Lyric Opera 2023-2024 Issue 6 - Champion

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 28 for the opera house audience. As we enter the world of the opera, we watch the present collide with the past in a charged sensibility. We return to a moment more than 60 years prior that haunted Emile Griffith to the end of his life, and became indelible in the larger history of boxing. In the bookends of the opera—the opening and closing scenes—we see older Emile, the boxing champion who at various points in his career held world welterweight and middleweight titles. He is suffering from pugilistic dementia and the effects of a severe beating outside a gay nightclub in 1992. As a metaphor for the double vision of our perceptions of heroes and champions, older Emile sings about a single shoe, left without its match, wondering where it belongs. In its unlikely pairing of the arts and sport, Champion gives us a glimpse of the stories of Griffith and Paret and their professional and familial communities. We begin to feel some of the fame, horror, accomplishment, and violence that surrounded them both inside the ring and out. Their names are part of the history of Black honor and celebrity. Even today, most people can more easily list five Black athletes and entertainers before naming even one or two Black Nobel laureates, CEOs, professors, doctors, members of congress, or judges. We need all of these names in the pantheon. In showing the contours of what made some of these historic figures both human and real—and literally multi-dimensional— Champion provides its own kind of revelatory reckoning. Naomi André is the David G. Frey Distinguished Professor in the Department of Music at UNC-Chapel Hill and Professor Emerita at the University of Michigan. Her publications include the books Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement and Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman in Early Nineteenth- Century Italian Opera . Emile Griffith NY Daily News via Getty Images Emile Griffith and Benny Paret battle during the decisive and tragic 1962 bout.