killing for love
by Douglas Messerli
Michael Cristofer (libretto),
Terence Blanchard (composer), Gary Halvorson (live HD director), James Robinson
(on-stage production director) Champion / 2023
Having read several reviews of
Terence Blanchard’s second opera to premiere at The Metropolitan Opera in the
last two years—a record matched only by Richard Strauss—I perhaps lowered my
expectations for my viewing of this opera. But after seeing the opera I was bit
abashed for having attended so fully to the reviews. Although I can’t disagree
with a number of the critics in their observations of this opera’s flaws, I
nonetheless was overcome by this work’s powerful popular appeal—particularly to
the black, Hispanic, and LGBTQ audiences who, with a few exceptions, have for
centuries been largely ignored in this major cultural milieu. Now that opera,
through its HD productions, has become something which we can identify as being
akin to film, perhaps I can rectify that long silence, at least as it applies
to the those audiences, by
reviewing those few operatic exceptions.
Champion hits
home for black, Hispanic, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and perhaps even transsexual
individuals, but also resonates for anyone who has unintentionally been
involved in a terrible act that resulted in a lifetime of guilt—which given the
actions of our own government during the last 100 years alone, might include
all of us who make up “We, the people.”
There
is no doubt that the greatest problems facing Blanchard’s first opera, which
premiered in a production by Opera Theatre of Saint Louis in 2013, is Michael
Cristofer’s libretto. Playwright Cristofer, best known for his 1977 play The
Shadow Box—not a play about boxing, but about characters suffering from
various forms of terminal illness—and his play on Emile Griffith Man in
the Ring written after the opera, may be an excellent creator of
well-made plays, but he has clearly little talent for the epic and his talents
as a poet are questionable.
Fortunately, when we meet Griffith’s mother when the young man arrives in
New York City she has the opportunity to hastily attempt to explain her
abandonment of seven children in the moving and wonderful song in which she
sings of her “babies in the sun” left behind. And from the very beginning we
comprehend that Emelda Griffith (Latonia Moore) is a being of contradictions, a
woman who recognizes that she has not been a very good mother, but who wants
back into her son’s life simply because she is still his “only mother” and,
perhaps she has found another method of financial support through him.
Some of the
reviews suggested that Groves was not in his very best voice on opening night,
but in the HD performance I saw he was quite excellent, and as a character
helped to enunciate and connect various aspects of Griffith’s life that
otherwise seemed hazy, as in his remarkable aria in which he refuses to hear
his boxer’s confessions about his gay life—a representation of the purposeful
denial of so many individuals in the US of 1962, a period which Michael S.
Sherry argues in his Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An
Imagined Conspiracy, there was a shift from ignorance and dislike of all
things gay in the post-war era to outright hatred of public gay figures in the
early 1960s when he argues, “there was a near-unified belief that homosexuality
was not only a corruption of American values but a real threat to American
power.”
Yet, most
importantly, since one of the central themes of this opera seems to revolve
around Griffith’s being gay or bisexual—the opera even hinting, by surrounding
him with gay friends during his first encounter and proposal, that his sudden
marriage to Mercedes "Sadie" Donastorg (Brittany Renee) in 1971
probably was in reaction to the public homosexual slurs**—one of the libretto’s
greatest flaws is that we never see Griffith in an actual relationship with a
gay man. He enters Kathy Hagen’s LGBTQ club Hagen’s Hole (a truly lesbian, gay,
and transgender hangout) twice, without seeming to take anyone home with him or
even making-out in the back room. In fact, the first bar scene appears more
about giving popular Metropolitan mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe something
to sing about—no harm in that!—than in exploring the other central aspect,
along with his boxing skill and the sorrow it brings him, of Griffith’s complex
life.
If
it is important to establish that Griffith was homosexual, it is equally
important to know how his love of gay men and sex intersects with the violence
that compels him to quite literally kill his boxing opponent and its effects in
the later street attack upon him by homophobic thugs which almost takes his own
life and certainly helped to contribute to his further dementia. Such violence
arises not just through being called a maricón but something
far deeper in US life and, in particular, in US sports culture.
In
a short interview before the opera, composer Terence Blanchard expressed his
sadness that even in his greatest moments of success, Griffith could not openly
share it with his gay lover. But after seeing the opera, I can only wonder,
what gay lover? Did he truly even have a gay relationship? We haven’t even been
shown a one-night stand.
Writing
in The Observer Gabrielle Ferrari nicely summarizes my
feelings:
“The finest line of the opera comes
at the end when the older Emile says: “I kill a man, and the world forgave me,
but I love a man, and the world wants to kill me.” From the press surrounding
the St. Louis premiere, it seems these were words spoken by Griffith himself in
conversation with the opera’s creators. Here, we get what we wanted all along:
Griffith recognizing something about queerness, boxing and forgiveness; voicing
his understanding; and asking us to think with him. It subtly touches on how
American sports culture so quickly commodifies Black men’s bodies, how it
stages violence as entertainment with little thought to the physical and
emotional ramifications of that violence and how queer Black men struggle to
define themselves within a system that makes their survival contingent on their
conformation to violently-enforced heterosexuality. It’s the opera’s best
moment because it lets its subject speak with amazing clarity, cutting through
to us with all the force of a punch.”
Again, we recognize that not
all that matters in a larger-than-life figure’s personal history can be boxed
into the contents of an opera, particularly a work such as this one which
focused itself upon a kind of box, a boxing ring which flows in and out of
young and older Emiles’ lives. Perhaps, as I have already suggested, if the
librettist had been more of a craftsman of words than he is of plot he might
have encapsulated some of what he tells us in ordinary prose and action through
the language itself.
Consider,
for example, the image of the “shoe” which dominates this work—the elder
dementia patient not even able, at moments, to comprehend what it is, where it
goes, and what it means to put on a shoe, let alone to realize he’s missing its
“other.” Imagine if that in Emile’s perplexed struggle to contemplate where a
shoe goes, instead of arguing it goes with me, he might have been, inspired by
a brilliant poet such as Gertrude Stein, able to suggest something like (forgive
my hastily hobbled together example) “a shoe is a shoe that goes to show.” Here
the shoe, in its very essence, represents not only something that with a shift
of a single vowel to consonant takes him to "his" show (life in a
boxing-ring) but something that will gradually demonstrate and lead him to a
way out of his confusions and intense guilt. He puts on the shoes in the opera
to meet up with Paret's son, who frees him in his simple observation that he
cannot forgive him for his father's death; he need only forgive himself.
But
time and again, as several critics commented, Cristofer simply doesn’t have the
language skills.
“Blanchard’s fine ear for scoring
and his way with a groove led too often to the orchestra’s riffing idly while
singers intoned librettist Michael Cristofer’s leaden phrases (‘I can’t give
you what you want. Only you can give you what you want.’)” (David Wright, New
York Classical Review)
“Cristofer’s libretto leans too
heavily on some of its more meager metaphors and vaguest poetic devices (hats,
shoes, baseball bats) and ironically, tends to pull its emotional punches in
the investigation either of Griffith’s queer desire or his feelings after
killing Paret.” (Ferrari, The Observer)
“Michael Cristofer pares back the
libretto’s language to singsong monosyllables and rhymes that at times approach
moon-June-spoon levels of sophistication and rarely open a window into the
characters’ interior lives.” (Justin Davidson, Vulture)
Even
in the highly moving and crucial centerpiece of this opera, Emile’s solo “What
Makes a Man a Man?” there is far too much Broadway-theater poesy to reach the
full depths where the music attempts to take it.
Gathering
up the trilogy—child, son, and father—of himself, Griffith is finally able
to release himself from his past, and we, similarly, forgive most of the
opera’s flaws for allowing us to share in this luminous moment and all the
pleasures that came before it.
*For a full discussion of the
meaning and etymology of the word, go here:
**In real life, as opposed to the
opera, the marriage lasted only a few months.
Los Angeles, May 1, 2023
Reprinted from World Cinema
Review (May 2023).
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