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Can grand opera survive?
Your guess is as good as mine.
To reach a broader audience, major companies stage small-scale productions and chamber versions of opera with stripped-down orchestration, costumes and props. Meanwhile, conservatories, university music schools and community-based organizations, with minimal staffing and low- or unpaid performers, try, with limited success, to fill a void.
Even this country’s biggest opera companies are in trouble. Post-pandemic, New York’s Metropolitan Opera’s revenue is down $40 million, and its paid attendance has fallen by nearly 17 percent. Average attendance is just 61 percent of capacity. To make matters worse, one of the strategies that the Met has adopted to sustain itself, streaming performances in movie theaters, erodes regional companies’ audience.
How, then, does grand opera survive? On donations. About half of the Met’s revenue comes from donations and just 30 percent from the box office. Donations constitute roughly 60 percent of the San Francisco Opera Company’s revenue.
The future depends on audience development, and two strategies hold out some promise. One is to treat works like Show Boat, Porgy and Bess, and Carousel, which straddle the boundary between popular entertainment and high art, as opera.
The alternative is to commission new works that might speak to a more diverse audience. These are not radically innovative avant-garde works that push the boundaries of staging and musical composition, since those only appeal to the initiated. Rather, these are jazz-inflected compositions that address subjects of current interest, like Grammy-winning jazz trumpeter and film score composer Terence Blanchard’s Champion.
I recently had the opportunity to see Champion, the story of Emile Griffith, the U.S. Virgin Islands–born boxer who held the world light middleweight, welterweight and middleweight titles. Today, Griffith is best remembered for a nationally broadcast 1962 fight in which he pummeled Benny “Kid” Paret into unconsciousness, after being taunted at the weigh-in as a homosexual. Paret died 10 days later, leaving Griffith guilt-stricken.
Co-commissioned by the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis and Jazz Saint Louis, with a libretto by playwright Michael Cristofer and first performed in 2013, the Met version of Champion features soloists, a jazz quartet, a full orchestra and a gospel chorus, along with vivid video projections in a story of maternal abandonment, rage, guilt and an unattained quest for forgiveness. The opera paints vivid contrasts between an idyllic island culture and Griffith’s abusive upbringing and a welcoming, warm gay culture and homophobic violence.
In the Met’s somewhat overwrought words, this is the story of a “closeted young hatmaker-turned-prizefighter, who rises from obscurity to become world champion and, in one of the great tragedies in sports history, kills his homophobic archrival in the ring.” But what brings the opera to life is its score and its leading character, portrayed as a boy, as a prizefighter and as the aged Griffith trying to grapple with his past through the fog of dementia. If the libretto is tragic, the score is a celebration of a wide range of Black musics, from afrobeat, bebop and the blues to calypso, funk, gospel, jazz, ragtime, samba, swing, pop and funk (accompanied by some lush, Puccini-like neo-Romantic interludes).
The critical reaction to Champion has been mixed, with reviewers inevitably drawing upon sports metaphors. Some call the opera a knockout with a one-two punch. But others are more dismissive, terming it lightweight and asserting it that shadowboxes without quite landing a punch.
I attended Champion with some trepidation. I feared that the performance would be too violent and too painful to watch. I was wrong. The show treated violence operatically, in slow motion and with a vivid sense of the factors that had made Griffith into the man he was and the factors that had led him to an awful, appalling moment.
Champion certainly isn’t perfect. Its score isn’t, I’m afraid, memorable. Too many of the words in the recitatifs are, alas, pedestrian. Yet the audience—a packed house of 4,000, without an empty seat—was far more diverse than any I have previously witnessed. It paid rapt attention to a tragedy that was heartrending in a way that only opera can capture and convey. But it was a tragedy that spoke to our time—a tragedy of race and sexuality, sports and class.
The most telling commentary that I’ve read appeared in The Observer: the opera “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.”
What we see is one of opera’s first serious attempts to grapple in a sustained way with race and the homoerotic.
Champion is not, of course, the first opera to deal with masculinity, sexuality and race. There’s also Verdi’s Otello, Alban Berg’s Wozzeck (1925), Ernst Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf (1927), George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1935), and Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes (1945), as well as Blanchard’s own Fire Shut Up in My Bones (2019). But Champion certainly treats race and sexuality with a complexity and sophistication that earlier operas lacked.
No one today would describe race (or bisexuality) as a reality that dare not speak its name. Racial identities, like those involving gender and sexuality, are at the very center of academic discourse. Even if race is biologically baseless, we recognize that it is a historical construct and a lived reality that shapes a person’s options and life trajectory.
We also realize that white culture (euphemized as Western culture) is often treated as the measure by which all forms of artistic, cultural and intellectual achievement and ideals of beauty are assessed.
In her crucially important, if far too neglected, study The Future of Whiteness, the philosopher Linda Martín Alcoff examines how the modern concept of race developed in a context of European global expansion, slavery and other forms of unfree labor and colonial conquest. She also looks at the complex relationship between race and class and the shift from biological racism, rooted in supposed genetic differences, to cultural racism defined by identities, beliefs and cultural practices. She is especially interested in intellectual and political responses to demographic shifts in the makeup of the U.S. and European populations that challenge political, economic and cultural dominance of those deemed white.
As Martín Alcoff notes, race, in common parlance, refers to groups “that are visually demarcated and socially significant, with a shared geographical lineage.” Even if race lacks a biological or genetic basis, however, it is not illusory. It is instead a historically and sociologically shaped category that is connected to individual and collective identities and that is aligned with group privilege and domination and conversely with marginalization and disadvantage.
As Martín Alcoff and others, including Karen Brodkin, Noel Ignatiev, Nell Irvin Painter and David R. Roediger, have pointed out, racial categories are not static. Their boundaries shift and are frequently contested.
Nor is inclusion within the category of white necessarily advantageous. In the past, the categorization of Mexican Americans as white in the U.S. Southwest precluded the ability to sue over discriminatory school expenditures or inequitable policing. Today, inclusion can mean exclusion from access to programs involving affirmative action or minority set-asides.
If, in some ways, the dominant sectors of U.S. society have become more liberal and inclusive, it is also clear that the demographic transition toward greater diversity underlies much current political contention. In Martín Alcoff’s words, “It is not overstatement to say that every major political issue debated in the public domain”—not just immigration, but fiscal policy, criminal justice, health care, housing, taxation and the treatment of student loans—is affected by the demographic transition. At stake is the distribution of income, wealth and political power.
So, what does any of this have to do with the future of opera or with higher education?
In addressing highly fraught issues of race, opera companies and college faculty have a great deal to learn from Champion.
First of all, don’t flinch from discussing inequality, injustice and violence. But also do what Terence Blanchard did: give expression to this country’s diverse cultures in their richness, fullness and complexity. Recover stories that reveal the intricacy and poignancy of diverse lives and locate individuals within the rich cultures that they inhabited.
If American life is rife with tragedy, bias and unfairness, that pain has also been transmuted into modes of music and other forms of cultural expression that stand among the world’s most awe-inspiring, transcendent and sublime.
Secondly, treat personal identities as complex—or, as we’d say today, as intersectional. One of Champion’s themes is that Griffith’s identity consisted of a wide range of elements, ethnic, gendered and racial, to be sure, but also familial, religious, sexual and more. Griffith was Black, but he was also a motherless and fatherless child and the primary financial support for some 17 relatives. He was Caribbean, bisexual and also “a Methodist who carries a Jewish mezuzah and has a small Catholic altar and rosary beads on the dresser in his bedroom.” In later life, he suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, guilt and what’s now called post-traumatic stress disorder.
Our identities are shaped by individual characteristics, our family and class backgrounds, group histories, social and political contexts, our sexuality, our personal experiences, and much more. Griffith’s individuality lay in his complexity. Revel in complexity.
Third, don’t evade history’s moral and psychological complexities. What raises Champion above the narrowly biographical is its willingness to explore how Griffith, in many ways a gentle and sensitive man, was able to beat another man to death and the psychological costs that his acts of violence exacted.
If this country is to move beyond the past’s rigid racial hierarchies, we need to immerse our students in the rich, resonant and varied cultures, traditions and modes of expression and style that raise this society above its more homogeneous foreign counterparts.
