the Opera Theatre of St Louis this summer — where “Fire” premiered in 2019 — and heard a performance of “Highway 1,” a one-act opera by Black composer William Grant Still first performed in 1963.

“I’m sitting there listening to that,” he said, “and I go, like, why couldn’t that be at the Met?"

Blanchard said OTSL artistic director James Robinson had been after him to compose another opera after his first, “Champion,” based on the life of boxer Emile Griffith, premiered there in 2013. When his wife Robin Burgess recommended he read Blow’s memoir, Blanchard said it struck a chord.

In his book, Blow, now 51, describes growing up in poverty as a shy, sensitive child in rural Louisiana with four macho older brothers, a philandering drunk for a father and a warm-hearted, hard-working mother who carried a gun in her purse.

“What drew me to this story was the notion of being isolated and different in your own community,” said Blanchard, who was born in New Orleans. “I knew a lot about that growing up, wanting to be a musician and walking to the bus stop on the weekends, carrying my horn and wearing glasses while the other boys were playing football in the street. That was not a popular look.”

To write the libretto, Blanchard enlisted filmmaker Kasi Lemmons, his friend and frequent collaborator. She had never written an opera libretto, though she said it was on a “bucket list” of things she hoped someday to accomplish.

“I didn’t know what the process normally was,” Lemmons said. “I didn’t even know the libretto went first. I thought maybe the music came first.”

For advice, she turned to Robinson who gave her the crucial suggestion that “in an opera, anything can sing.” Inspired by that, she created two characters known as Destiny and Loneliness who accompany Blow at different points in his life. She also has a child in the role of the young Charles on stage at various points alongside the adult character.

Lemmons said she was nervous about how Blow might react to some of her invention.

“Okay, I’ve written this guy’s loneliness as a character. That’s pretty intrusive,” she said. “On the other hand, the way he spoke about loneliness in the book was very palpable.”

Once she handed the libretto to Blanchard, he set it to music with few changes. The score is infused with jazz rhythms and filled with lyrical passages, including full-fledged arias for some of the characters.

The Met production is co-directed by Robinson and Camille A. Brown. Met music director Yannick Nezet-Seguin will lead a cast of stars.




 

Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.

沪公网安备 31010602000204号

Email this to your friend