A time for X

X premiered at New York City Opera during Beverly Sills’ tenure as general director. It was composer Anthony Davis’ first opera, with a libretto by poet Thulani Davis that was based on a story developed by Christopher Davis.

Anthony Davis’ music draws from an exceptionally wide range of influences, including Richard Wagner, Alban Berg, Indonesian gamelan, South Indian drums, African dance rhythms, jazz, and music that was known to be important to Malcolm. In addition to standard orchestral instruments, the score includes free jazz-style improvisation, performed by Episteme, Davis’ octet. Malcolm’s speaking style, noted for its punchy staccato quality, is reflected in the character’s vocal lines.

The production now at the Met has received glowing reviews, with Opera Wire calling it “an evening with profound impact” and Broadway World saying, “It was an exceptional night at the opera, both musically and historically.”

In The New York Times, Joshua Barone wrote, “All these [production] elements cohere into a grand, pageantry treatment of Malcolm X’s life that eschews realism for dreamy abstraction befitting the opening’s oratorio-like choral incantation ‘We’ve been waiting for a prophet,’ and Brechtian touches that signal X as distinctly theatrical storytelling. … And, with performances planned long after the run in New York, it has the opportunity to become what it always should have been: an American classic.”

New York Classical Review called it, “a spectacular new production … [that] kept the focus squarely on the inner journey of its iconic protagonist and his message to black Americans. … Davis’ lean and telling scoring … was vividly realized by conductor [Kazem] Abdullah, a longtime Met musical associate whose company podium appearances go back to 2009.”

In a recent interview with Pasatiempo, Abdullah described the opening night performance as a fantastic experience. “It was very heavily sold, and from the very first sung scene, which is a tour de force choral work, it got a great response,” he says. “There was tremendous excitement between the audience, the stage, and the pit.”

Asked to provide a one-sentence description of the score, Abdullah says, “I would say the music is wide-ranging, electric, eclectic, and meditative, so you get all of those aspects in the course of the evening.”

As he pointed out, X is really the first “CNN opera,” having preceded John Adams’ Nixon in China, which generally receives the honor. “I think of Anthony Davis as an American Verdi,” Abdullah says, “taking these historic events and making dramatic events out of them. He’s also part of a natural progression from George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein.”

Unlike most recent new operas, for which a short running time is seen as a plus, X is generously sculpted, with a three-hour duration. “It needs that length of time in the way that Tristan und Isolde needs to be a long opera,” the conductor says. “It’s very Wagnerian, in three acts, and the time is important to make his life really make sense, especially in how complex it was, even though it lasted just 39 years.”

While the opera is structured in 12 vignettes, each a key turning point in Malcolm’s life, it also offers fully scaled portraits of American society over those four decades. “The Malcolm we know doesn’t really appear until the end of the first act,” says Abdullah. “It’s brilliantly set up, so you see the context of the community, and what his family life would have been like, and the influences that might be shaping him, like the Marcus Garveyites.”

But why was the opera so long neglected? “A certain amount of racism was underlying it, of course,” Abdullah says. “It also happened because not enough companies had a fearless leader in the way that Beverly Sills was fearless. For a Jewish woman to see what the piece was and who the creators were and what potential they had was incredible.”

Sills’ determination to stage X was legendary, even though she ran into resistance from donors and others over Malcolm’s antisemitism, and her company wasn’t well positioned to deal with the opera’s requirements. “Did City Opera have a single Black singer on their roster? No. Did they have a single Black chorister? No. Did they have musicians who could improvise? No,” recalls Christopher Davis. “All of this costs more money. But music director Christopher Keene and Beverly Sills, god bless them, decided to go for it.”

X is for family

The profusion of Davis names as the opera’s creators is no coincidence: Anthony and Christopher are brothers and librettist Thulani is their second cousin. They saw each other occasionally as kids — the boys lived in Pennsylvania and their cousin in Virginia — and later reunited in New York in 1980. Thulani was working for the Village Voice and writing poetry, and Anthony was writing music for dance, including “choreopoems,” which combined dance, music, and poetry, some of which was by Thulani. Anthony was working as an actor and stage director.

The idea for a piece based on Malcolm was Christopher’s idea, having read The Autobiography of Malcolm X as part of a college class. He was struck by the amount and variety of music that the text included and saw parallels between Malcolm’s spiritual growth and the development of jazz during the same period. His initial idea was that it would be a stage play with music; Anthony decided to turn it into an opera, thanks in part for his enthusiasm for Wagner’s music-dramas.

“Malcolm worked in clubs and at dance halls [in Boston], and he was very specific about the music that he listened to — things like Lionel Hampton and Charlie Barnet,” Anthony said in a recent interview with the Metropolitan Opera. “And then later, in the ’60s, he would do his sermon on radio programs, juxtaposed with music by John Coltrane or Miles Davis or Sonny Rollins. So I thought there was a natural connection between his evolution as a man, and also the evolution of his political thought, with the evolution of music, culminating in the revolutionary spirit of the music of the ’60s.”

Christopher developed the concept for the story; he and Thulani collaborated on structure, and she wrote the text, which includes the use of internal rhymes, to make it more musical, reflecting her conviction that “you have to stretch yourself and offer the composer a variety of things,” because the text plays such a powerful role in determining the rhythms, tempos, and moods of the music.

“I wanted to have the lyricism and richness of language that she brings,” Christopher says, “and also her knowledge of the full history of African American poetry. In her work, she references poetry the same way I reference music, so that brought another level to what we were creating.”

The new production of X is staged by director-playwright Robert O’Hara, a two-time Obie Award winner for his Off-Broadway work, nominee for a 2020 Tony Award for Jeremy O. Harris’ Slave Play, and Helen Hayes Award winner for outstanding new play. The production concept, as developed by O’Hara and scenic designer Clint Ramos, the first person of color to win a Tony Award for design, merges an important historic event with Afro-futurism (a concept that has been defined as “a way of imagining possible futures through a Black cultural lens,” and merges aspects of science fiction, fantasy, astronomy, and recent technology innovations).

While the term was coined in 1993, its roots go back to the 1950s when the composer-pianist Herman Poole Blount reinvented himself as Sun Ra, after the Egyptian sun god who was believed to be the first Pharoah, performing avant-garde jazz based on free improvisation and modal harmonies combined with a stage presence that emphasized complex, futuristic costumes.

O’Hara and Ramos applied the concept of Afro-futurism to political activist Marcus Garvey’s ambition to create a unified, idyllic Africa, free of colonial rule, peopled in part by the African American diaspora. Garvey founded a steamship company, the Black Star Line, to provide transatlantic transportation for that purpose; the creative team for X re-envisioned the idea as a futuristic starship that arrives overhead as the opera begins.

Four of the five leading performers have recent Santa Fe Opera credits. Will Liverman (Malcolm) was a 2011 apprentice singer and returned for La Bohème’s Schaunard and Jenůfa’s mill foreman in 2019, while Michael Sumuel (Reginald) was Escamillo in last summer’s Carmen. Leah Hawkins (Louise and Betty) and Raehann Bryce-Davis (Ella and Queen Mother) were both featured in 2023, the former in Tosca’s title role and the latter as Rusalka’s Ježibaba.

“When I first heard Malcolm’s speeches it changed my life,” says Victor Ryan Robertson, a lyric tenor playing the dual roles of Street, who teaches the adolescent Malcolm Little how to hustle and survive on the streets, and Elijah Muhammad, head of the Nation of Islam, who was Malcolm’s mentor and perhaps the author of his assassination, after a major rift between the two men.

“I’d never heard anybody speak the truth like that, the raw, unfiltered truth,” says Robertson. “We hear a lot of half-truths, but when we hear the real thing, we know it. So I became obsessed with his speeches by my late teens.”

Elijah was a complicated person with a prickly personality (“ornery and defiant,” as Robertson describes him) who led a life full of contradictions. The most shocking was Malcolm’s discovery that his mentor had fathered at least eight children with seven different young girls, which his mentee publicly disclosed and denounced.

“This is probably the most difficult role I’ll ever sing, because the vocal line lies so high,” Robertson says. “Street is more jazz influenced, more Gershwin-esque; Elijah is more like Richard Strauss. But it’s also very gratifying, especially the duet between Elijah and Malcolm at the end. I love finishing it, because it really closes the chapter of their relationship, and it’s very poignant.”

As Robertson hastens to point out, this is not a Disney-style biography. It challenges the audience to consider their roles and responsibilities in the racism that still infests the country through such techniques as having the names of police brutality victims projected on the spaceship and bringing up the house lights during a key moment when Malcolm was sent to jail.

“Malcolm was unapologetic, and the opera had to be as well,” he says. “We’re all sacrificing something to perform it; it costs you something in your souls. But the rawness of it in the way Anthony has written it and Robert directs it is the only way to lead to real transformation or real change.” ◀

The Metropolitan Opera’s website (metopera.org) has a wealth of information about the opera, its creators, and the current production. The following videos provide interesting background and two samples of score:

▼ Anthony Davis and Thulani Davis on making X: youtube.com /watch?v=bDgbB_Z4mOY

▼ Will Liverman sings an excerpt from Malcolm’s Act I aria: youtube .com/watch?v=-Whvo9QPQFg

▼ Will Liverman and Victor Ryan Robertson sing an excerpt from Malcolm and Elijah’s Act II duet: youtube.com/watch?v=FvyZashApXc