Funny thing. I said that I wouldn't be able to see this until it appears on Met in HD "barring unforeseen circumstances." Just goes to show--you can't predict things. Maybe you can predict the general contour of things, okay, but there are always unforeseen circumstances of SOME sort. That's not meant to be a pollyannaish sentiment--maybe the circumstances will be unexpectedly bad--but they'll definitely be something. In the present case, some Russian folk hero somehow pirated the stream and put in youtube. That youtube video, predictably, was taken down, but it's still available on the more piracy-friendly mail.ru. The only problem with this--and it IS a bit of a problem--is that, naturally, it only has Russian subs. But will that stop me? Ha! HA!, I say.
The Met of course is making a big deal out of this being their first-ever opera by a black composer, which is fair enough. It would be easy (and fun!) to say, ooh, and only a hundred forty years after you opened! So...maybe I'll go ahead and say that. As this article demonstrates, they had a lot to choose from, but their choice was, nope! Sucks, but I suppose it doesn't actually suck any more than every damn segregated institution. I should also acknowledge that most of the Met staff would probably accept this criticism as justified (well, I can believe in Yannick Nézet-Séguin's sincerity; I'm slightly more doubtful about that sinister Gelb character, but WHATEVS). So...there it is.
This is based on Charles M. Blow's coming-of-age memoir. The opera begins with a twenty-year-old Charles, feeling homicidal, because he's about to go home and, so he thinks, wreak vengeance on his charismatic older cousin who had sexually abused him when he was seven. From there, the oper switches into flashback: we see the seven-year-old (as played by the scarily precocious Walter Russell III; he's not called on to deliver a very heavy singing load, and his voice itself isn't amazing, but he's still damned impressive in the role), his brothers, his strong mother and philandering father; his life after that is more or less glossed over until he gets to university (having received a full scholarship from Grambling), and eventually we catch up to the frame narrative. There's also a female figure representing in different places "Destiny" and "Loneliness," who then in the third act plays an actual woman, his first love Greta.
Gotta love it, man. This deserves the praise it's been getting. Blanchard is mainly a jazz musician; he only started writing opera later in life (this is his second), but it suits him. As expected, this is largely jazz-based, though with a strong streak of romanticism. Quite varied, also, from gospel-ish music to a sort of strip-club vibe (in a comic scene in a bar where Ma Blow confronts her cheatin' husband), to--this is something I've never seen in an opera--honest-to-god disco in the club where Charles first meets Greta. And real arias! Some quite moving. The whole thing is quite stirring; if I wanted to cavil a bit, I'd suggest that the Destiny/Loneliness thing doesn't necessarily make as much of an impact as one might have hoped (in spite of being sung by the great Angel Blue); also, when you think about it, the entire second act doesn't really do much; it could easily be cut without affecting one's understanding of the story. Although you shouldn't, because you'd lose some great music. So okay!
Regardless, I can't wait for it to appear on Met on Demand, because I sorely felt the lack of comprehensible subtitles. Sure, I could follow the basic plot, but...well, English-language operas vary in their comprehensibility, but here, I don't think I was able to understand more than half of the singing, and that's probably generous, although to my subjective perception, things did improve in that regard in the second act.
So how many operas by black composers have I seen? Along with this, Joseph Bologne's L'amant anonyme, Joplin's Treemonisha, Nkeiru Okoye's Harriet Tubman, Still's Highway 1, USA, Daniel Bernard Roumain's We Shall Not Be Moved, and a number of miscellaneous operatic shorts. I could conceivably be forgetting something, but I think that's all. And actually...it's more than I thought there'd be. Still less than I'd like, though. I hope the Met will continue to atone. Anything from that New York Times article would be great! Or anything else that seems appealing. All right.
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