When at the height of his fame, the late James Levine, the longtime music director of the Metropolitan Opera, was asked why he almost never staged newly composed operas, he had an answer that dismayed critics and music academics but that resonated with the company’s core audience.
“I wish I really thought there was a new opera good enough for the Met every year,” Levine told Charlie Rose on PBS in 1995. His point was not only that the Met should be solely obligated to produce great works but also that only great operas are economically viable because they must fill the Met’s 4,000 seats and standing room places, which must be sold every night in order for the company to survive.
Levine, who died in exile from his artistic home earlier this year at the age of 77, dominated the world of American classical music as a star conductor for decades. His career was brought to an end by #MeToo revelations that surfaced in 2017, which suggested an equally long run as an abhorrent sexual abuser of victims ranging from adolescents to young artists.
So it was perhaps fitting that the company, which in his absence has broken with the practice of ignoring contemporary composers, would seal that change by opening its new season with Fire Shut Up in My Bones, which centers on the rape of a child and the victim’s subsequent efforts to cope with that trauma.
But few were recalling Levine’s opinions about new operas or his crimes on Sept. 27, the opening night of Fire and the company’s first post-COVID-19 performance after an 18-month hiatus.
While Peter Gelb, the Met’s controversial general director, first chose to bring the piece to the Met after its world premiere in St. Louis in 2019, his reason for giving it the prestigious opening night slot had nothing to do with a dedication to new music. Rather, as he openly acknowledged in an interview with the New York Times, the symbolism of the Met’s first production of an opera by a black composer was uppermost in his mind.
Though lacking specifically political content, Fire is the perfect vehicle for Black Lives Matter virtue signaling. Based on the memoir of leftist New York Times columnist Charles Blow, the opera boasts not just the Met’s first black composer, jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard, and first black librettist, Kasi Lemmons, but it also has an all-black cast.
It was long past time for the company to stage a piece by a black composer. In its 138-year existence, the Met has staged approximately 300 operas, including quite a few new ones in the early 20th century that are now almost completely forgotten. But none were written by a black person despite the fact that there were some black composers of note who were deserving of the honor. And the Met’s stage wasn’t integrated, by the great contralto Marian Anderson, until 1955, eight years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball.
Yet it’s equally true that genuflecting toward Black Lives Matter and acknowledging guilt about the treatment of “people of color” is not merely obligatory for major arts institutions but is now thought of as their primary purpose. Indeed, earlier this year, the cash-starved Met, whose management used the pandemic to do its best to break the unions that represent its orchestra, chorus, and other workers, ultimately forcing them to accept onerous pay cuts, created a new high-paying position of “chief diversity officer,” whose job is to prod management to do even more virtue signaling.
So while no one is even bothering to pretend that Blanchard’s opera would have been given the honor of an opening night premiere absent this context, the question is whether it meets the challenge that Levine spoke of in terms of its worthiness as a musical achievement, as well as one that audiences will buy tickets to see.
On that score, the answer is mixed. Blanchard’s Fire is certainly a beneficiary of affirmative action and has the advantage of ingratiating the company with the New York Times, whose goodwill remains important to the city’s arts institutions, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is unworthy of being staged at one of the world’s great opera houses.
Fire is hardly the first opera to deal with difficult subject matter. Incest is romanticized in Richard Wagner’s Die Walkure. Rape is implied in Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto and Wolfgang Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Verdi’s Il Trovatore features a character who sets the plot in motion by murdering the “wrong” baby by throwing a live infant into a fire. But there has probably never been a more troubling scene depicted on the stage of the Met than the one in Fire that depicts the abuse of the 7-year-old Blow by an older cousin.
The opera begins with a phone call to Blow’s character, now in college, in which he learns his rapist is visiting his mother, which sets him off on a mission to kill him. The rest of the piece is told in flashback, with Blow recounting his struggles as a “boy with peculiar grace” in a broken home and a black community depicted as devaluing feelings in favor of violence and machismo that was alien to a sensitive child.
Throughout his journey, which ends with his decision to give up his quest for revenge and to stop trying to kill the part of himself that he despises, Blow is accompanied by female spirits named “Destiny” and “Loneliness,” who alternately give voice to his inner longings and fears. The same singer depicts both of these figures, as well as a woman he falls in love with in college but who rejects him for another man. But this opera has only one fully realized female character: Blow’s mother, who must deal with a mind-numbing factory job, a philandering husband whom she repeatedly threatens to gun down, and Blow’s four insensitive older brothers.
Blow’s inner life and romances are not sufficiently compelling to always command our sympathy or attention. More interesting are scenes that depict his attempt to embrace the Baptist religion of his mother as well as college life at historically black Grambling State University. At the latter, a fraternity step dance number was a showstopper that was followed by another that showed the brutal hazing of pledges.
But as with any opera, success depends primarily on the music. Blanchard’s score often sounds more like film music than musical theater. He seems most at home when the music functions primarily as an accompaniment to the action onstage. Still, Fire has long passages that are beautiful and lend themselves to this medium. His attempts at conjuring up Blow’s Louisiana hometown, church, and college, as well as a ballet scene that depicts his bisexuality, were particularly persuasive.
Blanchard’s writing for the voice also produces fine opportunities for the featured singers, particularly baritone Will Liverman, who copes well with the daunting challenge of playing Charles. Rising star Angel Blue shines as Destiny, Loneliness, and Greta. Latonia Moore, who played Billie, Charles’s long-suffering mother, was nothing less than magnificent.
But the true star of the evening was Met music director Yannick Nezet-Seguin and the company’s redoubtable orchestra. The care given to Blanchard’s score by a great conductor and a world-class ensemble not only elevated it to a higher realm than its St. Louis premiere, but it might be enough to convince even those most resistant to new music, and to the Black Lives Matter hoopla over the opera, to understand that it is worth a listen.
By the standards of contemporary opera, whose pickings remain as slim today as when Levine was complaining about their unworthiness 26 years ago, Fire is a masterpiece, and that is the way it was received by an ecstatic opening night audience. Perhaps it is not at the level of the classics that Levine staged with such regularity, but if the Met must produce new operas, and if some of them must be dedicated entirely to the black experience, it could have done far worse than Fire Shut Up In My Bones.
Jonathan Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS.org and a columnist for the New York Post. Follow him on Twitter: @jonathans_tobin.
