Lyric Opera 2024-2025 Issue 5 - Blue

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 22 In the fall of 2015, I received an email from Francesca Zambello, the director of The Glimmerglass Festival. “I’m interested in commissioning an opera about race in America, about where we are now as a people dealing with race,” she wrote. “I have a composer set, and I’m looking for a librettist. What are your thoughts on the following writers?” They were all names known to me, some quite famous. Some had written operas before. “What about me?” I replied. That summer at Glimmerglass, Eric Owens had been singing in Verdi’s Macbeth , and I was directing the American premiere of Vivaldi’s Cato in Utica . Eric and I, two Black men, were outraged by the prominent cases of unarmed Black boys and men being shot by white police officers. We, of course, had our own stories of racial profiling that we shared as we tried and failed to understand what was happening to our Black brothers, and why. I sent Francesca two scenes set in Harlem, where I was born and now live: A young married Black couple expecting their first child, a boy, and fearing the challenges and obstacles he will face; and a scene of the mother-to-be and her girlfriends. Francesca told me to send the samples to Jeanine Tesori, who would be the opera’s composer. Jeanine and I met over avocado toast on Upper Broadway. It was a match. As I wrote, I looked to my favorite essayist and novelist, James Baldwin, and his The Fire Next Time ; Ta- Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me ; and, from my teenage years, Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land . I consulted with friends, Black and white: How do you prepare a son for what awaits him? Do you have “the talk” with him, about how to survive and thrive from day to day? All the Black parents said yes. The white ones said it had never even entered their thoughts. Six months later I had a first draft, in which a Black family and their community are convulsed when an unarmed teenager is killed by a police officer. The principal characters were the father, a jazz saxophone player; the mother, a restaurant owner; and the son, a student activist interested in art and poetry. A chorus of 30 young Black men represented other murdered boys, attempting through music and dance to make sense of the world they had left. As Jeanine and I met and she began to hear musical themes in my text, and with Francesca’s tough notes, things evolved. I learned how to edit rambling sentences down to select bites that would allow the music to enter; how counterpoint is used, and the dramatic musical effect of repeating lines and using active verbs; how to write duets, trios, arias. At one meeting, Francesca and Jeanine suggested I get rid of the boys’ chorus, and rethink the idea of the father as a struggling jazz musician. “What if he’s a cop?” Jeanine said. “Absolutely not,” I answered. I did not want to write about a police officer. But despite myself, I soon recognized the irony, the tension, the glittering possibilities of personal conflict and heartache for a father whose son is murdered by a fellow officer. I set about interviewing Black police officers. I consulted with a Harlem police officer whose relationship with his teenage son was a disaster, the son appalled that his dad worked for “the man” — the enemy. That conflict is in the opera. For this officer, life insurance and dental coverage for his family were a major part of his decision to join the force. That’s in the opera, too. A note from the Librettist/Director by Tazewell Thompson My journey to writing an opera about police violence