A case in point is “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” composed by Anthony Davis to a libretto by Thulani Davis and a story by Christopher Davis. Just as Malcolm X introduced powerful new language to articulate America’s racism, Davis’s score expands opera’s vocabulary.
Its New York City Opera premiere showcased a large and mostly Black cast, with a full orchestra augmented by an eight-piece improvising jazz ensemble. The fiendishly difficult score veers from high modernism through R&B — not like a mindless turning of the radio dial, but as a dizzying enactment of double consciousness. A virulent aria for Malcolm X closes Act I by turning the spotlight on the audience. “You want the story, but you don’t want to know,” he sings. “My truth is, you’ve been on me a very long time, longer than I can say! As long as I’ve been living, you’ve had your foot on me, always pressing. … You want the truth, but you don’t want to know!” It’s hard to imagine anything less flattering to the traditional opera audience than this searing indictment of its complicity with systems of oppression.
Inviting this worldview into the narrow world of opera, into the hallowed halls of Lincoln Center, was a gutsy endeavor in 1986. Mounting a new production became my top priority when I became the artistic director of Detroit Opera in 2020. Not only because the subject matter had taken on renewed urgency in the heat of the racial reckoning of that summer. Not only because Detroit is a predominantly Black city and Malcolm X’s footprints there are still fresh in the ground. But because the music, like the human life at the work’s center, confronts the status quo.
At the opening of our production, directed by Robert O’Hara, the company’s traditional and predominantly white audience were challenged by the score. Not so the Black members of the audience, many of whom reported attending an opera for the first time. And the attendance was record-breaking: “X” was the first sold-out opera performance in Detroit since 2005. (The Metropolitan Opera, one of our four co-producers, reported similarly high attendance during its 2023 performances.)
In its scale, “X” is a grand opera to rival the largest works in the repertoire. But in its deft handling of explosive subject matter and uncompromising musical character, “X” carries none of the elitism we ascribe to the canon. It remains to me an example of what a new piece should be: the epitome of an anti-elite opera.
Thinking about what an audience sees and how audiences are engaged is almost self-explanatory in the mission of eliminating elitism. But I don’t think that mission is fully possible without also reconsidering the process of making an opera — and, as a practitioner, it is my chief concern.
Read More: Opera Doesn’t Have to Be an Elite Art Form. Here’s Why.
