NEW YORK, NY.- A basement rehearsal room at the Metropolitan Opera was so packed recently that it began to resemble a sweltering boxing gym.
In one corner, members of the Mets music staff were grouped together like judges tallying punches as they looked down at their scores. Nearby, a drummer and pianist locked into a syncopated groove, following the beat of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who was conducting while seated on an elevated platform.
A phalanx of dancers rushed in to evoke an intense, collective workout regimen filled with balletic grace and pugilistic intensity. Those moves were choreographed by Camille Brown, who was close by, keeping an eye on every acrobatic feint. A former World Boxing Organization heavyweight champion paced the room, offering exhortations and encouragement.
Supervising all this was composer and trumpeter Terence Blanchard. He watched as his first opera, Champion, took shape before its Met debut Monday. (A Live in HD simulcast is planned for April 29.)
After premiering at Opera Theater of St. Louis in 2013, Champion has played at the Washington National Opera and, scaled to a chamber-size orchestration, at SFJazz in San Francisco. But when this work modeled on the life of boxer Emile Griffith, and following Blanchards Fire Shut Up in My Bones, which arrived triumphantly at the Met in 2021 opens in New York this week, it will be thoroughly revised and expanded to embody the composers recent thoughts about opera, as a form. To wit: in this latest version of Champion, there are not only new arias (and new lines for supporting characters); what will be heard in New York this season also reflects Blanchards latest work when it comes to orchestral complexity and vocal elegance.
For example, during the rehearsal last month, soprano Latonia Moore, as Griffiths mother, was singing a rhythmically bumptious riff from the first act when she and Blanchard noticed that the phrase, as written, wasnt sitting in the most powerful part of her range. Hey, Mr. Living Composer, she called out, in a teasing tone. Could you rewrite this for me?
Blanchard got to work immediately, composing a new vocal part on a blank page of staff paper: a melodic line that could work atop the existing orchestral harmony. He took a photograph of the revision before passing it along.
I couldnt believe that he just sat there right in the room and wrote it, Moore said later. I expected he would come in with it a few days later, OK? It was like, No, here it is. Oh, my God! And it was really good.
In an interview after a rehearsal, Blanchard explained how his flexibility unusual in the world of opera, in which scores, like schedules, are set far in advance was the result of some early, on-the-job training in his career as a jazz performer.
Art Blakey taught me years ago: The easiest thing to do is to write something nobody can play, Blanchard recalled. The magic comes in not just through the melody and the harmony, but whos playing it.
You can see she has a powerful voice, he said of Moore. To him, the calculation was simple: He wanted to feature that voice in the strongest possible way. So thats what its gonna be changed to.
Moores role, as that of Griffiths manipulative and sometimes absent mother, is hardly the only one to be subjected to extensive revisions. Bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green a standout in Fire and the star of Champion said that when he first discussed this opera with Peter Gelb, the Mets general manager, he felt that the role was a touch high for him.
Gelb told him, Speedo, thats the beauty of having a living composer: Things can change, Green recalled.
Champion, with a libretto by Michael Cristofer, tells Griffiths tabloid-ready life story. Green sings Young Emile, while veteran bass-baritone Eric Owens is cast as Old Emile, who lives in a nursing home on Long Island in the early 2000s. The boxer leaves the Virgin Islands for New York, then works in a hat factory before becoming a welterweight champ in the 1960s. In the ring with Benny Paret, Griffith unintentionally delivers blows that prove to be fatal, leaving Griffith anguished for years.
Theres this dream state that Emile is in, Blanchard said, because hes dealing with dementia. Theres a combination of that harmony and that voicing, versus when its younger Emile. And chords moving; it goes back and forth. But its all story-driven, and its story-driven inside my language that I grew up listening to, as a jazz musician.
There is another thread in the opera, of Griffiths journey from a straight-coded world to one of queerness. As a young man in New York, he is drawn to gay bars and men while also excelling in the mans world of boxing. The sports universe either doesnt want to hear about queerness or openly derides him for his sexual orientation.
Just as Griffith navigates dramatic contrasts, so too does Blanchards score.
The composer likes to talk about his love for Giacomo Puccini and you can hear some of that in Young Emiles Act 1 aria What Makes a Man a Man? But in the boxing sequences, theres a driving sense of muscular, post-bop jazz tumult. (As in Fire, drummer Jeff Watts, known as Tain, leads a jazz combo embedded within the orchestra.) And there are some moments in which the fusion is well blended enough that no stylistic input seems to have the upper hand.
Blanchard said that from his first visits to New York, starting in the spring of 1980, he took in a wide range of music. Although he was associated with traditionalist-minded players of New Orleans, he made a point of hearing the trio Air, which included the cutting-edge music of composer Henry Threadgill.
People were like, Why are you going to that?, Blanchard said. And Im like: Bruh, because Im trying to figure out what fits for me. I want to experience it all. Why limit myself, because you think I shouldnt like this? Let me find out for myself.
Those experiences pay off in Champion. For one of the early scenes at a gay bar, Blanchard has written sumptuous orchestral music a cousin of sorts to the bluesy music heard in a club that figures in the story of Fire, but with the string section, not the jazz combo, taking center stage during the bacchanal. Its the sexiest sound those Met strings will ever make, Moore said after a rehearsal. You could see that they were feeling it!
Blanchard tipped his hat to an early teacher, composer Roger Dickerson, who used timbres and modes from American jazz when writing classical works such as the New Orleans Concerto. (Pianist, composer and critic Ethan Iverson recently lavished praise on that rarely heard piece, describing its finale as boogie-woogie gone surreal, the kind of thing Louis Andriessen tried to write over and over again, but better.)
When Blanchard started working with classical musicians, as he has done in his long partnership with Spike Lee as the composer of his soundtracks, Dickerson informed him that he had a unique opportunity, and a responsibility.
You have to keep in mind, the library of music for orchestral music has been limited, Blanchard recalled his teacher saying. There needs to be an expansion of it, through jazz and maybe youre the person to do that. He put that in my mind way back when.
Blanchard, who in 2021 became the first Black composer to have his work staged at the Met, has moved opera forward in exactly that way with his latest revisions to Champion, Nézet-Séguin said.
Even as the conductor has offered small suggestions in rehearsals such as proposing a bit of bowed, marcato playing for the strings instead of pizzicato that could get lost in the Mets grand auditorium he has also deferred to Blanchard, who he said has been much more hands on about fine-tuning the orchestration.
I think hes using the orchestra not to amplify his thoughts, Nézet-Séguin said. Its more: How can I use it as a vehicle, the same way I would use a band? It doesnt replace anything; it becomes its own thing.
Looking up at the stage after a recent run-through of Champion, Nézet-Séguin added of Blanchard, with a touch of pride in the musicians: Im pretty sure that in his next ventures whether its film music, or whatever it is hes going to miss all that.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.