ST. LOUIS — Opera and jazz have similar, specialized profiles in our culture. Both appeal to a limited group of listeners who are thoughtful about their music and take the time to consume more than a simple, happy hook.
But they are fundamentally different art forms. Classical is entirely about the composer with performers striving to make religion of the notes he has written. Jazz is centered on its performers, who treat a composer’s standard lines as a first draft, meant to be personalized, secularized, resaid.
Jazz is ego-driven American. Opera is European and knows its place.
The divide makes jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard’s think-y “Champion,” premiering at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis this summer, the rare bit of genre-mixing that succeeds once in a generation. Scott Joplin did something like it, blending folk sounds for his “Treemonisha,” and George Gershwin dived in close with his grand “Porgy and Bess.” Both prospered by submerging jazz into opera’s realm; they essentially wrote straight-ahead musical dramas with big, melodic numbers at their core, Verdi-style.
Blanchard does it his own way, on jazz’s terms, and he makes a new kind of masterpiece. “Champion” is an opera no doubt, written for those voices, scored for those instruments. But intellectually, it is a work of jazz, constructed around a theme that is expressed, tossed in the air, repeated with nuance.
Blanchard and his thoughtful librettist, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Michael Christofer, clearly get what’s possible in the story of boxer Emile Griffith, the welterweight champion of the JFK-era world who happened to punch an opponent to death in the ring and who happened to be gay.
This is a deeply personal story with a significant social message; the world forgave Griffith for killing a man but could not forgive him for loving one. Tragic for our hero and yet wonderful for opera.
The project started all the way back in 2008 — but what timing, with the first gay professional athletes just coming out this year.
The work is structured in 10 rounds, with bells clanging and an announcer shouting into a mike at the start of each. But it unfolds in a much more complicated way. We encounter, sometimes all at once, three versions of Griffith — the adult, the boy and the old man, portrayed by three different voices.
This is a welcome gimmick because it successfully gets at the way our lives evolve. What happens to us as children defines us in our prime. What we do in our prime haunts us until death. “What you do in the dark she does come to light,” Griffith repeats when he is so old he can’t remember how to put on his shoes.
So we see the boy, one of seven children, abandoned one-by-one by their mother back in the Virgin Islands. We see the grown man in the U.S. reunited with that mother, who actually mistakes him for another of her offspring. A dark man in a white culture, he’s never sure of himself, never comfortable in his skin.
This theme repeats, literally repeats again and again, but each time with different emphasis made possible by a growing backstory, a familiarity that makes improvisation on the idea hearable. This is that sort of jazz.
Unfortunately for traditionalists, the format leaves the piece long on feeling and short on audience-appeasing melody. There are arias, with large ideas, like “What Makes a Man a Man?,” but the memorable ones come late in the game. They are replaced with musical lines — Afro-Cuban fast, rich and bluesy — sometimes jarring and unexpected, played by the orchestra and a jazz trio, uttered by the singers. This is a modern piece of art and moves effectively without showstoppers.
The set and costumes push it along. The fashions are spot-on and tailored like clothes matter. Denyce Graves, the celebrity soprano brought to sing with a cast less-famous, wears them particularly well. There are drag queens, too, stationed at the bar of the nightclub where Griffith hangs out — oversized girls, made comically bigger in heels.
The set lights up from underneath and video projects on either side of the stage. It’s a lot to look at on top of the supertitles flanking far left and right, but this is 2013, a busy visual age, and the opera marks its own time period in this way. Stage director James Robinson keeps it relentlessly interesting to watch throughout.
“Champion” is painful at times, violent, and it aims for an earthiness that opera doesn’t always bother with. The work is full of bashings of many varieties and it flows with obscenities, the f-word, the p-word, the s-word, the c-word (not that c-word, the other one).
They don’t hit as hard as they might in this production, and neither do the fighters, especially in the first act. The violence is cartoon when it could be real. The curses are delivered sincerely but suspiciously absent from the supertitles. If you are going to go there, you have to go all the way.
The second act is less afraid to hurt us, or its characters, but maybe that’s because it deals less with what happens in the ring and more with what boxes us in the head and the heart. There is brutality in the beating a mature Griffith takes as he leaves a gay bar, and in his sad, late-in-life apology to the son of the man he put into a coma years before. It’s hard to bear the laments of a mother who did her own child wrong. This is that sort of opera.
Blanchard’s orchestral lines, set within the pacings of jazz, bring us there by the end. He delivers a few nearly sweet melodies, but he doesn’t give it up to them. Instead, he sticks to those variations of the themes. We don’t walk out humming refrains, we wake up the next morning repeating words in our head.
That makes this a durable piece of art. Remarkably impure as opera and as jazz, really, but unrelentingly true to itself, over-the-top when it needs to be and unapologetic, just like Verdi.
New operas rarely have a life after their premieres, but this one ought to, at least in the U.S. It worked in its setting, with St. Louis at its mid-June sweatiest, setting us up for the heat on stage, with singers and musicians knowing they are making something new and crucial, and delivering the goods.
But its value transcends those circumstances because the piece bridges a divide between the European forms we still love and the American spirit that always seduces us. “Champion” makes its stands, politically and artistically. It is black-and-white and black and white, moving forward in a world defined by gray hair and old customs. It has a giant ego and it is an important work.
Ray Mark Rinaldi: 303-954-1540, rrinaldi@denverpost.com or twitter.com/rayrinaldi
