NewYorker.com: Anthony Davis’s Revolutionary Opera: “X”

Anthony Davis

(Marty Reicchenthal/AP)

The New Yorker

By Ryan Ebright

May 22, 2020

In her incisive book “Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement,” the musicologist Naomi André frames black opera—opera that foregrounds black experiences, voices, and bodies—as a kind of shadow culture, with a rich lineage that runs parallel to, but has been obscured by, mainstream opera tradition. Those two traditions drew closer together earlier this month, when the composer Anthony Davis received the Pulitzer Prize for music for his opera “The Central Park Five,” which recounts the wrongful conviction and later exoneration of five black and Latino New York City teen-agers. Citing the composer’s effort as “a courageous operatic work” that “transforms a notorious example of contemporary injustice into something empathetic and hopeful,” the Pulitzer committee gave what is effectively the strongest acknowledgement to date of Davis’s ongoing creative engagement with race and political struggle in American history.

Opera has a problematic history with race, stemming in part from a lack of black authorial voices and failure to represent black subjectivity. But this is beginning to change, sometimes in imaginative ways. Composers are not only transforming black experiences and history into musical dramas but—just as important—companies are putting them on stage. Within the past decade alone, the stories of Charlie Parker, Harriet Tubman, the baseball player Josh Gibson, and the boxer Emile Griffith have found a home at opera houses.

Such biographical treatments of black experiences in opera find a significant precedent in Davis’s first opera, his landmark “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” which premièred at New York City Opera, in 1986. “My goal,” Davis once remarked, “is to be the American composer who helps to define opera for the next century, to give opera its unique American voice.” To a certain extent, he’s already succeeded. Before “X,” full-fledged black operas were scarce: William Grant Still’s “Troubled Island,” in 1949, and Scott Joplin’s “Treemonisha,” in 1975, had comparably high-profile premières. But in the mid-eighties, an opera about a controversial black nationalist was not an obvious—or entirely comfortable—fit for Lincoln Center. What did it take for an opera about Malcolm X to appear at City Opera, and what might that tell us about the racial topography of American opera, then and now?