Lyric Opera 2021-2022 Issue 7 Fire Shut Up My Bones

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 33 Marian Anderson’s historic debut as Ulrica in Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera at the Metropolitan Opera on January 7, 1955. That performance became a symbolic desegregation of opera, as houses in the U.S. and Europe thereafter began to let Black singers onto their stages. Just five years after its founding, Lyric welcomed Leontyne Price on its stage in 1959 as Liù in Puccini’s Turandot and in the title role in Massenet’s Thaïs . Over the past several decades, works of Black opera composers—notably Davis’s X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X (1986)—have ushered in a new generation to which Blanchard belongs. In addition to Amistad at Lyric in 1997, Davis’s many operas include the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Central Park Five (2019). Recent years have brought the premieres of many more important operas by Black composers, including Nkeiru Okoye’s Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed that Line to Freedom (2014), George Lewis’s Afterword (2015), about the founding of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, and Daniel Bernard Roumain’s We Shall Not Be Moved (2017). While Blanchard is no stranger to opera, he is better known as a celebrated jazz trumpeter and film score composer, winning Grammy Awards for his jazz recordings and collaborating frequently with film director Spike Lee—as a trumpet player in Lee’s early movies and as the film score composer for many others. (He was nominated for an Academy Award last year for his score to Lee’s Da 5 Bloods .) He has worked with other film directors over the years and created the music for two recent films that have trenchantly documented important Black historical figures and experiences: One Night in Miami… (2020) and Harriet (2019), the latter a collaboration with Lemmons, who directed the award-winning movie. “With Harriet , there was no other composer I could imagine,” Lemmons says. “I wanted a big American sound and a lush, full, heroic score.” But their partnership goes back even further, beginning with Lemmons’s first film, Eve’s Bayou (1997) and continuing with several of her other movies. Bringing her experience as an actress, screenwriter, film director, and opera lover to her work on Fire , Lemmons’s libretto—her first—breathes a penetrating drama into this nuanced story. Here, as in all her films, Lemmons shows her mastery at weaving together sophisticated community scenes and intimate hidden stories. Fire is Blanchard’s second opera and the second commissioned from him by Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, where James Robinson is Artistic Director (also making his debut at Lyric, as co-director). Blanchard’s first, Champion (2013), which he calls an “opera in jazz,” was about the boxer Emile Griffith (1938-2013), who was haunted both by his bisexuality and his brutal knockout of Benny Paret in 1962, which put Paret in a coma and led to his death ten days later. “ Champion was such a success that on opening night we immediately asked Terence to write another opera for us,” Robinson says. “It took a while to land on a subject that really inspired Terence, but then one day his wife and I both read an article in The New York Times by Charles Blow that previewed his forthcoming memoir. We thought Charles’s story would make a wonderful opera, and Terence immediately responded to the idea.” When Blow met with Blanchard to discuss the idea of an opera, Blow remembers, “Terence and I just talked. I knew his work. We’re both from Louisiana and the whole thing. My thought was, as long as it ends properly, go for it.” The opera condenses the book and embraces the texture and rhythms of young Charles’s life growing up in the small town of Gibsland, Louisiana—the love of his mother and siblings, the secret of his sexual abuse at the hands of two extended family members, and his path through recognizing the trauma and finding a way forward. A theme that links Blanchard’s two operas is their portrayal of Black men in the public eye whose bisexuality leads to bullying, shame, trauma, and inner turmoil. Both operas involve the past and the present coming together as their protagonists age, and use different singers to represent the boy and the mature man. “The role of Charles is so intense, so raw. It just grabs you immediately,” says Liverman, who headlines the production. “It’s the journey of finding a way to Will Liverman as Charles (right) shares a moment with his younger self,Char’es-Baby, in the Metropolitan Opera’s production. Photo: Ken Howard