Lyric Opera 2023-2024 Issue 6 - Champion

27 | Lyric Opera of Chicago Born in the U.S.Virgin Islands, boxer Emile Griffith (1938-2013) made it to the “big time” in a generation when Black people garnered the most praise in the mainstream press as either athletes or entertainers. He gained popularity in the thick of the Jim Crow era— a time of inequitable application of the G.I. Bill for Black soldiers returning after WWII, increased red lining against Black home buyers, and Sundown Towns, among innumerable other indignities. With Champion , composer Terence Blanchard and librettist Michael Cristofer have devised a work that weaves together the contrasting realities of the hope and disappointment that surrounded Griffith’s career. The work presents a portrait of his public persona juxtaposed with his inner private life. In Champion we see how Blackness, boxing, and manhood can unexpectedly, and eloquently, be expressed in the expansive genre of opera. Blanchard and Cristofer showcase the arena of the boxing ring as a microcosm for the brutality and sensitivity, anticipation and hope in Griffith’s story. The narrative centerpiece is the time before and leading up to his third and final fight with Afro-Cuban Benny “Kid” Paret (1937-1962), which led to harrowing results as Paret was knocked out, went into a coma, and then died 10 days later. Yet the action also encompasses years before, and decades after, the fight. In an innovative operatic technique achieved through layered staging and musical textures, we get a multi-tiered presentation of this story all at once. Through a trio of singers, we see Griffith at three stages of his life: Little Emile (as a young boy), Young Emile (in his major years as a boxer), and an older Emile (nearing the end of his life). As the three Emiles overlap with each other, we take in a story that feels at once tragically timeless and intimately present. Near the midpoint of the opera, just before the depiction of the fight that would shade his career, Emile reflects on the slur that Paret has just whispered to him regarding his sexuality. Alone on stage, Emile ruminates as he queries “What Makes a Man a Man?” In an undulating line that starts high, dips down, and then keeps reaching up to recover, Emile hunts for the answer. He looks inside and outside of who he is, “the skin he wears,” “the color of his voice,” “the walk he walks,” and the way he talks. Through such soul searching we share this private pivotal moment and see Emile both as a man, and a boxer—a person who encompasses aching vulnerability and a competitor who participates in an aggressive dangerous sport. In the next scene, the finale of Act 1, we see the big fight. Highly anticipated when it took place in Madison Square Garden on March 24, 1962, it was meant to be the decisive match between Griffith and Paret. Each had previously beaten the other, and a central question was whether Griffith could win back the welterweight title he had taken from Paret in their first bout, a belt that Paret had then won back in their second encounter. The whole cast is at the fight—Paret, his opponent; Howie Albert, his trainer; Emelda Griffith, his mother; the Ring Announcer; and the chorus of Reporters and Photographers. Additionally, we have Kathy Hagen, the bar owner, and several Drag Queens who patronize Hagen’s gay bar. Also at the fight, as though coming from inside the fighter’s head as a projection of his future self, we have older Emile punctuating the scene, guiding the audience through the bifurcated vision of what is happening. Both in the present for boxer Emile, and in the past of older Emile’s memory, this seminal bout becomes a twofold dramaturgical moment in time By Naomi André Making a Man In its multilayered portrait of Emile Griffith, Champion illuminates complex aspects of Black fame and identity