An opera about Malcolm X will open Friday night at New York's Metropolitan Opera — 37 years after it first premiered. The opera's creative team says although nearly four decades have passed sinceMalcolm X's life – and his assassination in 1965 at age 39 – still loom large in popular consciousness. But the creators ofsay that the opera stage is the ideal vehicle to convey both the drama of his public life – as well as his richly emotional, interior journey.
Davis says that one through line in the opera is the music of Malcolm's own lifetime."You could basically tell a story through the development of music from the Forties to the Sixties — let's say Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five and bebop to 1940s to the avant-garde jazz of the Sixties — John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner," Davis says."So that gave a kind of musical trajectory that I could draw on in creating the score.
"When he got to 'You've had your foot on me a very long time,'" Thulani Davis recalls,"I was really startled and I was like, 'Oh, my God. That's why you sing it.' It's something high school students in Detroit related to. They were the first out of their seats to give us a standing ovation. I was totally surprised."
The spaceship hovers above the stage, projecting real images from Malcolm X's life and other footage. At one point, the spaceship displays the names of Black victims of police brutality.Thulani Davis says she was overwhelmed at a performance of X last year in Detroit when she saw all those names projected above the stage. It's a way of holding the past in the present, she says.
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Source: NPR - 🏆 96. / 63 Read more »