Anthony Davis - X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X
Metropolitan Opera, New York, 2023
Kazem Abdullah, Robert O'Hara, Leah Hawkins, Raehann Bryce-Davis, Victor Ryan Robertson, Will Liverman, Michael Sumuel, Edwin Jhamaal Davis, Jasmine Muhammad, Elliott Paige, Adam Richardson, Tracy Cox, Bryce Christian Thompson, Gregory Warren, Marco Jordão, Ross Benoliel, Tshombe Selby
The Met Live in HD - 18th November 2023
I praised the Metropolitan Opera two years ago for the initiative of bringing the first opera by a black composer to the Met stage, Terence Blanchard's incendiary Fire Shut Up In My Bones, an opera that tackled race issues that still persist in America head-on. It was a significant moment and a great success, showing that opera could be relevant modern and progressive. What was even more important was that it wouldn't be just a token gesture and that it would be followed up, which it was by going back to Blanchard's other neglected opera, Champion. This year, the Met have continued to support not just works by black composers but contemporary works by other composers never before performed there. With Dead Man Walking opening the 2023-24 season, it was clear that not only did these neglected works by contemporary American composers deserve to be seen on the biggest opera platform in the US, but they could also be hugely successful.
Written and first performed in 1986 by a composer better known for his work in jazz (much like Terence Blanchard), it would have it would have been inconceivable that Anthony Davis's X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X would have been performed back then at the Met, but here we are now with it even being live-streamed live across the world via their Live in HD cinema broadcasts. It's a bold initiative for a bold opera that takes on a challenging subject, a controversial figure from recent history and approaches its subject with an uncommon blend of contemporary opera with arias and an orchestra that includes a jazz ensemble. There would have been more chance of an alien spaceship crashing onto the stage of the Met than X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X being performed there.
That's the image that the director Robert O'Hara chooses as a symbol or emblem that hangs over the stage of the newly revised and expanded version of the opera for the 2023 Met production. We are back to the future, or more specifically, thrown into Afrofuturism, an idea that was first envisioned by Marcus Garvey and has since been taken up by many black jazz musicians supporting the idea of an alternative future where black culture, technology and science are progressive and dominant force in society. Here, they have come back in a spaceship to the Met, no less, to celebrate the life of one of the movement's earliest proponents and indeed activist, Malcolm X advocating not only justice and equality that had been denied to his race, but for separatism "a nation within a nation" that would allow black culture to flourish apart from white society.
There is a clear arc to follow in X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, the opera divided up into three acts that cover Malcolm's early life as Malcolm Little, the years when he threw off his 'slave name' for an 'X' under the influence of Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam, and in the third part where he visits Mecca and converts to Sunni Islam and the civil rights movement as el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz. The composer also sees this narrative arc of a character arc being one of transformation that can be defined across those three parts as "Fear, hate and love". It's a serious subject but not one that should come across as a dry docu-drama. There's no danger of the opera being that, but at the same time, it doesn't engage the way it should and it does indeed suffer from trying to be too close and literal to the subject matter.
It shouldn't be like that. Every effort is put into the production design and direction to ensure that this is a varied and colourful production that fills the stage with life, movement and passion. O'Hara's direction attempts to add a larger dimension to the subject with his Afrofuturist sets, elaborate colourful costume designs and groups of dancers while history comes forward from a little amateur dramatics stage at the back. It does help to make the staging a little more interesting from a visual perspective, even if it doesn't really hold to the documentary tone of the work. It looks unfortunately more like a circus and seems at odds even with the austere image of the slim, neat fitted, close cropped, bespectacled and deadly serious Malcolm X we see in black-and-white documentary footage. This is opera however and can't compete with naturalistic realism, and considering the lack of dramatic action, it helps fill the large stage of the Met. Perhaps more importantly it needs to keep up with the times and remain relevant. Thematically there is no problem with that, the race issues raised still largely unchanged, the fact that this is now on the Met stage notwithstanding.
Probably the greatest challenge the opera faces and fails to overcome is the same one that is a challenge for biopics in the cinema; time is compressed and you don't really get a sense of all the elements that feed into the life of the subject and inspire them to transform into the famous person they become known for. We get a sense of the impact of his father's death when he is a child, but it is made to sound like an accident. The sense of fear that the creators strive for in Act 1 however is progressed well, fear turning into anger by the end of the act. Dramatically it doesn't have a whole lot to offer, but it shows how deep-rooted prejudice is in American society. At every turn the young Malcolm takes, he runs up against a wall of racism, of being told this is not for black people and that he needs to know your place, boxed into a life of criminality. The aria "You want the story, but you don’t want to know" hits at the right point at end of Act 1. Even though his arrest in Charleston in 1945 looks like a small matter, it's clear that anger has been building up to this breaking point.
The second act has its strengths but suffers from those biopic issues, compressing the lived experience and failing to adequately show on the stage all the elements and conflicts that feed into the various stages of transformation that Malcolm undergoes. His conversion to the cause of the Nation of Islam and to Sunni Islam on a visit to Mecca seems precipitous, and for all its invention Davis's score doesn't fill in the blanks. You could certainly do that for yourself by imagining the experience of injustice and racism experienced by any black person in America during the 1950s and early 1960s, but it doesn't feature strongly in the opera. The action is limited and more focussed on capturing the speeches and sayings of Malcolm X than showing any real world impact that inspires them or that they might inspire. For large parts this is reduced to sloganeering, which although the feelings expressed remain relevant, it's not what great opera is made of. That said, the chorus work is very strong.
Created 40 years ago and revised for this production, Anthony Davis's score is still ahead of the game, certainly more challenging than Heggie's more conventional Dead Man Walking. Not being constrained to any style other than what is required for the purposes of the story, X draws from a whole range of influences and styles, from classical to Wagner and Berg and more contemporary styles, but also incorporates various periods of jazz that reflect the time Malcolm X lived through. That's important as the black origins of jazz come from the same source that is reflected in the feelings that are expressed by Malcolm X in the opera. Davis's music engages with the complexities of the subject, the historical context of the period and the issues with those unconventional musical forms and African rhythms. The main arias hit home effectively and indeed impressively here, but the greater operatic quality or perspective doesn't succeed in lifting this into another dimension.
None of this takes away from the significance of this particular opera being performed on the Met stage. It's a huge advancement for black artists and the vindication of the ideas of Malcolm X. Much like Malcolm X himself, it's the legacy that is important, with a greater proportion of black artists finding their rightful place in the opera world. There can be no denying either that the singing performances are outstanding and truly inspired by the subject and the work. For me, the tenor Victor Ryan Robertson playing two roles as 'Street' and Elijah Muhammad was the most impressive, working in an incredibly high range and sounding just amazing. He might not look at all like Malcolm X, but Will Livermore's grave impassioned and authoritative performance, also in a very challenging range, was utterly convincing. Leah Hawkins playing Malcolm's mother in the first act and his wife thereafter, was also hugely impressive. Her aria "When a man is lost" in Act II before Malcolm's visit to Mecca was breathtaking. There is an incredible talent base of new black American singers filling out the ranks of the Met.
Bringing this together musically would have been quite a challenge for conductor Kazem Abdullah, the jazz elements and drums blended in with the contemporary music creating odd rhythms, but it came across effectively and powerfully in the Met Live in HD screening. There's no question that the subject is also an interesting and a challenging one, and it's to the credit of the Met that they were willing to take it on. If the stage production didn't entirely succeed in enhancing the qualities of the work, it certainly showed that the talent is there in abundance, and that there is a new audience out there for more work like this.
External links: The Metropolitan Opera, The Met Live in HD
