SAN DIEGO — Serendipity and irony. Foresight and hindsight. A handwritten musical score giving way to a software program. A pandemic giving way to a rebirth.
Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Anthony Davis is acutely aware of the key roles timing, technology, fate and the devastating COVID-19 pandemic have played in bringing back to life his first opera, 1986’s groundbreaking “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X.”
“It’s beyond serendipitous,” said Davis of his opera’s unexpected resurrection, 36 years after its debut.
A bold fusion of contemporary classical and traditional opera, vintage and cutting-edge jazz styles, gospel music and Indonesian gamelan, meticulously notated scores and daring improvisations, “X” is nearly as revolutionary — on an artistic level — as the slain civil rights leader whose life inspired it.
“ ‘X’ was really a huge undertaking. The orchestral score was more than 500 pages, which I wrote all by hand with a pencil,” Davis recalled. He has taught at the University of California San Diego since 1989, three years after “X” debuted in an acclaimed but controversial New York City Opera production at Lincoln Center.
“I had been thinking of writing an opera ever since I was in the 10th grade in Italy, where my father had a Fulbright Scholarship to teach at the University of Torino,” Davis explained.
I was in 10th grade in Torino and had an English teacher who started a philosophy class dealing with Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Reading Nietzsche’s ‘Birth of Tragedy’ got me interested in the idea of opera. Either or both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard pointed me in the direct of opera.
“When I did ‘X,’ it was very exciting to create something based on Malcolm’s life because he was so significant.”
HD film version of ‘X’ is pending
As timely as ever four decades after its Big Apple debut, “X” will receive its first full scale revival May 14-22 in a Detroit Opera production. (A scaled down version was staged Oakland in 2006.)
“X” will then be staged in Omaha, Chicago, Seattle and at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, where it will become only the second opera by a Black composer in the Met’s 139-year history. The first, Terrence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” debuted there just last year.
“The Met will be filming an HD version of ‘X’ to be shown in theaters,” Davis said from Detroit, where he is working on the new production with the Detroit Opera cast, orchestra and Tony Award-winning director Robert O’Hara.
“X’s” 1986 production at Lincoln Center sold out all four performances. It drew a record number of Black listeners — including Spike Lee (who went on to direct the 1992 film, “Malcolm X”) — to an opera venue that had long attracted predominantly White audiences.
“X’s” subject — an inspirational but doomed Black nationalist, who embraced the Islamic faith, espoused self-determination and battled against racism — was unprecedented in opera.
“Why did I do an opera about Malcolm? It’s about the story,” Davis said.
“To me, Malcolm embodies a tragic hero, a person who is transformed and becomes one of the most influential leaders in our political history. And then there’s the fact that Black people killed him.
“It wasn’t some random, misguided White dude who murdered Malcolm. Black people did it. We did it ourselves. That is deeply disturbing and deeply tragic.”
A labor of love
Several years in the making, the groundbreaking “X” was a labor of love for Davis, his younger brother, Christopher (who conceived and wrote the story), and their cousin, poet and author Thulani Davis (who wrote the libretto).
“It was exhausting! It was like writing a novel,” said Thulani Davis, who now teaches in the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin. She is currently at work on her latest book, “Fugitive Freedoms: A Race, Politics & Black Culture Circuit Before Civil Rights.”
“ ‘X’ was a lot of work, but it was worth it,” Thulani Davis said. She also wrote the libretto for her brother’s acclaimed 1997 opera “Amistad,” which chronicles a successful 1839 uprising by captive Africans on a slave ship head for the United States.
“Anthony is able to do things that other composers are not,” she said. “He makes everything I write more poignant with his music. I can make it moving; he’ll make you cry.”
Noted composer Anthony Davis blurs the lines between jazz, opera, world music, the avant-garde and other styles with unique skill and daring.
Even in its earliest, work-in-progress phases in the first half of the 1980s, the emotional power of Davis’ music in “X” was immediately clear to Cynthia Aaronson. She was a soprano in the New York City Opera company at the time and later performed on the 1992 album version of “X,” which will be recorded anew in Boston in June.
“The first time I heard Anthony play and sing part of it, I felt like Mozart was in my house,” said Aaronson, who married Davis in 1994. She is the featured singer on the 2001 album of “Tanya,” his opera inspired by the 1974 kidnapping and subsequent radicalization of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst.
“Thirty years ago, I couldn’t believe Anthony wasn’t one of the most famous people in the world,” Aaronson said. “I still can’t.”
Davis’ most recent opera, the politically charged “The Central Park Five,” was awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for music in May of that year. He learned of his Pulitzer honor, via a phone call from New York, while in the midst of a Zoom meeting with the other faculty members of UC San Diego’s music department.
Like his fellow professors at the time, Davis was working from home. His next two new operas and other musical projects were shelved, at least for a while, because of the pandemic.
Anthony Davis has spent several years working on his new opera, "The Central Park Five," which addresses race and judicial inequities through the prism a real-life, 1989 event that is now back in the headlines again.
“When all my composing commissions were canceled during the COVID shutdown, I thought: ‘What am I going to do?’ ” Davis recalled.
It didn’t take long for him to come up with a resounding answer.
“I had composed ‘X,’ by hand, back in the 1980s,” said the New Jersey native, who had long wanted to adapt parts of his 160-minute operatic opus for shorter performances by orchestras. “So, I inputted the entire original score into (the music notation software program) Finale.”
I can do better than that!’
Once he did, Davis quickly came to a realization. His 36-year-old opera was ready to be honed. Because of the COVID-fueled shutdown, he suddenly had ample time to do work on “X.”
“As I was (putting) the whole score into Finale on my computer, I thought: ‘I can do better than that! And I can be true to my 34-year-old self who wrote it,’ ” he said.
“I didn’t want to change the music. But I wanted to redefine the music, make it as effective as I could, and — in some places — make different changes with the vocals so the words are more clear.”
Davis happily began a deep dive back into “X.” It was then that the serendipitous part of his new/old musical adventure began, thanks to a phone call from Detroit Opera Artistic Director Yuval Sharon.
“Yuval had just become their artistic director and he told me he wanted to do a new production of ‘X.’ I replied: ‘Great. I’ve already completed half of it!’ ” Davis, 71, said.
“I felt that, maybe, a moment was happening which might provide a chance for this opera to have a new life and be rediscovered.
“With the death of George Floyd and all the other things that had been happening, I felt this was a moment when ‘X’ could come back because the libretto — which was done by my cousin, Thulani Davis, who is a genius writer — was so prescient about everything that was happening. Malcolm X was the precedent for Black Lives Matter.”
All in the family
Like her Pulitzer-winning cousin, Thulani Davis, 72, is delighted that “X” has now come to life again after four decades. Make that, delighted and taken aback that an opera so far ahead of its time is now being embraced in another century.
“I thought ‘X’ would only be staged once,” she said.
“Why? Because it was ahead of its time! I could not imagine other opera companies all over the country doing it in the 1980s. ‘X’ was a great challenge and a great adventure. But we just tried to get it done once, and we didn’t imagine it going beyond that.”
Anthony Davis created “X” to fulfill an artistic vision. He also sought to provide employment for Black opera singers, whose main professional option — at least in the 1980s — was to get cast in revival productions of “Porgy and Bess.”
Davis was eager to combine different musical traditions — and to create new ones. He wrote the score for “X” as a vehicle for singers, orchestral musicians and members of his groundbreaking band, Episteme, who added real-time improvisational fire to his opera.
“In different ways, Duke Ellington was a role model because of his knowledge of African American history and how it was embedded in his music,” Davis said. “Duke and (Charles) Mingus were always huge influences on me. So, in sections of ‘X,’ there are obvious jazz references.
“I listened to (recordings of speeches) by Malcolm, as did Thulani. When I heard the quick-witted, mercurial way Malcolm spoke, I thought: ‘That’s Miles (Davis)!’ So, I had Miles’ musical voice in the back of my head. Miles, circa his ‘Bitches Brew’ album in the late 1960s and then what he did in the early ‘70s, was always my model for Malcolm.”
What about the more traditional opera influences for “X”?
“Most of my first contact with opera was when I was a student at Yale. It was primarily German opera, from Wagner to Berg, and I studied scores by Strauss,” Davis replied.
“I was also very interested in Carnatic music from India and in gamelan music. I wrote some pieces for my ensemble and voice back then, and I later wrote an electronic music piece at MIT.”
Davis drew from nearly all his influences for “X.” Then, he pushed beyond them to craft something new and distinct.
“I was interested in creating what I called ‘rhythm dramas,’ where rhythm would be the guiding principle,” he explained.
“Some of that came from Indonesian gamelan music, the idea of having rhythmic patterns and structures create a parallel to the dramatic structure on stage. There’s a lot of that in ‘X.’ And I liked the idea of resolving harmonic tension with African rhythms.”
That “X” is now being produced anew — along with some of Davis’ orchestral works and “The Central Park Five” — can largely be attributed to his 2020 Pulitzer Prize victory.
“It changed Tony’s whole stature,” said his wife, Cynthia, speaking from their home in University City. “He was passed over for so many years, and still is in San Diego.”
Davis, a 2021 American Academy of Arts & Letters inductee, is certainly not the first groundbreaking artist to earn greater acclaim and opportunity nationally than in the city where he lives and works.
Nearly 15 years ago, in a conversation with this writer, he matter-of-factly noted that San Diego Opera had never engaged with him about staging any of his works here. This still holds true now, even after his Pulitzer win for “The Central Park Five,” which debuted at the nearby Long Beach Opera in 2019.
This omission may reflect San Diego Opera’s longstanding emphasis on traditional operatic fare from bygone centuries. One can only hope the company’s future seasons will open up enough to incorporate at least one of Davis’ innovative operas. To not do so would be a disappointing missed opportunity.
Even more disappointing is that it has taken “X” decades to be rediscovered, anywhere, after its 1986 premiere at Lincoln Center.
Davis cities two principal reasons: money and controversy. They are directly connected.
Mounting a new opera is always a pricey and risky proposition.
Mounting a new opera by an innovative composer acclaimed in the worlds of cutting-edge jazz and New Music — but unknown to opera audiences and producers — is even more risky.
And basing that opera on the life of a game-changing, 20th-century activist made the risk exponentially greater.
“There was lots of controversy around ‘X,’ ” Davis acknowledged.
“A week before the New York City Opera production opened at Lincoln Center in 1986, the New York Times put out a story with the headline: ‘Malcolm X: Anti-Semite?’
“A number of the opera’s board members, who were donors to ‘X,’ withdrew their money as a result. The Readers Digest Lila Wallace Foundation, which had given $250,000 for the production of ‘X’ to go on the road after Lincoln Center, also took its money back.”
Davis credits legendary soprano Beverly Sills, who was then New York City Opera’s general director, for making “X” a reality.
Not only did she raise alternate funding at the last minute, she was also instrumental early on in persuading Malcolm X’s widow, Betty Shabazz, to give the production her approval to proceed.
“We had a meeting with Betty to discuss her giving us her blessing to do ‘X,’ ” Davis said. “Beverly insisted on coming to the meeting, although I was thinking: ‘Maybe we should let the Black people handle this!’ But Beverly was adamant.
“As soon as Betty came into the room, Beverly asked her: ‘Do you have a dress picked out for the opening?’ And Betty said: ‘Not yet, but I’m looking for one.’ And that was it — we were in!”
Davis laughed at the memory.
“The next thing that happened,” he continued, “is Betty said to Beverly: ‘Malcolm and I used to love watching you on TV on ‘The Carol Burnett Show.’ I thought: ‘My God. Beverly can charm anyone!’ There was something about the power of her personality.”
Thulani Davis agreed.
“I was not at that meeting,” she said, “but I know for a fact Beverly charmed Betty. She told Betty: ‘Of course, you’ll sit in the (VIP) box at the Met with me for opening,’ which Betty did.
“My own meeting with Betty was really rough, terrifying even. She asked me: ‘Who do you think you are that you can write an opera about us? You weren’t there.’
“I asked her questions, some of which she didn’t directly answer, but I took lots of notes. And I told her: ‘Malcolm’s story will be told by a generation or two, or three, who were not there. I’m here to listen to you before I write what I do. And I, at least, remember that time period firsthand.’ ”
The renewed interest in “X,” which has been trimmed by 25 minutes and reconfigured from a three-act opera to two acts, is a classic case of belated attention. While Anthony Davis is pleased multiple productions of “X” and “The Central Park Five” are pending, he admits to some disappointment.
“It’s been frustrating to not get commissioned to do a new work,” he said.
“I’d love to write a new opera and I’m hoping to do one based on Edith Wharton’s (1912) novel, ‘The Reef.’ I’ve got lots of ideas!”
