|
|
LOVE AND BOXING. MET OPERA HOUSE
Last season, Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones caused a sensation at the Met, drawing untold new audiences for one of the most notable premieres in recent memory. Now, the composer is back with Champion, starring bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green as a tormented boxer balancing life in the ring with his secret desires. Yannick Nézet-Séguin is on the podium for James Robinson’s action- and emotion-packed production. By Matt Dobkin
The year is 1962. A young welterweight boxer named Emile Griffith arrives at Madison Square Garden in New York City to weigh in for a bout later that night. His opponent, Benny Paret, seizes the moment to taunt Griffith, hurling homophobic slurs at him. The hazing hits home, and hours later in the ring, at once ashamed and enraged, Griffith unleashes a torrent of fearsome blows on Paret, ultimately killing the man. For years, Griffith would be haunted by the incident, at the same time as he struggled with his sexuality.
This true story of Emile Griffith (1938–2013) is the inspiration for Terence Blanchard’s Champion, his first foray into opera after a wildly successful career as a jazz artist and composer of film scores. It’s his second opera at the Met after last season’s landmark presentation of Fire Shut Up in My Bones, which was the first opera by a Black composer in Met history.
“The thing that really got me about Emile’s story is the whole idea
of accomplishing something major in your life but not being able to share that
openly with someone you love,” Blanchard says. “Thinking about the inequities
that people experience in the world because of social dogma—that really
appealed to me as a subject. There’s a moment when he says, ‘I killed a man,
and the world forgave me. Yet I loved a man, and the world wants to kill me.’
That, to me, was a very, very, very powerful notion.”
Griffith’s singular story has been told in a book, Nine… Ten… And Out!, by Ron Ross, and in a documentary film, Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story, directed by Ron Berger and Dan Klores. In the opera, his tale is told in flashback, opening on the elderly Griffith, portrayed at the Met by bass-baritone Eric Owens, suffering from dementia in a nursing home on Long Island on the eve of a planned meeting with Benny Paret’s son.
We then move back to the 1950s, when young Emile, sung by bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green, arrives in New York from his home in the U.S. Virgin Islands, hoping to establish a career in boxing, music, or, improbably, hat-making. In New York, he is reunited with his mother, Emelda, sung by soprano Latonia Moore (like Green, a veteran of Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones at the Met).
He also encounters gay nightlife and turns to bar owner Kathy Hagen, played by mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe, who becomes his confidante as he struggles with his sexuality. Met Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who collaborated to great acclaim with Blanchard on Fire Shut Up in My Bones, will conduct.
Helping Blanchard harness the many facets of the piece since the beginning was director James Robinson. In his role as artistic director of Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Robinson (who also commissioned and directed Fire Shut Up in My Bones when it had its world premiere in St. Louis), had been contemplating an education project, perhaps an opera for kids, maybe something in a jazz idiom.
A colleague from Jazz St. Louis suggested five possible composers, including Blanchard, whose work Robinson knew well. They quickly agreed not just to collaborate but to expand the ambition of the piece to a full-length mainstage work, an “opera in jazz,” as Blanchard calls Champion, that would appeal to a broad audience. The next step was to settle on a subject.
“Terence is passionate about boxing and has a great knowledge of boxing history,” Robinson says. “And he was particularly attracted to the idea of Emile Griffith, somebody who really couldn’t live his life openly. Griffith was suffering from pugilistic dementia, and before he was totally incapacitated, he wanted to be forgiven by the family of the man that he had killed. All of this was in Terence’s mind. And I thought, ‘Wow, that’s a great story. That is purely operatic.’”
To transform the idea into a libretto, Blanchard and Robinson turned to playwright and filmmaker Michael Cristofer, who won both a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award for his play The Shadow Box, which addresses similar notions of end-of-life reckoning and hidden sexuality. “We called Michael, and he said, ‘I’ve never done an opera before,’” Robinson remembers. “I said, ‘Well, neither has Terence, so let’s all have a good time!’”
Blanchard looks back and recalls, “I really had no ambition to write an opera, zero. And I was already consumed with my film work. But it’s funny how things go.” Once he started work composing Champion, he found himself totally taken over by the project, as he would later be working on Fire Shut Up in My Bones. “You become extremely focused—you live, eat, and breathe the project,” he says. “
When I was writing Fire and Champion, I’d wake up in the morning and go right to work, because it’s like there’s a burning desire within you to say something. It’s almost like you get into a Zen mode, and once it’s finished, you feel like you didn’t write it. You think, ‘I hope it’s good. I don’t know. Let’s wait and see.’”
Champion was enormously successful, thanks to a score that calls on all of Blanchard’s orchestral mastery, with jazz and gospel inflections that instantly hook the ear. Robinson’s fast-moving production provided a compelling visual backdrop for the drama. The Met stage, though, is larger than the one in St. Louis, so set designer Allen Moyer is reconceiving the scenic design to be even more involving and impressive for the audience. “When we did it in St. Louis, we didn’t have a proper boxing ring.
There
was a section of the floor that lit up, and four dancers came out and held up
ropes around the edge,” Moyer recalls. “At the Met, we’ll have a real ring,
which will emerge out of the upstage darkness. We see it several times over the
opera, and we thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be exciting if the boxing ring could spin
around?’ So that’s what we’re doing this time, because the ring is like this
whirlwind in Emile’s life.”......
Matt Dobkin is the Met’s Creative Director, Content & Strategy.
https://www.metopera.org/discover/articles/love-and-boxing/
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario