`My truth is a hammer coming from the back. It will beat you down when you least expect,” sings Malcolm X in a passionate soliloquy that ends the first act of Anthony Davis` opera ”X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X.”
Twenty-seven years after his assassination, the ”truth” of the martyred black nationalist leader has entered mainstream American culture with a vengeance.
Spike Lee`s already controversial film biography is only the most visible manifestation of Malcolm as trendy icon, but an opera?
The notion of an art form grounded in centuries-old white European musical tradition embracing the fiery spokesman of the 1960s Black Muslim movement might strike some people as ironic in the extreme, if not a marriage made in hell.
But Davis-an Afro-American composer whose opera will receive its Chicago concert premiere (in condensed form) for two performances this weekend as part of the Illinois Humanities Council`s third annual Chicago Humanities Festival-argues that opera is the ideal medium for telling Malcolm X`s life story. Moreover, he contends that Malcolm is the ideal protagonist for a new kind of American music theater, stocked with real people and drawn from real events.
”Malcolm`s story was made for opera,” says the laid-back creator of
”X,” which will have its second and final Chicago concert performance at 1 p.m. Sunday in Orchestra Hall. ”I think he was a really important figure in that he embodied the pride and aspirations of blacks during the civil rights struggle.” Davis smiles. ”But I didn`t try to write a piece just for black audiences. I think Malcolm is an American hero, too.”
”X” is truly a family affair, boasting a story and libretto by Davis` cousin Thulani Davis and brother Christopher.
The Davises consider the core of their story to be Malcolm X`s spiritual journey and transformations, his emergence from a racially brutalized young manhood to become a powerful voice for the militant black consciousness that undergirded the civil rights movement of the `60s, until his efforts to further radicalize blacks in America ended with his
assassination in 1965.
The score-to be performed here by eight soloists, members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, CSO Chorus, local community choirs and jazz instrumentalists under Michael Morgan`s direction (Davis himself will play piano)-straddles the worlds of jazz and classical composition in a way that catches the temper of Malcolm X`s time and our own.
The music and words borrow their funky rhythms from the idioms of black speech and the fervent cadence of Malcolm`s own public speaking. Ellington, Mingus and Coltrane are as smoothly assimilated into Davis` score as Mussorgsky`s ”Boris Godunov” and Gershwin`s ”Porgy and Bess.” For all its nervous, street-smart energy, however, ”X” never forgets opera`s Golden Rule: an opera must sing.
When the final revised version of ”X” opened at the New York City Opera in 1986, audiences responded enthusiastically to its powerful melding of vernacular and academic styles, its compelling subject, its potent theatricality. And most of the critics seemed to echo the popular sentiment, even if they were rather patronizing to composer Davis.
Despite the initial acclaim for ”X,” no other opera company took it up, nor did it court the kind of popularity that has since propelled another straight-from-the-headlines opera, John Adams` ”Nixon in China” (1987), all over the musical map.
Gramavision did record ”X” in 1989 but only now has the company released the album (R2-79470, 2 CDs), no doubt hoping to reap some of the residual attention from Spike Lee`s film.
Looking back on his first opera from a six-year distance, Davis thinks he knows why ”X” the opera has proved almost as incendiary as the real Malcolm X was in life.
”It really threw down the gauntlet at the operatic world,” the 41-year-old composer told an interviewer. ”Because I created a real opera about a figure whose message is threatening to the audience that generally attends opera, because it`s about a person who is trying to challenge the power structure in America. So it`s natural that opera companies are very frightened of `X` and its story.”
With Richard Nixon, Patty Hearst and even Charles Manson having been made the subjects of recent American operas (the Hearst opera, ”Tania,” is in fact Davis` third opera), it is easy to forget that ”X” really began the trend among American composers to take real figures out of the headlines, create singable music for them and put them on the stage.
”At the time I felt it was a breakthrough, that we were opening doors. That gave us an added impetus, an additional freedom,” Davis recalls. ”It enabled me to establish my own language and terrain in music as well as to go through the thrill of learning and developing a work larger in scale than anything I had attempted before.”
No hothouse rose, ”X” evolved through a series of workshop and concert performances paid for by foundation and government funding.
The opera began life as a work-in-progress in 1983 at an Opera America conference in New York, moving on to a staged workshop performance the following year at Philadelphia`s American Music Theater Festival.
In 1985, again in Philadelphia, the entire opera was presented for the first time, with full orchestra, whereupon Davis made extensive revisions. It was this revised version that New York City Opera staged in 1986 and that Chicago will hear.
As a leader who was hated and feared as much as he was loved, even by his own people, Malcolm X was forced to spend his adolescent and adult life on the edge. The Yale-educated Davis has endured an identity crisis of his own, having grown up in a white academic community for much of his life before immersing himself as performer and composer in the world of jazz.
Since 1981, when he founded the octet Episteme, his efforts have been largely directed toward uniting jazz and European classical traditions, breaking down stylistic barriers much in the manner of his colleague William Bolcom, of Lyric Opera ”McTeague” fame.
In so doing he has taken heat from both his black colleagues for being
”too white,” and from white critics for being ”too black.”
Davis` reaction is that he will continue to resist other people`s expectations of what kind of music a black American composer should compose.
”I see myself as a composer who is trying to transform classical musical forms into music that embraces vernacular culture. I believe the isolation of classical composers in America from that culture has been devastating in many respects to our music.
”As a classically trained musician I never felt I was `better` than jazz; I love that tradition and feel a part of it. But I also feel the need to extend my music into other areas. I won`t accept any limitations on what I can do as an opera composer; I never wanted to be called a jazz musician; I never wanted to be labeled under `new music.` I have an aversion to being pigeonholed, so whatever people expect me to do, I won`t do it.”
Davis agrees it is unfortunate that many black audience members feel excluded from the world of opera, believing (with justification) that opera is a kind of country club for the delectation of a primarily white, upper-middle- class social elite.
He hopes operas like ”X”-vernacular-tinged works that employ subject matter relevant to contemporary black social and cultural experience-will begin to demolish those barriers, too.
”What I`m trying to do is to reclaim opera as an American form. And if it`s going to be American I think it`s natural that we look back at musical structures that are uniquely American. So the operatic world is going to be forced to confront American music in a manner that it hasn`t had to before.” That is, if Anthony Davis has anything to say about it.
