Heather Mac Donald A Jarring Opera on Jarring Themes On the Met’s recent production of X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X
https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-jarring-opera-on-jarring-themes
EXCERPTS:
Peter Gelb hired the company’s first chief diversity officer, even as the Met was warning of imminent financial collapse. This new position was based on the idea that the present-day Met discriminated against qualified black artists and needed a high-priced overseer to combat its reflexive racism.
Anthony Davis is arguably the most militant of today’s black composers. (Daniel Bernard Roumain would vie for that title, but he is younger and less well known.) Davis favors tales of black victimhood, whether the alleged railroading of five black teenagers for the brutal 1989 rape of a white jogger in Central Park (the Pulitzer Prize-winning Central Park Five) or the struggles of blacks and homosexuals in the McCarthy era (Shimmer, still in development).
He has been showered with almost every honor that can grace a contemporary composer—from fellowships at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy and the MacDowell Colony to awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, OPERA America, and other institutions. He has taught at prestigious colleges, including Harvard and Yale. Malcolm X premiered to sold-out audiences at New York City Opera, then the second-most prestigious American venue for operas. The current production received a rare Ford Foundation grant (Ford stopped underwriting anything “white” long ago) as well as a National Endowment of the Arts grant.
By a stroke of good fortune, the libretto for X contains the line: “You have your foot on me, always pressing.” Cue the George Floyd comparisons. The aria containing the line, sung by Malcolm in prison, “captures the relation of our community to the police and the power structure and the pain that comes out of that,” Davis said. Davis’s brother, Christopher, who wrote X’s book, described the reaction of Detroit school students to the aria: “They were like, ‘YES!’ and unfortunately, considering the way things are going, there will always be that reaction.” (For the record, there are counterarguments to the idea that the police and other representatives of the white “power structure” are the main threat in the black community today.)
Many scenes are prolonged beyond any musical or dramatic interest. The chorus will repeat a phrase, such as “Africa for Africans,” or “Allahu-Akbar,” at high volume on a single note. Davis may have been aiming to recreate a cathartic ritual experience, but the result is listener exhaustion.
The opera’s most punishing aria occurs early on, in an audience trial by fire. Malcolm’s mother, waiting apprehensively for her husband to return from a Marcus Garvey organizing session, recalls the Ku Klux Klan raids, including an arson attack, on the family’s homes. The vocal leaps here are at their most extreme, the repudiation of melody the most jarring, in a sonic portrait of psychological torment.
Malcolm X’s contemporaries in the civil rights movement dismissed the Nation of Islam. Thurgood Marshall claimed that the group was “run by a bunch of thugs organized from prisons and jails.” Martin Luther King Jr. said that Malcolm’s talk had brought “misery upon Negroes.” Carl Rowan, the director of the U.S. Information Agency, lamented Africa’s lionization of Malcolm after his assassination: “Here was a Negro who preached segregation and race hatred, killed by another Negro, presumably from another organization that preaches segregation and race hatred, and neither of them representative of more than a tiny minority of the Negro population of America.”
Malcolm has had the last laugh. Ibram X. Kendi, Ta-Nehisi Coates, a majority of the humanities and social science professoriate, academic and corporate diversity bureaucrats, college presidents, editors of scientific journals, chairs of STEM departments: all are Malcolm’s intellectual heirs in their insistence on the intractability of black victimhood at the hands of perennially bigoted whites. The rhetoric may have become less raw—instead of white devils, we speak of white privilege—but the meaning is the same. Segregation, in the form of black college graduations, black dorms, black cultural centers, black freshmen orientations, black theater, black Zoom breakout sessions, is now a demand, not a yoke. Conservative whites may wistfully intone the peroration of King’s “I Have a Dream speech,” but elite blacks admonish us that the color of their skin is the most important content of their character. (And why shouldn’t it be, since we have made it the ticket to college admissions, jobs, and promotions?) America may celebrate King Day, but its opinion makers take inspiration from Malcolm.
Comments are closed.
