Davis’s many operas include Amistad (1997) and the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Central Park Five (2019). Then, in 1986, Anthony Davis’s X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X (coming to the Met in fall 2023) ushered in a new generation of Black opera composers, to which Blanchard belongs. But Anderson’s performance as Ulrica in Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera became a symbol of the desegregation of opera as houses in the United States and Europe began to let Black singers onto their stages. From Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield and Sissieretta Jones, two of the best-known Black opera singers of the 19th century, to composers Harry Lawrence Freeman, Scott Joplin, William Grant Still, and many others, Black artists were making important contributions to the opera world long before Marian Anderson’s historic debut at the Met on January 7, 1955. And filmmaker Kasi Lemmons becomes the first African American librettist to have her work performed by the Met.Īs Blanchard points out, his work is part of a much longer trajectory of operas by Black composers- and operatic contributions by Black librettists, singers, and other collaborating artists. Brown, who is both the production’s choreographer and one of its co-directors, in partnership with James Robinson. The premiere of Fire Shut Up in My Bones also marks the company’s first staging with a Black female director: Camille A. Performers and audience members alike are coming together after 18 months during which live opera was not possible due to the dangers of the pandemic-the longest closure in Met history. Indeed, the opening of Blanchard’s opera to kick off the 2021–22 season is historic in several ways. It’s because of them that I’m here doing this.” I want the people whose shoulders I’m standing on to be honored by what we put on the stage. “But I know I’m not the first African American qualified to be in this position. “It’s overwhelming, and it’s a huge honor,” he acknowledges, remembering how humbled and astounded he was by the revelation. When Terence Blanchard first spoke to a journalist about the plans for his Fire Shut Up in My Bones to be produced at the Metropolitan Opera, he did not know that it would become the first opera by a Black composer to be performed by the company in its august 139-year history. Blow’s searing memoir, the opera tells a traumatic but ultimately empowering story of adversity, struggle, and rebirth, a striking metaphor at the dawn of a bright new era for the Met.
The 2021–22 season opens September 27 with a landmark moment in Met history: the premiere of Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones, marking both the company’s first performance of an opera by a Black composer and its return to the stage after the longest closure since its founding in 1883.
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