Lyric Opera 2024-2025 Issue 5 - Blue

25 | Lyric Opera of Chicago Staging Justice The groundbreaking Blue brings the contemporary lived experience of Black citizens onto the opera stage. by Naomi André There is something almost magical about the opera Blue . Straddling many edges of genre, style, and form, it is a dramatic theatrical piece that works with the expansiveness of opera as well as conveying the immediacy of musical theater. Blue connects to a rooted moment in time — the present time of its composition in 2019. In many ways, this story about family and the undisputed horror of losing a child to a violent death gets to the root of the worst fears uniting our experiences across nation, race, ethnicity, and time period. Yet very specifically this story captures the essence of past conflicts involving Black people in the United States. Blue delineates a space where modern policing extends back to patrolling enslaved bodies, the legacy of Emmett Till, and the highly visible police killings of many unarmed Black people since Trayvon Martin in 2012. Presciently, this opera preceded the murder of George Floyd by a year. The specifics of this 21st-century story encompass what has become a transcending universal truth of oppression for Black people in America. The intimacy of this family’s situation presents both a private as well as an epic portrayal of life in operatic dimensions. In the first scene, where we meet The Mother telling her three Girlfriends about her recent marriage and pregnancy, we witness an event that feels normal and natural. Here we have an every-woman, called “The Mother” in the libretto, sharing joyous everyday details of young adulthood: getting married and starting a family. Yet this is an extraordinary occurrence — indeed, this is the magic. For this is what had been missing in mainstream opera, a space that had not previously included stories of Black characters who are fully human and relatable to all audiences. Blue showcases Black experiences on the opera stage in a manner that brings a shadow culture of Black operas, operas that have previously been hidden from the majority, into the foreground. Such Black creative expressions include numerous operas written from the late 19th century up into the present day, works that reveal a deep engagement and care in representation absent in the dominant culture and brings Black perspectives and experiences to the forefront. This shadow culture includes Black singers who sang operatic arias, primarily in recitals (including Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, Thomas Bowers, and Sissieretta Jones in the 19th century); Black opera companies (such as those run by Theodore Drury and Mary Cardwell Dawson); and the works of Black composers (including Harry Lawrence Freeman, Shirley Graham DuBois, William Grant Still, Nkeiru Okoye, Anthony Davis, and many more). Blue belongs to two intersecting trios. The first trio is delineated by the momentous summer of 2019, when three Black operas began to make history. Composer Anthony Davis and librettist Richard Wesley’s The Central Park Five premiered at Long Beach Opera in June 2019 and went on to be the first opera by a Black composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music (Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels’s Omar was the second, in 2023.) Fire Shut Up in My Bones , with music by Terence Blanchard and libretto by Kasi Lemmons, premiered at the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis the very same week. Originally commissioned by Washington National Opera’s Timothy O’Leary, who had previously served as General Director of Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Fire Shut Up in My Bones went on to be the first opera by a Black composer presented at the Metropolitan Opera in its history (the company began in 1883). Such an occasion, 66 years after Marian Anderson’s historical debut at the Met, has begun to act as a similar beacon to other opera houses to perform and commission operas by Black composers. (Lyric, a co-producer, presented Fire to great acclaim in its 2021/22 Season). This brings us to Blue , which premiered at The Glimmerglass Festival in July 2019, won the Music