Culture

Malcolm X and Hamlet Seize the Opera Stage


In 1986, the novelist and critic Samuel R. Delany interviewed the composer Anthony Davis, whose opera “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” had just received a triumphant première at New York City Opera. Delany, lamenting the neglect of Black opera composers, said, “From ‘Aida’ and ‘Otello’ to ‘Porgy and Bess’ and ‘Lost in the Stars,’ we as blacks have been opera-ed, have been operated upon, have been operationalized by white composers so that there seems to be a kind of massive charge running from white musicians to us as black subjects.” Davis’s piece seemed to augur a significant shift. Andrew Porter wrote in this magazine, “ ‘X’ is a work that deserves to enter the American repertory.”

Malcolm X, a relentless critic of American myths of progress, would have been unsurprised to learn that the repertory was not quite ready for an opera about his life. Two decades passed before “X” received a full revival, at Oakland Opera Theatre; then it receded for another decade and a half. The George Floyd protests of 2020 finally induced major American companies to pay more heed to Black composers. Last fall, the Metropolitan Opera presented, for the first time in its history, an African American work—Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.” The same composer’s “Champion” is scheduled for next season. And “X” has come back to life: Detroit Opera staged it in mid-May, and Odyssey Opera and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project will give a semi-staged performance in June. In future seasons, the Detroit production will travel to the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Opera Omaha, Seattle Opera, and, in the fall of 2023, the Met.

Davis, a true musical cosmopolitan, merits the attention. He was born in 1951, in Paterson, New Jersey, and grew up in State College, Pennsylvania. He explored twentieth-century classical music alongside jazz, studying at Yale while playing gigs with the likes of Wadada Leo Smith, George Lewis, and Gerry Hemingway. He also absorbed West African, South Indian, and Indonesian practices. When he turned to opera, in the eighties, he immersed himself in Wagner, Strauss, and Berg. What emerges from this swirl of impressions is a heterogeneous modernist style that mixes dissonant harmony with hypnotic repetition and integrated spells of improvisation.

The libretto for “X” is by the playwright and critic Thulani Davis, the composer’s cousin; the story is by Christopher Davis, his brother. The authors extract a tersely lyrical narrative from the phases of Malcolm X’s evolution: his fraught childhood, his zoot-suit youth, his years in prison, his joining the Nation of Islam, his break with Elijah Muhammad, his pilgrimage to Mecca, and his assassination, in 1965, at thirty-nine. At the same time, there is a mythic resonance in Malcolm’s momentous journey across the landscape of mid-twentieth-century Black life: his quest moves from the social to the sacred, the political to the eternal.

The most remarkable sections of the score are those in which Malcolm undergoes spiritual transformations: first his conversion to Islam, then his transcendent experience at Mecca. Hard-driving, jazz-inflected writing in the opening scenes gives way to episodes of entrancing stasis: sustained drones, intricately overlapping rhythmic cycles, choral chants of ritual simplicity. Davis’s study of Indonesian gamelan is apparent; so is his admiration for Wagner. In conversation with Delany, Davis revealed that he took inspiration from the Grail ceremonies of “Parsifal,” which he playfully called the “first minimalist opera.” Murmuring string arpeggios that appear throughout the opera are redolent of the shimmering “Parsifal” prelude. The sum of these various elements is a kind of music that, as Porter observed, had never been heard before.

Robert O’Hara, who directed the staging in Detroit, further expanded the story’s reach by infusing it with elements of Afrofuturism. Clint Ramos, the set designer, installed a swooping, spaceship-like structure above the stage; on it were projected words and images relevant to the story, including the names of Black people killed by police in recent years. During the Mecca sequence, dozens of sci-fi-ish lamps floated down from the rigging. This hovering between reality and fantasy warded off bio-pic clichés and gave the opera an otherworldly aura.

“X” needs a gifted singer-actor in the title role, and it found one in the bass-baritone Davóne Tines, who had mesmerized the audience before singing a note. In Malcolm’s first scene, he emulates a blustering character named Street—a sly riposte to Gershwin’s Sportin’ Life. Through body language alone, Tines evoked the defensive swagger of a displaced adolescent. The sequence ends with Malcolm in prison. In the austere, smoldering monologue that follows—“I wouldn’t tell you / what I know”—Tines unleashed the expressive power of his voice, which combines precise diction with an acute sensitivity to the musical phrase.

Several principals sang dual roles, in a scheme akin to the ironic doublings of Berg’s “Lulu.” Victor Ryan Robertson brought his bright, focussed tenor to Street and to Elijah Muhammad; Ronnita Miller showed a richly billowing mezzo voice as Malcolm’s sister Ella and as Queen Mother Moore; the soprano Whitney Morrison was warmly lyrical as both Louise Little, Malcolm’s mother, and Betty Shabazz. Characterizations from the orchestra pit were no less striking. The original production of “X” featured improvisations by members of Epistēmē, Davis’s own ensemble; in Detroit, stars of the local jazz scene ably filled those roles. A trumpet solo by Walter White brought another rapt layer to the time-suspending Mecca scene.

The opera comes to a brutally abrupt close. Malcolm, now known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, addresses a crowd at the Audubon Ballroom, in Washington Heights. “As-Salaam Alaikum,” he says. He stands before a painted backdrop of trees and mountains—an incongruous image that has been looming behind the performers throughout the evening. The music stops; shots ring out; the lights are cut. When I got back to my hotel, I opened my computer to find that a racist white teen-ager had killed ten Black people in Buffalo.

On the same weekend that “X” opened in Detroit, the Met mounted Brett Dean’s “Hamlet,” a deft stab at a play that has long defied operatic adaptation. Dean’s two-act condensation, first seen at Glyndebourne, in 2017, avoids most of the obvious pitfalls of making opera out of Shakespeare. How can a composer set the words “To be or not to be” or “The rest is silence” without sounding faintly ridiculous? Dean and his librettist, Matthew Jocelyn, finesse the problem with a strategy of self-consciousness. When Hamlet enters, he’s muttering bits and pieces of the famous phrases—“. . . or not to be,” “The rest is . . .”—while the orchestra revels in eerie effects. This “Hamlet” is aware of its “Hamlet”-ness, and is also aware that its audience is aware.

It’s an absorbing spectacle, but ultimately an insubstantial one. The dismantling of most of Hamlet’s soliloquies obscures his inner world, without which the bloodbath at Elsinore loses interest. In place of the dreamer-philosopher Hamlet, we get an ill-tempered cutup, a tragic brat. The staging, by Neil Armfield, rarely lets the hero stand still: he paces, he slouches, he holds up bunny-ear fingers behind Polonius’s head, he mincingly mocks the foppish Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Allan Clayton, a pungently eloquent tenor who will sing Peter Grimes at the Met next season, thrives on the assignment: he’s nearly as fine a singer-actor as Tines. But the japery is so relentless that I found myself sympathizing more than once with Claudius, whom Rod Gilfry embodies in seedily charismatic style. The women, meanwhile, are reduced to modish caricature: Gertrude, sung by Sarah Connolly, assumes arch poses, while Ophelia, played by Brenda Rae, lurches from pitiful fretting to orgasmic writhing. Connolly’s regal tone and Rae’s nuanced passagework partly redeemed these regressive conceptions.

Dean, an Australian who played viola in the Berlin Philharmonic before turning to composition full time, has total command of the orchestra. He can generate hyper-complex, borderline-chaotic textures that remain cleanly etched in every detail. The soundscapes of “Hamlet” are a multifaceted wonder, incorporating abyssal electronic tones, instrumental stations in the balconies, an onstage accordion, and every extended technique in the modern-music textbook. The Met orchestra, under the baton of Nicholas Carter, delivered each squall of sound with immense virtuosity. Yet I struggled to hear an individual voice—the kind that is evident in just a few bars of Davis’s “X.” Nor could I divine what this “Hamlet” has to say about our time. It seems to emanate from somewhere in the middle of the late twentieth century.

The ending offers a release from the hurly-burly. Solo voices in the orchestra—cello, English horn, clarinet—intone downward-sighing lines over a quivering bed of sustained chords. Hamlet, collapsed in Horatio’s arms, finally gets to complete his line “The rest is silence.” It’s a beautiful, almost sentimental close, and it ignores the play’s valedictory irony: Hamlet dies amid “warlike noise,” the ruckus of Fortinbras’s arriving army. For a realization of that sonic crackup, one can turn to a “Hamlet” opera that has fallen into obscurity: a 1968 adaptation by the British twelve-tone composer Humphrey Searle, who studied with Anton Webern. Searle signs off with a dissonantly howling march, which might be either a reflection on what has just happened or a premonition of what comes next. That ending would have better matched our moment. ♦



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