NEW YORK, NY.- Richard Strauss’ “Der Rosenkavalier” was performed at the Metropolitan Opera in 1948. The next year the Met put on his “Salome.”

It took until Monday evening — more than 70 years later — before another living composer had different operas staged at the Met in back-to-back seasons, as Terence Blanchard’s “Champion” followed his “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.”

Just a couple of years ago, few would have predicted this milestone. “Fire” was supposed to have its premiere at the Met this coming fall, and “Champion” wasn’t scheduled at all. But in the wake of the widespread calls for racial justice in 2020, “Fire” was moved up to opening night of the 2021-22 season, the symbol of the company’s resurrection as it reopened after a year-and-a-half pandemic closure.

It was the first opera by a Black composer to reach the country’s largest performing arts institution. And the astonishing speed with which another Blanchard piece has been added to the repertory is a sign of how swiftly and profoundly the Met, buffeted by lagging ticket sales for some classics, has pivoted to emphasize new and recent works and long-marginalized voices. Next season, Blanchard’s “Fire” will be revived; no Strauss operas are on the roster.

Diverting and smoothly staged, if also sluggishly paced and eventually wearying, “Champion” has the more immediately opera-worthy plot of the Blanchard pair. It tells the painful real-life story of closeted boxer Emile Griffith, whose ferocious attack in the ring on a fighter who used a gay slur at their weigh-in resulted in the man’s death 10 days later.

Guilt over what happened cast a shadow over the rest of Griffith’s life, which ended in a long twilight of dementia. He died, at 75, in 2013, a month after “Champion” premiered at Opera Theater of St. Louis.

With three singers depicting Griffith — as a child, a young fighter in his prime, and a gentle, confused old man, haunted by the opponent he killed — the opera relates both the colorful atmosphere of the Virgin Islands, where he was born, and the abuse he was subjected to growing up.

We’re introduced to the self-absorbed mother who doesn’t recognize him when he moves to New York to join her, and the hat manufacturer who becomes his coach. (That he worked as a milliner while he rose as an athlete is one of the surprising turns in Griffith’s story.) There’s the deadly bout; his ill-advised marriage; his mounting losses in the ring; and the brutal attack, as he left a gay bar, that nearly killed him in 1992.

Blanchard and his librettist, Michael Cristofer (who has also written a play, “Man in the Ring,” about Griffith), tell the story in flashbacks from the shattered memory of Griffith, who, in his 60s, is being looked after on Long Island by his lover turned adopted son and caretaker.

But the opera doesn’t wander too far into fragmentation; its narrative is straightforward, coherent, chronological — biopic-style. Blanchard, best known as a jazz trumpeter and the composer of scores for Spike Lee films, likes to contrast upbeat party sequences with brooding monologues, but he brings a sense of order to both. There’s a lot that’s syncopated but very little that’s wild in either of his operas.

“A Tale of God’s Will,” his 2007 album inspired by his score for “When the Levees Broke,” Lee’s HBO documentary about Hurricane Katrina, bloomed with aria-intense emotion. It persuaded James Robinson, the artistic director of Opera Theater of St. Louis who has staged “Champion” and “Fire,” that Blanchard had operas in him.

The two works have much in common. Perhaps most conspicuous — remarkably and hearteningly, given that Blanchard is straight — they both involve queer male protagonists, and their struggles with traditional conceptions of masculinity are part of their heartfelt charm. (“Fire,” which premiered in St. Louis in 2019, was based on New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow’s memoir of his turbulent upbringing in Louisiana.)

Both operas, though particularly “Champion,” are more blandly jazzy than they are vivid jazz. In both, the orchestra tends to be attractively functional — a carpet of gently bluesy repeating riffs — rather than an expressive character in its own right. The too-few moments of idiosyncrasy in “Champion” are the strongest, like the soft, humid breath of chant that unexpectedly but perfectly evokes the harrowing folk religiosity of Griffith’s abusive cousin in the islands.

Even more than “Fire,” though, the sonic landscape of “Champion” often feels like lush film-style underscoring, which means that the music labors to press forward and scenes linger too long, giving the piece a feeling of stagnancy, of slowly snapping its finger in place — though conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, does his best to keep the pace from flagging.




While it is recognizably by the same composer as “Champion,” “Fire” has more resourceful, deep and varied music, dreamily reprising memorable themes and melodies, and more daringly using the jazz quartet rhythm section that both scores tuck into the traditional symphony orchestra.

But if “Champion” feels talkier, it’s also shorter and generally sturdier and plainer, in a good way, without the overwrought poetic flourishes of “Fire,” which includes a singer who has to play the allegorical qualities of both Destiny and Loneliness as well as, confusingly, a human woman.

Robinson’s attractive “Champion” production splashes evocative projections (by Greg Emetaz) of mid-20th-century New York on Allen Moyer’s light-on-its-feet set, which shifts fluidly between scenes, and the boxing sequences nicely toggle between flurries of punches and slow motion.

The striking energy of Camille A. Brown’s choreography, which was so crucial to “Fire” that she was designated its co-director, is folded more organically into the scenes in “Champion.” But here she conjures visions no less memorable than the showstopping step dance of “Fire”: a raucous carnival in St. Thomas, an explosively macho boxing gym, gay bar encounters that radiate some genuine heat.

Eric Owens’ stolidity and his aging, granitic bass-baritone convey the older Griffith’s hurt and confusion; Ethan Joseph sings sweetly and clearly as the boy Emile, even as Blanchard’s score stays punishingly high for him near the opera’s end. In what’s essentially a cameo, the eminent mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe has a ball with the hard-swinging, gleefully vulgar gay bar owner Kathy Hagen.

A powerful voice and presence in smaller parts at the Met over the past 10 years, and the best singer in its “Fire,” bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green got in fighting shape to play the young Griffith, his first leading role with the company. Even if he stands nearly a foot taller than his real-life counterpart did, he has the right combination of imposing physicality and tender geniality.

Green has said in interviews that his first impression was that the part lay too high for his voice — Blanchard made some adjustments — but on Monday the music often seemed like it lay too low for him to project strongly through the orchestra, robbing the character of force and intensity. But he was bruising and effective in Griffith’s grandest aria, “What makes a man a man,” near the end of Act 1.

Both Blanchard’s operas reach toward uplifting, therapized endings: “Fire” in a duet for a mother and son finally able to embrace without emotional barriers, and “Champion” in a kind of hymn sung by the assembled company as the young Griffith begs his older self’s forgiveness, and gets it.

And both suffer from the overexpansion of secondary characters, a kind of narrative clutter. (The addition of material as both pieces moved from the intimate St. Louis theater to the far grander Met hasn’t helped.) The mother in “Fire” became almost a co-protagonist, and in “Champion,” too, there’s a feeling of Emelda Griffith stealing some of her son’s spotlight.

Her long aria in the second act, as she remembers her childhood in the Virgin Islands and suggests some of the unhappiness she’s passed on, is perhaps the most musically intriguing sequence in the show, with a seductive, soaring vocal line — tailor-made for Latonia Moore’s airily flexible soprano, with its passionate high notes — and a quiet, austere plucked accompaniment for a solo double bass.

But it does little for the plot. And, since it’s followed by a seemingly endless number for Griffith’s coach (tenor Paul Groves, strained), it serves mostly to keep Griffith offstage for a sprawling stretch when we want to be hearing from him about what he’s doing and feeling.

This is one of the reasons why, despite all the obvious drama and grab-you-by-the-lapels outpourings, the impact of “Champion” is more mellow — earnestly, affably toe-tapping — than fierce or haunting. The opera shadowboxes without quite landing a punch.

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‘Champion’

Continues through May 13 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.