Fire, Factotum, and the Future of Opera
As the audience fills each velvet seat, the house dims until only the somber words from Jeremiah linger on a black screen. Strings and brass rumble a low overture. When the screen lifts away, a Black man gasps on stage, stumbling under the psychological weight of the pistol in his hand. His silky baritone voice enters at the same time as a steely drum kit: “Prepare to die, motherf—cker!”
Fire Shut Up In My Bones reopened New York City’s Metropolitan Opera after it closed for the height of the pandemic. Composed by jazz artist Terence Blanchard and with librettist Kasi Lemmons, the opera adapts the memoir of Charles M. Blow, a New York Times columnist, Louisiana native, and survivor of childhood sexual assault. Fire is the first opera to cast an all-Black ensemble since Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess in 1935, and so far, the only opera written by Black people telling the story of a Black person.
Will Liverman starred as Charles at the Met and then in Fire’s debut at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. He started each night with a pistol in hand, as Charles decides if he will murder the cousin who assaulted him as a child. The piece changed him forever, he says. “The more meaningful and relevant stories [we tell], the more we can impact people who don’t usually go to the opera. Fire is just the first step; but it’s a big step!”
Opera is an extravagant and expensive art form over four hundred years old. Its sheer magnitude spawned entire other traditions (read: Broadway). Some audiences have abandoned opera altogether for showtunes, rap or pop; fed up with flabby divas and foreign languages, they lost their taste for the highbrow entertainment of 19th century Europe. They moved towards music that showcased what they cared about. But Fire Shut Up In My Bones is a far cry from Wagner. Fire is just one of many works that update the canon and diversify the people writing, producing, starring in and soaking up opera. It’s part of a whole movement reclaiming this Euro-centric art form as their own. Liverman moves on from Fire to write an opera fusion piece celebrating Black joy. Storytellers of every stripe are harnessing the power of opera to produce art that reflects themselves, their communities, and their dreams for the future.
“The more meaningful and relevant stories [we tell], the more we can impact people who don’t usually go to the opera. Fire is just the first step; but it’s a big step!”
Alyson Cambridge redefines opera diva. She poses onstage, shoulders back and down, smokey eyes and flawless cheekbones just as dramatic as her black leather corset and sheer black lace skirt. Before she sang as a cast member in Fire, this was Cambridge onstage in Rocktopia, a show that combined pop stars, power ballads and arias to emphasize that, as Cambridge says, “Mozart was the rockstar of his day and age.”
The first step to showing someone the importance of opera is to show them what opera is. Without exposure (or worse, after boring, uninspired, or laborious exposure), most people will yawn, laugh or sneer at the idea of listening to Strauss for three hours.
Cambridge understands the bad rap opera gets. She grew up hearing the arias her mother played around the house. But when she first started classical voice lessons as a teenager, she kept them a secret from her peers. She was a star athlete and active student and didn’t want her friends to suddenly put her in an “opera” category.
Even when Cambridge made it to the Met, agents and executives told her that opera was an exclusive gig and niche world. Stay in your lane, they warned, or else opera people won’t take you seriously.
“Mozart was the rockstar of his day and age.”
“I played by those rules for the first two or three years,” Cambridge said. “Then the opportunities became, frankly, too interesting to me. With every other success I had, I couldn’t help but think, ‘Gosh, those guys were wrong.’”
Cambridge is a singer, a model, a producer and event hostess and recreational athlete, the kind of person the New York Times wanted to follow around in their series of Sunday features, the charismatic force who asked Ruth Bader Ginsburg to officiate her wedding. (Ginsburg accepted.)
In her success, Cambridge became far more comfortable with her dedication to opera alongside other passions. Much of her work now focuses on bringing opera to new audiences. She is convinced that a love for opera is a matter of proper exposure. The on-ramp to classical music needs to be less intimidating. This is the main motivation behind her coming production (and Falco nod) Rock Me Amadeus. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a pop star and hot commodity in his day; Cambridge wants to show skeptics that opera can be “sexy and accessible and cool.” It’s quite the natural fusion, she says, to present classical work alongside popular music of the current century.
“The natural voice that can carry to the back of the house and pierces you to your core – it’s really intense.”
Despite suspicion from purists, Cambridge insists she has no interest in “watering down operatic work.” She only hopes to get more people excited and involved, propelling the diversity of genres and creators and presenters of the genre. In Fire, Cambridge hears “notes of Puccini and rimshots and syncopation.” Only this kind of operatic fusion can support the huge weight of the story itself. In this piece, the drum kit and bass don’t threaten the gravitas of the opera; instead, they elevate the integrity of the work while getting swept up in the magnitude of the production.
Broadway shows and other theater have their place, but they can’t replace opera. Fire probably couldn’t work as a musical – Broadway voices couldn’t access the sheer force that opera singers harness. A lighter touch would disrespect the deep trauma that Blow writes about. The memoir demands a heavier medium.
“There’s something about opera that connotes grandness,” Cambridge said. “The natural voice that can carry to the back of the house and pierces you to your core – it’s really intense.”
“As you know,” an aging opera fan once told me, unsolicited, “all conductors have an ego the size of a house.”
That doesn’t square with Daniela Candillari, who conducted Fire during its residency at Lyric Opera of Chicago after its run at the Met. She leans forward into the computer monitor, her short bob nodding encouragingly as I explain the premise of my article. I tell her that my whole life I’ve heard my dad and other musicians say that opera is dying. She looks at me like she might look at someone who just said their childhood dog died, makes direct eye contact through the video chat, and says, “I’m so sorry.”
“Composers are the angels that reflect our societies,” she told me. She emphasized the huge amount of new opera work being done in the United States. So many of the pieces reflect current times, questions and wounds, like Gregory Spears’ Fellow Travelers about the witchhunt for gay men in 1950s American government, or Du Yun’s Pulitzer Prize winner Angel’s Bone, an unnerving allegory of human trafficking. These pieces offer an alternative to those who consider opera inherently old-fashioned, irrelevant and out-of-touch.
All art, in any form, from any period, comments on the human experience. All enduring art enhances the human experience, regardless of release date. Operas don’t need to be contemporary to give insight into contemporary themes. But new debuts often help.
In current American culture, opera is mostly a form of entertainment. David Lomeli, Chief Artistic Director at The Santa Fe Opera, noted that trends often dictate American entertainment. The success of an all-Black opera like Fire is directly linked to the racial reckoning re-instigated by the killing of George Floyd. New audiences, previously uninterested in opera, flock to theaters to see a production that is newsworthy and hot.
But trends and issues are different in different communities. Loren Meeker is the General and Artistic Director at OPERA San Antonio. She stresses the importance of Spanish-language programming in her opera house, which serves a larger Latinx community than some other theaters around the country. Their initiative ¡En Vivo! introduces new Hispanic artists to local and international audiences.
“Every audience member can find an opera that thrills, challenges, speaks to and delights them.”
According to Meeker, it’s not necessarily length (hello, binge-watching Bridgerton) or the difficulty of acquiring a new taste (wine, anyone?) that make opera’s barrier to entry too high. Houses and audiences are struggling through a disconnect over the purpose opera. In the past, there has been little reason for some community members to trust the house for art that is meaningful to them.
“There is no one universal way of setting up an opera company that will be immediately appealing to everyone in the community,” Meeker says. Each house has the opportunity and privilege of presenting “the greatest art we can” to an audience that has specific tastes, desires and needs.
Parsing opera’s role in contemporary society hinges on the purpose of art in general. Should art or opera be consumed as entertainment or study? An escape or an education? A moment or a movement?
The wonderful thing, Candillari posits, is that there’s room for both ends of the spectrum. Both are happening, both are good, neither are mutually exclusive. Not every opera is the same and not every opera is intimidating. Each piece is different from another. Every audience member can find an opera that thrills, challenges, speaks to and delights them.
The main thrust is to keep the “elements essential to humanity” close to society’s heart and mind. Cultivating artists and art enthusiasts starts young. In her elementary school in Serbia, Candillari and her schoolmates “were all painting even if we couldn’t paint. It was a release for your soul.” Candillari credits this early exposure for an (eventually) mature appreciation of art and opera.
Yes, Candillari says, “opera does have a longer road in. So don’t rush into it.” But also know that there is plenty of opera out there for different kinds of people. “There isn’t one genre of contemporary,” Candillari says, and “every piece at some point was contemporary.” Candillari sees a direct line between Bizet’s Carmen and any Broadway musical today.
Contemporary opera does not have one audience or one taste in mind, no matter what snobs or skeptics may say. Candillari promises that the opportunities of live performance – with new visual effects, elite dancers, maximalist or minimalist orchestral scores, and the sheer athletic capabilities of a musician’s voice or stamina – hold treasure for everyone.
“Opera can do what no other art form can do.”
Madame Butterfly flutters around a lot of opera conversations these days. The music is, inarguably, magnificent. With lavish sets and the luxurious melodies only Puccini could pen, it has long been the bread and butter of many an opera house. But it premiered in 1904, written and composed by Italian men, based on a short story by an American man in 1898, about the exploitation of a Japanese woman. Any new opera-goer could be rightfully offended. If there is one question that encapsulates the soul-searching of artistic directors in opera houses today, it’s this – can we stage another production of Butterfly?
Cory Lippiello thinks about this all the time. She is the Artistic Administrator at Lyric Opera of Chicago. She helps plan each season, cast each production, and steer Lyric toward survival. She emphasizes the need for change in vision-casting roles, like composers and creative directors and commissioners, to curate an opera arena that supports the best art possible.
“There are plenty of new people wanting to share their stories through this art form,” Lippiello says, since “opera can do what no other art form can do.”
But big opera houses are huge operations, and it’s hard to turn a big ship around. For Lyric and many other theaters, most of their funding comes from yearly subscriptions and generous philanthropic donations. Both traditionally come from old money with specific tastes. Those tastes have a large say in what is shown onstage, and usually dictate seasons of established repertoire. Without this support, the ship could sink. But if a large enough audience pushed for new work with fresher voices, the house could respond.
“The ball is in the audience’s court to choose the shows they want to see,” says Lippiello. “We need to train the audience to expect this storytelling. Up until now, they had no reason to trust us.”
Opera houses don’t want to trade their obligation to monied donors for subjection to audience whim, but it’s a capitalistic reality. Lippiello imagines that this pendulum swing will eventually balance itself out.
“It is impossible not to notice that the audience at Fire is different that the audience at Barber of Seville,” she says. “The audience is seeing itself on stage. One audience wants to see one thing, another wants to see another. There should be room for all those people in the opera house. They’re not mutually exclusive if we put our money where our mouth is.”
New shows are not a fad; modern composers have long been savvy to opera’s prowess. But producing new work is more than spilling ink on a page: pairing suited composers and librettists can take years; green composers have to enter a whole new world of writing for the most thrilling ends of each range of the human voice; the production can’t have too many characters or else it will be too expensive for a smaller house to perform; specific casting rules could make flying and housing the right singers prohibitively expensive. And should a new opera make it through all the hoops, there’s still a chance it will flop.
“It’s messy and definitely not comfortable,” Lippiello freely admits. New pieces are hit or miss, and opera houses must take the failures on the chin. Lippiello notes that opera houses become less adventurous if they fear losing the audience.
Instead, cue the favorites, the comfort foods, the productions that have already stood the test of time, and the Germans, Austrians, Italians and Frenchmen who set epic stories of exotic lands, brutal suicides and the victimization of women to glorious, magnificent symphonic genius. There’s no denying their power. “Sometimes,” Lippiello is quick to say, “I want to see people losing their minds onstage. Give me all the blood, guts, insanity, everything!” But do these time-honored productions isolate the opera world from a new audience that is sometimes horrified by the insensitivity and injustice on stage?
“Instead, cue the favorites, the comfort foods, the productions that have already stood the test of time, and the Germans, Austrians, Italians and Frenchmen who set epic stories of exotic lands, brutal suicides and the victimization of women to glorious, magnificent symphonic genius.”
This is where the importance of creative administration shines. Perhaps there are self-aware ways to do these productions, to hold in tension the great music and problematic story. Sensitive people need to examine the faults of traditional repertoire with established audiences. They also need to train new audiences to consume it wisely. “Art is something that makes life worth living,” says Lippiello, “and we have to put things on stage that help people’s lives in that way. Art is essential to our existence, and we cannot choose who it benefits.”
Madame Butterfly, Lippiello contends, can help make life worth living if done well. But that doesn’t mean that everyone needs to see Butterfly, or every house needs to do Butterfly. The classical landscape is resilient enough to rebirth old traditions and allow new repertoire to flourish.
Charles doesn’t murder his abuser at the end of the opera. He forges a new destiny by abandoning the cycle of violence that traps his small Louisiana town. As Will Liverman wraps up his time as Charles, he is making his first foray as a composer in Lyric’s 2023 commission of The Factotum. Liverman loosely bases Factotum on The Barber of Seville by Rossini in 1816, but Liverman sets his new opera in a Black Chicago barbershop.
“But operatic power doesn’t have to underscore trauma; Liverman harnesses its gravitas to celebrate and immortalize the joy of being Black. ”
“We’re writing Factotum to be part of the movement,” Liverman says. Fire touched audiences by dealing with difficult, taboo subjects. But operatic power doesn’t have to underscore trauma; Liverman harnesses its gravitas to celebrate and immortalize the joy of being Black.
“We also recognize the power and fun and laughter just to see a show and have a good time,” Liverman says. “We’re adding to the canon and the movement.” Amidst the lofty goals and grand purposes that can make the opera world feel stuffy, Liverman admits, “we just hope people walk away feeling good.”
