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    Opera Doesn’t Have to Be for Elites. Here’s Why.

    If opera at its best aspires to a different world, then we need to cultivate an anti-elite approach to how it is created and performed.Is opera a standard-bearer or a pallbearer of the status quo?It’s easy to assume the former: From its less-than-humble origins as a private event in Italian courts over 400 years ago, opera boasted a spare-no-expense theatricality that projected the power and wealth of the work’s supporting patrons. Spectacle was a form of political justification, and extravagance became self-serving. Before long, the equating of display and dominance seeped into opera’s DNA.Today, opera still seems to many a reflection of a hierarchical and exclusionary society.Thinking about opera as burying or at least challenging the status quo may seem antithetical to its nature. Yet opera always fares best when it goes against the grain: flaunting resistance to the beauty standards erected by mass media; fitting uneasily, if at all, with the rapid demands of the attention economy; feeling completely out of place with how we consume other art.For every composer affirming authority in their work, opera’s history offers counterexamples: creators so committed to establishing a new world order in sound that they resisted all conventions and invented their own instruments, their own ensembles or their own theaters. Opera often appears to ratify the reigning ideology, but the art form is most exciting and viable when it is a subversive act.The status quo in opera is elitism, and the art form’s elitist tendencies (viewing audiences in large swaths differentiated by class) all too easily eclipse its aspirational potential (the art form’s ability to speak to a single spectator and support their process of individuation). To nourish opera’s aspirational quality, its ability to serve as a mechanism for imagining a different world, we need to cultivate an anti-elite approach in the spaces where opera is performed and in the way the artists create the work.Opera was not always perceived as elitist in the United States: It wasn’t so long ago that opera singers were featured on mainstream television, like on “The Ed Sullivan Show” or “The Muppet Show.” The “Looney Tunes” sendup of Wagner remains for many as much opera as they’ve ever experienced. The director Peter Sellars once shared with me a childhood memory of a handyman pulling up to his home in a pickup truck with the Met Opera broadcast playing on his radio.It’s easy to view this situation cynically, as though the bejeweled televised appearances of beloved sopranos like Beverly Sills and Leontyne Price represented a mainstream co-opting of opera to sell an image of upward mobility after World War II. But when Leonard Bernstein and Maria Callas appeared on prime-time television, they did not reduce classical music to a mere signifier of economic advancement.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Four Takeaways From the Metropolitan Opera’s Risky Season

    The company has bet that new operas will attract new, more diverse audiences and revitalize a stale repertory. Is the gamble paying off?For years, the Metropolitan Opera — the nation’s largest performing arts institution, with a $300 million budget and 4,000-seat theater — was like an ocean liner, changing course slowly, if at all.But now it is trying to be more like a speedboat. Since the pandemic, with costs up and ticket sales down, the Met’s programming has taken a sharp swerve toward contemporary works, which used to come along once in a blue moon. In recent seasons, the Met has done fewer productions than it used to, but about a third of its operas now come from our times.Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, has staked a large part of his legacy on the bet that these new operas will attract new and more diverse audiences, revitalizing a house repertory better known for presenting “Tosca” and “La Traviata,” year after year. With the Met entering its summer break this week, is that bet paying off, artistically and financially?The experiment is, at best, a work in progress.The Met put on 18 operas during this so-so season, and if you line them up in order of paid attendance, only one of the six contemporary pieces, Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” is in the top half. Modern opera is not selling well, at least not better than classics like “The Magic Flute,” “Carmen” and “Turandot.”The Met’s economic model revolves around being able to efficiently bring back most pieces and have them find an audience. But this season raised alarms about how newer titles will do when revived. Gelb’s gamble on swiftly restaging two top sellers of recent seasons — Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” and Kevin Puts’s “The Hours” — fizzled, with the theater over a third empty for both. (The average performance across the season was 72 percent full.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Anthony Davis Puts His Operatic Spin on Edith Wharton

    Anthony Davis has written operas based on recent history. But now he is adapting, and dramatically changing, Wharton’s 1912 novel “The Reef.”The composer and pianist Anthony Davis is known for drawing inspiration from real-world figures in his operas.“X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” — recently mounted by the Metropolitan Opera — and “The Central Park Five,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020, are both grave, ripped-from-the-headlines stories about well-known people.But Davis has also written rollicking adaptations of literary material. Less frequently produced but no less interesting are chamber operas like “Lilith” — a saucy and inventive take on the story of Adam’s first wife that features a divorce court in the Garden of Eden. Similarly, “Lear on the 2nd Floor” is a riff on Shakespeare that brings “King Lear” into contemporary discussions about medicine and Alzheimer’s disease.“The Reef,” Davis’s latest music drama to arrive onstage and his follow-up to “The Central Park Five,” seems more fitting in that literary cohort. That is, once it’s finished. Still in progress, the piece dipped its toes into the world by way of a recent workshop performance at Merkin Hall, presented by the Berkshire Opera Festival.Adapted from Edith Wharton’s 1912 novel of the same name, “The Reef,” with a libretto by Joan Ross Sorkin, has been in development, in fits and starts, since 2014. (Since then, Davis premiered “The Central Park Five” and revised the score of “X,” ahead of its traveling revival.)At the Merkin performance, the work departed significantly from Wharton’s text. For one thing, it’s set in Martinique rather than in Paris or the French countryside. The novel’s love-triangle treatment of romance, late Victorian propriety and social class has also been altered by a change of one character’s racial identity: The demimonde-adjacent Sophy is, in Davis and Sorkin’s version, the nursemaid Sonya, a biracial member of the sugar-cane estate’s domestic staff. A quartet of other Black workers on the estate, named the Invisibles, has also been added to the mix. The opera’s creators are toying with the idea of setting their story in 1928 to make more of the Jazz Age’s emergence.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The Met Opera Puts On a Malcolm X Marathon

    For 18 hours on a rainy Sunday this Halloween weekend, the Metropolitan Opera House was visited by the ghost of Malcolm X.Words made famous by the Black nationalist leader and civil rights figure in his classic autobiography, dictated to Alex Haley and posthumously published in 1965, could be heard echoing throughout the soaring lobby of the Lincoln Center theater. It was a welcomed haunting, conjured by the Met in conjunction with a new production of Anthony Davis’s opera “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” which premieres on Friday.Dr. Ilyasah Shabazz, Malcolm X’s daughter.Text from “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.”From 6 a.m. until a little after midnight, a starry lineup of Malcolm surrogates — including his daughter Dr. Ilyasah Shabazz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Michael R. Jackson and the actor Leslie Odom Jr. — read from the autobiography continuously and in its roughly 500-page entirety.“I didn’t think that they would do it,” said the director and playwright Robert O’Hara, who staged “Slave Play” and is at the helm’s of the Met’s production. He proposed the reading to the company’s leadership as a way to build word of mouth for the opera. “It’s amazing just to have the words in this space, and for the Met to open its doors and let people come.”Top row, from left, Maurio Hines, Anthony Davis and Christopher Davis, April Matthis. Second row, from left, Courtney B. Vance, Robert O’Hara, Bill Haley Jr. Third row, from left, Leah Hawkins and Dr. Ilyasah Shabazz, Makeda Hampton, Liesl Tommy.The event was free to attend, and an estimated 680 people cumulatively made their way to the lobby’s Grand Tier balcony, up the undulating, red-carpeted steps and around the low-hanging starburst chandeliers. At 10 a.m., about 100 people sat or stood around a small stage with a black backdrop set up in front of the building’s floor-to-ceiling windows.Marcia Sells, the Met’s chief diversity officer, said that Sunday was the first time the space had been used for a free event.“To all these people who are coming in here, to the speakers, to even the Black staff members who have worked here for a long time,” Sells said, “this represents the Met saying, ‘Yes, you really are included.’”Thompson, who plays a young Malcolm X in the opera.Shabazz’s Kaaba pendant.Around 10:30, the actor Peterson Townsend, a performer in “X,” brought a resounding musicality to an early chapter in which Malcolm details his inauspicious early years as a small-time drug dealer and hustler in Harlem known as Detroit Red.The actor Courtney B. Vance, of “The People v. O.J. Simpson” and “The Preacher’s Wife,” followed, drawing big laughs with a rousing rendition of a scene in which Malcolm X escapes the World War II draft by feigning madness at the induction office.“The educated folks had Martin Luther King, but the folks on the street — Malcolm had them,” Vance said in an interview after his reading. “It’s a wonderful opportunity to talk about him and what he stood for and to maybe make people go, Hmm, I want to learn more.”The Met’s event was free to attend, and brought in an estimated 680 people throughout the day.Peterson Townsend, a performer in “X,” preparing for his reading on Sunday.More than 70 speakers appeared, including Bill Haley, Alex Haley’s grandson; David C. Banks, the chancellor of the New York City Department of Education; and Liesl Tommy, the director of the Aretha Franklin biopic “Respect.”Around 2:30 p.m., Shabazz movingly channeled her father, and received a standing ovation, for a section that recounted his intellectual awakening while confined at Norfolk Prison Colony in Massachusetts, spurred by a trove of history and philosophy texts.“It’s a great way to tell my father’s story and to reach different audiences,” she said in an interview. “It’s as relevant now as it was then. We’re still living with the same challenges.”Readers on deck: Sunday’s event included appearances by more than 70 participants.Christopher-Rashee Stevenson, a member of the theater company Elevator Repair Service, watching Shabazz speak.“X” premiered at New York City Opera in 1986. This revival, which first ran in Detroit in 2021, was conceived by O’Hara as an Afrofuturist fable in which the title character is an archetypical Everyman who transcends time and space. The Met’s production stars the baritone Will Liverman, who opened the Met’s 2021-22 season in “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” the first presentation of a work by a Black composer in its history; Kazem Abdullah will conduct Davis’s score, which was revised for Detroit and changed further for the Met.Davis said that the aim, then and now, was to present a challenge to opera as an art form, in the spirit of Malcolm himself.“I wanted to help transform opera into a truly American form, one that reflects African American musical traditions,” he said. “Not only can opera play an important role in music today, it can make statements about who we are and what’s going on in the world.” More

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    North Carolina Radio Station Won’t Ban Met Opera Broadcasts After All

    The station, which had called the Met’s newer operas unsuitable because of their “difficult music” and “adult themes and harsh language,” reversed course.The music director of a nonprofit North Carolina classical radio station said on Thursday that the station would reverse course and air several contemporary operas being performed by the Metropolitan Opera this season that the station had originally said were unsuitable for broadcast, citing their “adult themes and harsh language.”“It was a very hard decision,” Emily Moss, the music director of WCPE, a nonprofit station based in Wake Forest, said in an interview. “It’s been a hard day and a hard week.”The reversal came after the station faced widespread criticism.The Met, the nation’s leading opera company, has been staging more contemporary work in recent seasons as part of a push to attract new and more diverse audiences; the company has found that these newer works draw more first-time ticket buyers than the classics do.But Deborah S. Proctor, the general manager of WCPE, took issue with new works planned for the current season in a survey she sent to listeners on Aug. 31.“This coming season, the Metropolitan Opera has chosen several operas which are written in a nonclassical music style, have adult themes and language, and are in English,” she wrote. “I feel they aren’t suitable for broadcast on our station.”In the survey, Proctor cited her problems with several of the Met’s offerings this season.She described the violence in Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking,” the death row opera that opened the season. She cited the “non-Biblical” sources of the libretto of John Adams’s “El Niño,” and the suicidal themes in Kevin Puts’s “The Hours,” which is based on the Michael Cunningham novel and the Oscar-winning film it inspired. She wrote that “Florencia en el Amazona,” by the Mexican composer Daniel Catán, was “simply outside of the bounds of our musical format guidelines.” And she said that both Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” and Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” contain “offensive language plainly audible to everyone.”“We want parents to know that they can leave our station playing for their children because our broadcasts are without mature themes or foul language,” she wrote in the letter. “We must maintain the trust of listeners.”The station decided last season not to broadcast Blanchard’s “Champion.”The Met, which has said it follows Federal Communications Commission guidelines regarding profanity and language, said it was happy with the change of course. “We’re pleased that opera fans in North Carolina will be able to hear all 27 of our scheduled broadcasts this season,” the Met said in a statement.The station’s letter, and the survey attached to it, received scant attention before reaching social media last week. Rhiannon Giddens, a North Carolina native who shared the Pulitzer Prize this year with Michael Abels for their opera “Omar,” wrote an open letter voicing her displeasure over the station’s stance and noted that challenging adult themes are staples of many of the most popular operas of the past.“The Met broadcasts are the only way many people get to hear the productions, which are situated in New York and priced way out of many people’s budgets,” Giddens wrote. “Radio is supposed to be egalitarian and an equalizer, not used as a weapon, as you are doing.”The station reversed course after receiving feedback from the public and holding internal conversations.“We really value being safe for a general audience, especially children,” Moss said in the interview. “But one of our core values is that we are a refuge from the political and troubles of the world and we are returning to that value.” More

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    America Needs Its Own Comic Opera Company

    There is no house in the United States dedicated to presenting works from a prominent corner of homegrown music theater repertory.Whenever I’m trying to sell a friend on a night at the opera, my memory calls up a scene from “Twin Peaks.”The local doctor, Will Hayward, sits down to dinner, clearly haggard, thanks to his work mopping up local catastrophes. Then someone asks him how it’s going.“I feel like I’ve sat through back-to-back operas,” he says with a sigh. Everyone at the table smirks. In this view, even one opera might prove a test of endurance. It’s a somewhat surprising joke at the music world’s expense, given that “Twin Peaks” often found pleasure in an eclectic array of sound worlds (spurred on by the inventive, varied work of the show’s composer, Angelo Badalamenti, who died this month at 85).But the gag also makes perfect sense. While “Twin Peaks” had art house trappings, it straddled the line between rarefied and popular: a feat that American opera hasn’t bothered with much since it stopped regularly letting its hair down on television in the 1950s.Long before grand Metropolitan Opera productions represented the first, last and final word about opera onscreen, thanks to its public-television broadcasts, audiences could find their way to sprightly, comedic musical spectacles. After a successful Broadway run in the 1940s, Kurt Weill’s “Lady in the Dark,” with a book by Moss Hart and lyrics by Ira Gershwin, was performed live on NBC in 1954. This night at the theater at home featured a plot driven by psychoanalysis and songs that unfurled within dreams. (“Twin Peaks,” eat your heart out.)It was a critical hit again, just as it had been live. Weill’s “One Touch of Venus,” with text by Ogden Nash and S.J. Perelman, followed on NBC in 1955. Around that time, audiences could also catch Oscar Straus’s “The Chocolate Soldier” and Victor Herbert’s “Naughty Marietta” on TV. Shows that would otherwise be found on the stages of comic opera houses — theaters that specialize in the genre of theatrical works with spoken dialogue and often humorous plots — were readily available in living rooms across America.Thankfully, all those telecasts have been preserved on DVD by the VAI imprint. And although the orchestrations in use weren’t those of the composers, at least the tunes are all there — which is more than you can say for the Hollywood adaptations of the same works. But why do we hardly see this kind of material today, on television or in theaters?Composers didn’t lose all purchase on humor around 1960. But since then, Broadway has become a less reliable steward of these kinds of scores. Pit orchestras have been reduced in size; amplification of voices has become more common. Sondheim’s catalog, with its complexity and wit, is the exception to these trends (and even his shows aren’t in consistent enough circulation today).Despite that reduced range of performance, American classical artists still demonstrate comic bents just waiting for an outlet. One example: Anthony Davis, a Pulitzer Prize winner, writes serious-minded grand stage works like “The Central Park Five” and “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” which is headed to the Metropolitan Opera in 2023. But he also writes comic operas, and they have languished.Davis’s 1992 opera on the Patty Hearst saga, “Tania,” contains a satirical jewel titled “If I Were a Black Man,” with words by Michael John LaChiusa. It is sung by a white Symbionese Liberation Army terrorist, and lampoons the liberal fascination with what Tom Wolfe called radical chic. Anyone weary of cringe-y, performative displays of bien-pensant thinking might crack a smile — or let loose a belly laugh. (Davis, too, chuckled while singing a line to himself when I spoke with him this year.)But you really have to go searching for “Tania,” or this song. Rare is the algorithm that would promote it; and the CD version, from the Koch label, is catch as catch can on the secondhand marketplace.Davis’s fellow Pulitzer awardee William Bolcom is in similar straits. His verismo operatic adaptation of Arthur Miller’s “A View from the Bridge,” from 1999, was prominently documented on a New World Records album from Chicago’s Lyric Opera. Yet Bolcom’s comedic efforts, like the 1990 “Casino Paradise” — with its Trump-like land developer protagonist — aren’t as widely known.Some elements of “Paradise” are dated, but the verve of “A Great Man’s Child,” the show’s failson anthem, with a lyric by Arnold Weinstein, still plays well alongside contemporary talk about “nepotism babies.” Bolcom’s accolades have tended to be for concert works like his “Twelve New Etudes for Piano.” When I interviewed him this year, however, he made his underlying affections clear, saying, “Since the beginning, I’ve had love for the theater.”This strain of American cultural life clearly exists. But how could it be better represented? The answer is simple: It’s time for this country to create a comic opera company of its own.The comic opera tradition — which traditionally has included not only spoken dialogue, but also smaller voices relative to grander works in the repertory — has since cross-pollinated with neighboring forms like the musical. The Komische Oper in Berlin or the Opéra Comique in Paris might play “Kiss Me, Kate” one night, and an experimental opera with spoken bits — or comedic angles — the next.Critics trip over one another for assignments to these houses. (One of the performance highlights of my year was a new production, at the Komische Oper, of Jaromir Weinberger’s riotous “Schwanda the Bagpiper,” whose orchestral music delighted American audiences in the mid-20th century.) But New York has no such organization. And aside from small, specialized troupes — a local Gilbert & Sullivan society, or Ohio Light Opera — the United States doesn’t really have any comic opera companies.The American Musical Theater Festival in Philadelphia commissioned and premiered both “Tania” and “Casino Paradise” but was shuttered in 2014. You might occasionally find a great chorus like MasterVoices in New York partnering with an estimable local ensemble like the Orchestra of St. Luke’s to stage the original, comic opera version of Bizet’s “Carmen” — but generally for one night only. That same creative team brought “Lady in the Dark” back for a triumphant one-weekend run in 2019. (The short run was billed as a celebration of a previous New York revival, during the first season of Encores!, in 1994.)Together, MasterVoices and St. Luke’s could form the backbone of America’s first true comic opera company. What else would they play and sing? Perhaps those comedies from Davis and Bolcom, and more of Weill’s works. But also, surely, shows by Sondheim — and perhaps other musicals that wouldn’t be appropriate for commercial runs on Broadway today.That catalog could include, for example, the vaudeville music of the composer and lyricist team Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, whose 1921 show “Shuffle Along” was a landmark of Black Broadway. The show employed William Grant Still, who was eventually called “the dean of African American composers,” as an oboist in the pit. (Still was said to have improvised a motif in performances that George Gershwin supposedly heard and later used for “I Got Rhythm.”)The book of “Shuffle Along” is weighed down by racial stereotypes of the period — yet Blake and Sissle’s music deserves a new outing. In 2016, Broadway tried a story-behind-the-show approach, though it shuttered prematurely after its star, Audra McDonald, had to withdraw because of a pregnancy. A new adaptation of “Shuffle” would be fitting for an American opera company, and more viable outside the profit-driven confines of Broadway.Contemporary composers who would be a good fit for a comic opera company include Joseph White, whose outlandish “The Wagging Craze” — a self-described “radio opera” from late 2021 — dramatizes a ribald (and, of course, fictional) male-bonding fraternity that attracts Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. (J. Edgar Hoover, for his part, is appalled.)There’s also Kate Soper — the dramatist, soprano and librettist behind out-of-the-box theater pieces like “Here Be Sirens.” We would all benefit from her having the space, and budget, to produce new works. (Her long-delayed opera “The Romance of the Rose,” originally intended for spring 2020, will at last make its debut at Long Beach Opera in February.) Or maybe Soper could just pop into the theater to perform a black box-style show based on her most recent album, “The Understanding of All Things,” in which she winningly dissects a male suitor’s negging in the Yeats poem “For Anne Gregory.”It’s not likely that we’ll see a contemporary version of mid-20th century opera telecasts. Those old Weill productions would be too ambitious; Soper’s conceits, too experimental.A proper stage for these and other works wouldn’t merely help to reclaim comic opera’s past and present; it could also set priorities for the future. After all, what incentive is there for budding artists to write in the vein of Davis and Bolcom if their own works can’t be heard? It’s time to give our comic spirits the opportunity to punch up the script of American opera. More

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    Abdul Wadud, Cellist Who Crossed Musical Boundaries, Dies at 75

    He performed with classical ensembles, but he was best known for his work with cutting-edge composers and improvisers like Anthony Davis and Julius Hemphill.Abdul Wadud, a distinctive cellist who crossed genres and was a key collaborator with the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Anthony Davis, died on Aug. 10 in Cleveland. He was 75.His son, the R&B singer Raheem DeVaughn, said the death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of multiple recent illnesses.Mr. Wadud converted to Islam while in college but continued to use his given name, Ronald DeVaughn, when playing with classical ensembles, as he did with the New Jersey Symphony in the 1970s.He also performed in Broadway pit bands and with Stevie Wonder. But he is best known for his work with Mr. Davis, the saxophonist and composer Julius Hemphill, and others who were central to the development of American composition and improvisation in the late 20th century.Skilled at eliciting variations of instrumental color with a bow, Mr. Wadud pioneered a pizzicato language on the cello that was sometimes subtle, sometimes booming.For many of his contemporaries, the first taste of his instrumental prowess came via his appearance on Mr. Hemphill’s 1972 album, “Dogon A.D.” (Like many important recordings featuring Mr. Wadud, it is currently out of print.)Over the title track’s unusual loping groove, Mr. Wadud supported Mr. Hemphill’s saxophone lines with crying, bluesy bowed phrases as well as some select, forcefully plucked notes. Baikida Carroll, the trumpeter on that session — and, like Mr. Hemphill, a member of the St. Louis-based Black Artists Group — remembered Mr. Wadud’s insightful questioning during rehearsals about that composition’s 11/16 meter.“He asked Julius about the relation of the drum part and the cello part, how they hook up,” Mr. Carroll recalled in an interview, adding that he “pointedly observed” Mr. Wadud’s working methods “because I was, like, This is the cat!”The composer, trombonist and scholar George Lewis said in an interview that he regarded Mr. Wadud’s playing on “Dogon A.D.” as a landmark of 20th-century music. He tied that performance to Mr. Wadud’s later solo recording, “By Myself,” which is also out of print.“There’s the electricity — he’s amplified — there’s the funk, there’s the off-meter; a lot of the stuff that turns up being crystallized in ‘By Myself’ is sort of foreshadowed in ‘Dogon A.D,’” Mr. Lewis said. “It’s like James Brown — but I bet even James Brown couldn’t have done it if it had been in 11/16.” (A 1977 live performance of the piece is included on a boxed set of Mr. Hemphill’s work, released in 2021 by New World Records.)Mr. Wadud did not record much of his own music, aside from his 1977 solo LP, but his solo work had an impact. Writing in The New York Times about the Abdul original “Camille,” from “By Myself,” the cellist Tomeka Reid praised him for using “the whole range of the cello” and moving “between lyrical, free playing and groove with ease, something I strive to do in my own work.” In a recent interview, Ms. Reid added, “What Pablo Casals did for the Bach suites, I feel like Abdul Wadud did for the new generation of cello in jazz.”Around the time of “By Myself,” Mr. Lewis chose Mr. Wadud for an ensemble that performed the Lewis composition “Monads,” his attempt to “come to terms” with the graphic scores of the composer Morton Feldman.“Abdul knew all about that kind of thing; he knew more about it than I did,” Mr. Lewis said. “That combination, of having the strong kind of Black bass and having all these other possibilities — equally strong — made him someone you could work with who was super versatile and could do anything.”Similarly, the clarinetist J.D. Parran noted that “you could run into Abdul Wadud anywhere.” He remembered with particular pleasure seeing “this gigantic smile” on Mr. Wadud’s face during their tour with Stevie Wonder, in support of the album “Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants.” (Mr. Parran added that Mr. Wadud was the contractor for the ambitious, larger than usual outfit Mr. Wonder used on that tour.)Mr. DeVaughn, Mr. Wadud’s son, recalled his father offering his ear when Mr. DeVaughn was recording his album “The Love Reunion.” “He went with me to a couple studio sessions,” the son said. “And he would make some cool suggestions.”Mr. Wadud in concert at Washington Square Church in Manhattan in 1990.Jack Vartoogian/FrontRowPhotos/Getty ImagesRonald Earsall DeVaughn was born on April 30, 1947, in Cleveland, the youngest of 12 children of Alberta Miller and Edward DeVaughn. He studied at Youngstown State University and Oberlin College in Ohio and, though accepted to Yale for graduate work in performance, chose to attend Stony Brook University, on Long Island, for his master’s degree, so that he could study cello with Bernard Greenhouse of the Beaux Arts Trio.In 2014, in one of his last interviews, Mr. Wadud said of Mr. Greenhouse: “He had the ensemble background. At that time, I was thinking if I wanted to do something in classical, it would be in an ensemble, an arranged quartet, piano trio, or something of that nature.”Mr. Wadud clinched some of these chamber music ambitions in the 1980s as part of a stellar trio with Mr. Davis and the flutist and composer James Newton.“A lot of people have spoken about his pizzicato playing, but I was also excited by his arco tone,” Mr. Davis said in an interview, referring to Mr. Wadud’s use of the bow. “He had a unique sound, a beautiful sound. I think James and I were both so excited; it opened up so many avenues in terms of our composition, to create pieces for him.”When the trio performed with the New York Philharmonic, as soloists in an orchestral performance of Mr. Davis’s “Still Waters,” there came a distinct moment of respect for Mr. Wadud’s musicianship, Mr. Newton recalled.“The principal cellist in the orchestra at that time said, ‘Mr. Wadud, what is the fingering that you’re using for this phrase?’” Mr. Newton recalled saying to himself, knowing the Philharmonic’s reputation for icy welcomes, “We got ’em.’”At the same time, Mr. Davis had unwittingly spoiled Mr. Wadud’s strategic use of his dual musical identities, in which he went by his original name, Ronald DeVaughn, for classical gigs while saving the name Abdul Wadud for improvisational work. “He was laughing,” Mr. Davis remembered, “Because, he said, now I had busted him: People in the classical world knew he was Abdul Wadud.”In addition to his son, Mr. Wadud is survived by a daughter, Aisha DeVaughn; a brother, Marvin DeVaughn; a sister, Floretta Perry; and five grandchildren. He was married and divorced twice.Shortly after recording the album “Oakland Duets” with Mr. Hemphill in 1992, Mr. Wadud retired from playing. Mr. Newton said of that decision: “I think when people believe that you’ve changed an instrument, as he did, the level of what they’re looking to hear every night is not always easy.” Citing Mr. Wadud’s ability to operate in so many worlds, he said, “You add all of that together, and the pressures are not minimal.”Ms. Reid said she had tried to coax Mr. Wadud back into playing. He was the guest of honor at the 2016 edition of her Chicago Jazz String Summit. And she repeatedly told him how influential he was.But a revival did not occur. “He was just so humble,” Ms. Reid said. “And I think he was happy that I even reached out to him.” She added that many record companies have since approached her, wondering if Mr. Wadud would be interested in reissuing “By Myself.”Mr. DeVaughn, Mr. Wadud’s son, said that just such a release remains in the cards. “I plan to definitely keep the torch burning,” he said, “and having that stuff put on vinyl.” More

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    Review: After 36 Years, a Malcolm X Opera Sings to the Future

    Anthony Davis’s “X” has stretches of incantation that, in person, turn it into something like a sacred rite.DETROIT — “When a man is lost,” sings Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s wife, “does the sky bleed for him, or does the sunset ignore his tears?”The start of a smoldering aria, these words may be the most poetic and poignant in Anthony Davis’s opera “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X.” Especially poignant because, for several decades, “X,” too, has been ignored.The work, with a libretto by Thulani Davis, the composer’s cousin, from a story by his brother, Christopher Davis, premiered in the mid-1980s, first in Philadelphia and, officially, at New York City Opera. And then … largely silence.For the past 36 years, it has been more talked about than heard. (An excellent studio recording from 1992 is now out of print.) And it was obvious, at the opening of a new production on Saturday at the Detroit Opera House, what “X” gains from being taken in live: Its stretches of incantation turn into something like a sacred rite.In these passages, over carpets of complex, repeating rhythms in the orchestra, the ensemble chants short lines — “Africa for Africans,” “Betrayal is on his lips,” “Freedom, justice, equality” — again and again, building and overlapping. The opera is at its best in these long swaths of music poised between churning intensity and stillness. Without copying the prayer practices of Malcolm’s Muslim faith, the work evokes them.Bringing “X” back to the stage is a coup for Detroit Opera, which has recently rebranded itself after 50 years as Michigan Opera Theater, inaugurating a new era under the artistic leadership of Yuval Sharon.Sharon came to prominence as the founder of the experimental Los Angeles company the Industry, and he is swiftly bringing ambitious, inventive programming to Detroit, like a “Götterdämmerung” in a parking garage and a “La Bohème” whose four acts are played in reverse. The field is noticing what he’s up to: As part of a widespread effort to belatedly present more works by Black composers and librettists, this “X” will travel to the Metropolitan Opera (in fall 2023), Lyric Opera of Chicago, Opera Omaha and Seattle Opera.In biopic style, the libretto sketches an outline of a short but eventful life: the murder of Malcolm’s father when Malcolm is a boy in Lansing, Mich.; his mother’s mental breakdown; his move to live with his half sister in Boston, where he falls in with a fast crowd and ends up in prison; his jailhouse conversion to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam; the success of his Black nationalist ministry; his rift with Muhammad over tactics; his pilgrimage to Mecca; and the glimmers of a more universalist ideology of peace and racial unity, which he barely gets a chance to expound before his assassination in 1965, at just 39.Clint Ramos’s set for Robert O’Hara’s production evokes the Audubon Ballroom in New York, where Malcolm was killed, while introducing an element of sci-fi Afrofuturism.Micah ShumakeAll this is conveyed in the heightened register of opera. Even the dialogue is pithy and exalted: “I come from a desert of pain and remorse.” The music is varied and resourceful; Davis won a Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for his most recent opera, “The Central Park Five,” but “X” is a deeper score.It begins in a mournful, noirish mood, the moments of anxiety flirting with blues and subtle swing. Guided sensitively by the conductor Kazem Abdullah, the music goes on to swerve from punchy modernism to lyrical lushness, from peaceful worship to nervous energy and stentorian forcefulness.An essay in the program describes how Davis’s original contract specified that “the word ‘jazz’ should not be used in any connection with this piece,” though an innovation here was to embed an improvising ensemble within a traditional orchestra. This works smoothly, as when a saxophone aptly depicts Malcolm’s new life in big-city Boston, or when a wailing, longing trumpet accompanies prayer in Mecca. The prisoners’ choral dirge is heated by squeals of brass, smoking underneath; along with Betty’s enigmatically tender aria, this is the most intriguing music of the opera.The new production, directed by Robert O’Hara (“Slave Play”), has a unit set, by Clint Ramos, that evokes the partly ruined Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, where Malcolm was killed. (The mountain pass mural painted on the back wall of the ballroom’s stage depicts an idyll that seems like it’s almost taunting the opera’s characters.)Above hover some big, swooping curves, used as a projection screen for textures, animated designs and a scrolling list of names of victims of white violence, before and after Malcolm. The staging is inspired by Afrofuturism, the attempt to conceive new — often fanciful, sometimes celestial — circumstances for a people suffering under crushing oppression.“Imagine a world where Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line is a spaceship,” O’Hara writes in a program note, referring to the “Back to Africa” movement in which Malcolm’s parents participated. But it is when the curves take on the literal flashing lights of such a ship that things turn a bit risible, conjuring the vessel in “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” more than noble dreams of escape and revision.More effective is the introduction of four male dancers — their sinuous choreography is by Rickey Tripp — who snake through the production, sometimes as guardian angels looking over Young Malcolm (Charles Dennis), sometimes as squiggly punctuation to scenes. The spare flexibility that O’Hara introduces mostly works, even if the libretto’s specificity of place and situation gets sacrificed in this more abstract vision. Malcolm’s basic progress is still clear — less so the particulars of where he is and to whom, exactly, he’s speaking. The result, not unpleasantly, is more dream ballet than CNN.In the production, four dancers — their sinuous choreography by Rickey Tripp — snake through the production, sometimes as guardian angels looking over Young Malcolm (Charles Dennis), here with his mother (Whitney Morrison).Micah ShumakeMalcolm, though, still wears his distinctive browline glasses. He is played here with superb control by the bass-baritone Davóne Tines, steady, calm and committed in both his physical presence and grounded voice, with a fiery core that seethes in his main aria, “I would not tell you what I know,” at the end of Act I.As Malcolm’s mother and his wife, the soprano Whitney Morrison sings with mellow strength. Charming as Street, who spiffs up Malcolm in Boston, the tenor Victor Ryan Robertson largely handles Elijah Muhammad’s muscular high lines but strains to convey his magnetism.“X” sometimes hypnotizes but sometimes sags. Like Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha,” about Gandhi’s early years in South Africa, the opera is conceived as a steadily progressing account of a historical figure’s ideological evolution, dispensing with traditional dramatic tension. The main human conflict, between Malcolm and Elijah, is only lightly touched on; it’s not the plot.“Satyagraha,” though, fully gives itself over to stylization, its Sanskrit text detached from the action, its scenes pageantlike. The music and libretto of “X,” by contrast, keep promising crackling drama without quite delivering; there can be a sense of falling between the stools of trance-like repetition and standard storytelling.Scattered throughout are interludes that musically feel like vamping and that offer little obvious pretext for action. After so many years, the creators seem to have perceived the need to do something with these expanses — “We have added a few lines of singing in places that were musical interludes,” Thulani Davis writes in the program — but they remain, and sap the energy.Still “X,” for all its obvious admiration for its subject, is admirably resistant to mawkishness or melodrama, particularly in avoiding an operatic death scene: At the end, Malcolm takes the podium in the Audubon Ballroom and briefly greets his audience in Arabic. Then there’s a blackout as gunfire rings out.For all the talk of spaceships and a better tomorrow, it is an inescapably stark conclusion. There will always be gifted, visionary boys and men, the work seems to say in this new staging, but their futures are hardly assured.X: The Life and Times of Malcolm XThrough May 22 at the Detroit Opera House; detroitopera.org. More