February 9, 2024
My love for Terence Blanchard goes back a long time, to a nervous young college kid hesitantly using his ID to enter a club for the first time. I was new to New York, and the Village Vanguard was showcasing a trumpeter whose name I recognized from his score for Malcolm X and his work on Cedar Walton’s Roots album. I remember being deeply moved by playing that was virtually vocal in its lyricism. In the following years, Terence Blanchard’s albums slowly made their way into my collection.
However, I’ve somehow missed Champion and Fire Shut Up in My Bones, so I was intrigued to see how this master of jazz lyricism handles the large-scale structural challenges of opera. On Friday, February 9, I finally got my chance, when Lyric Opera of Chicago presented their penultimate performance of the revised version of Champion.
The original commision for Champion emerged from a collaboration between Opera Theatre of St. Louis and Jazz St. Louis, as the two companies expressed an interest in an opera with jazz roots. Blanchard has consistently refused to call the resulting work a “jazz opera”, preferring “an opera in jazz.” The opera, with a libretto by Michael Cristofer, is based on the life of boxer Emile Griffith, a complicated figure who struggled throughout his life with both his sexuality and guilt over killing an opponent in a match.
Champion premiered in St. Louis and soon saw performances in San Francisco, Washington, and Boston. Blanchard and Cristofer recently revised the work for a new co-production with the Met and Lyric; this is the version presented in Chicago.
I went into this opera wanting very badly to like it. It has an appealing story that’s unlike most anything else in the repertoire, and it’s by a musician whom I deeply respect. But three hours later, I emerged conflicted. It’s not that I disliked the show. It’s not that I thought it was bad. There’s a lot to like, and there’s a good show buried in here somewhere. It’s just… well, this opera is kind of a mess.
There are really two operas here, each trying to live on the same stage like mismatched roommates. The good news is that one of them has some really glorious moments and shows signs of greatness. The bad news is that there are two operas.
Blanchard and Cristofer seem to have approached this show by creating an “opera in jazz” analog to the classic recits-and-arias structure. When the music is in aria mode, we get a kind of jazz-infused, harmonically rich Puccini. Blanchard clearly knows how to write and harmonize a vocal line, and these sections are often moving and frequently sublime.
Then there’s the second opera. When the plot needs to move along or Blanchard has exposition to deliver, we get a groove from the orchestra. The characters talk-sing (or more often, yell-sing… more about that shortly) over this texture in a sort of modern recit. From a musician with legendary jazz chops like Blanchard, you’d think this would be strong. But it almost never works. Blanchard seems content to vamp on two or three chords, and the harmonies never provide the tension and support needed to make this kind of texture work in a dramatic context.
There was also a dramaturgical disconnect between these grooves and the story they were trying to tell. I’m not interested in nitpicking musical anachronisms if they work. But it seems to me that if you’re trying to establish that a scene takes place in a 1970s gay bar and you’re going to step outside of classical opera language, there are more appropriate styles you could evoke than ragtime or Dixieland.
And speaking of scenes set in gay bars, let’s talk a little bit about this libretto. I’m not familiar with Michael Cristofer’s sexuality, but the dynamics of a show about a gay Black athlete written by a straight Black man and a white man of uncertain sexuality are complicated, to say the least. There was a lot of good in this libretto — a fascinating story, relatable characters, some effective structural choices. And in a disconnect from many contemporary operas, the humorous moments are often genuinely funny. (Whitney Morrison as Emile’s mom was especially endearing.)
But there were a lot of moments that left me scratching my head. The White Savior subplot of Emile’s manager seemed to me, at best, problematic. But the real confusion for me came in the gay bar scenes. I don’t know if Blanchard or Cristofer have ever been in a gay bar… but if they have, I humbly speculate that they weren’t paying attention.
The text itself also left me cold. It felt like a first draft of something that didn’t quite know what it wanted to be. The recit-esque sections were serviceable, but then Cristofer would segue into some of the most awkwardly rhymed lines I’ve encountered. It felt like he wanted to write traditional song lyics, but something was holding him back. Each time we slipped into “lyrical aria” mode, the text began to exude My First Rhyming Dictionary energy. This held back several significant moments from the emotional impact they were trying to achieve; I found myself actively trying not to mentally Mad-Libs the predictable upcoming rhyme.
I’ve noticed a similar syndrome in other contemporary libretti. It’s as though librettists are worried that they might be mistaken for Broadway if they lean too far into rhyme and meter… or as though they’re hiding behind “it’s an opera libretto” to conceal their lack of lyric skills. Either way, it comes off, not as a “higher” artform, but as third-rate musical theater uncertain of its identity.
The structure of the libretto, on the other hand, was intriguing, and I think it worked well. Cristofer crammed most of the plot into Act 1. Act 2 consisted largely of individual characters’ emotional reactions to the events of Act 1, followed by a swift resolution to the story and a pseudo-epilogue. The dramatic arc was held together by the frame device of the elderly Emile reflecting on his life. If you’d explained this to me before the opera, I would have been skeptical. But broadly speaking, this structure just worked.
What didn’t work for me was the ending. Or endings. (Mild spoilers follow in the next three paragraphs.)
There is a moment in Act 2 — the single most powerful moment in the entire opera. The young Emile is cornered and gay-bashed by a gang of thugs and emerges from the beating, in a brilliant moment of simple but marvelously-executed stagecraft, as his older self. The music reaches a climax; the audience holds its breath. And Emile, through Reginald Smith’s heartfelt baritone, sings, “I killed a man and they forgave me. I loved a man, and they wanted to murder me.”
It’s an absolute gut punch of a line. It’s a gut punch of a musical moment. In the hands of Bizet or Strauss or Verdi or Puccini, the curtain would fall. We’d be left dumbstruck in the dark, utterly floored and pondering the emotional impact of that message.
But not here. We don’t even get a proper moment for applause. Instead, the opera takes us back to the present, and we’re given two or three more endings as Emile recounts the tale of the beating which we just witnessed. Loose ends that we barely remember get wrapped up. And then the show ends with the kind of hand-holding, candle-waving, moral-of-the-story, everything’s-gonna-be-all-right sing-along that feels like it was cut from Rent or Next to Normal. For an opera that’s spent nearly three hours worried that we might think it’s a musical, they sure don’t do themselves any favors here. It makes for a happy-ish ending and a little tune to hum going home. But it’s preachy. It’s condescending. And it’s not opera.
As far as the music goes, Blanchard’s lyrical lines and harmonic world were, in their best moments, extremely moving and effective. But from a technical standpoint, there’s a lot of room for improvement. It was painfully evident that this was a show written by a musician accustomed to the amplified stage, rather than the realities of live acoustic performance.
The most striking shortcoming came in the orchestration, which were unkind to both singers and pit musicians. It’s not fair to expect a pit drummer to play a jazz part under unamplified vocal soloists. The Lyric musicians gave their able best, but it felt so restrained, like they were barely touching their drums. Meanwhile, the voices onstage were struggling to cut through dense oscillating string harmonies and full-voiced brass punches.
The most immediate result was that the singers were robbed of dynamic range. It’s tremendously difficult to add subtlety and emotional inflection to your role when you have to sing full voice just for the chance to be heard at all. Parts that were intended to be performed in a kind of talk-singing manner ended up sounding yelled.
Photo credit: Michael Brosilow
I’m absolutely certain that these sections are going to sound amazing in a studio recording, where a skilled engineer can ride the faders. But in the acoustics of an opera house, the voices were simply lost. To make matters worse, one of the voices was amplified. Little Emile (sung by girl soprano Naya Rosalle James) gave a compelling and moving portrayal of Emile as a young boy. She was mic’d and could be heard clear as day. The impact was that, each time she sang, it was like shining a flashlight in my eyes after I’d been in the dark for an hour.
This effect was particularly pronounced in the duet between Old Emile and Little Emile. Reginald Smith was one of the few singers who could hold his own against this dense orchestration, but the contrast between his resonant voice and James’ artificially EQ’d speaker sound was distracting in a moment that could have been deeply moving.
Over and over, I found myself wishing that they’d simply taken a page from the Nixon in China playbook and embraced subtle sound reinforcement. If you’re going to draw on amplified genres without modifying the orchestration, there’s no shame in giving the voices some of the same support that singers in those genres are given.
In some ways, it might seem odd for a review to focus so much on structural and compositional issues in an opera that’s 11 years old. But this is only the second staging of the revised version of the work. More importantly, I think it’s important to understand what the artists were up against in bringing this show to life. The orchestrational shortcomings, especially, strongly influenced how the orchestra performed and how the singers were perceived.
Reginald Smith, Jr (old Emile) was the only member of the cast who could reliably be heard throughout the show. Smith’s deep, rich baritone resonated nicely in the Lyric Opera House, and he managed to cut through some very thick orchestration.
As Emile’s mother, Emelda, Whitney Morrison gave one of the star performances of the night. By turns charming and sympathetic, she brought depth to a complicated character. Her gorgeous soprano floated nicely over most of the orchestral textures, and her aria in Act 2 (accompanied almost entirely by solo bass) was absolutely a highlight of the evening, both musically and emotionally.
Photo credit: Michael Brosilow
The rest of the cast visibly struggled to cut through the dense orchestrations, with varying levels of success. As Howie Albert, Emile’s manager, Paul Groves did his best with a difficult situation, but he never fully resolved the transition between recit and lyricism that the part demanded.
The artist who inspired perhaps the most mixed feelings was Justin Arthur as the young Emile. He was charismatic, strikingly handsome, and played the role with full commitment.. I’ve heard Arthur in recitals; he has a charming presence and gorgeous voice. But on the Lyric stage, he was borderline nonexistent. His voice seemed to fall off at the edge of the stage and never made it into the house. Yes, he was fighting dense orchestration that did him no favors, but he also seemed to lack resonance. It was difficult to tell if this was his true voice, or if he was perhaps fatigued at the end of a long run.
(The best commentary on Arthur’s performance came from the older gay Black couple sitting next to me. At intermission, one of them said, “That boy’s got a MAN’s body.” Without missing a beat, his partner replied, “I just wish he’d get a man’s voice.” Vicious, perhaps, but I’ve never wanted so badly to be friends with anyone.)
All in all, I’ve rarely encountered a show that was such a mixed bag. There are moments of sheer beauty, but there were also long stretches of frustration and squandered potential. There is absolutely an incredible opera buried in this show. I hope Blanchard and Cristofer are equipped to excavate it.
For more information on Lyric Opera of Chicago’s 2023-34 Season, please visit the company’s website at www.lyricopera.org
-Chris Myers