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Stories   >   Met premieres Terence Blanchard's 'Champion' / AP

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Met premieres Terence Blanchard's 'Champion' / AP

Posted: April 6, 2023

AP's MIKE SILVERMAN writes…..When Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” proved a sell-out hit at the Metropolitan Opera in 2021, general manager Peter Gelb wasted no time lining up the composer’s other opera for the current season. And that set the clock ticking for Blanchard and his collaborators to adapt a relatively small-scale work to the vast resources of the nation’s premiere opera house. “We knew we had only a year and a half, so we immediately went to work,” recalled Michael Cristofer, who wrote the libretto. “We had an opportunity to enhance and expand not just story points but also certain scenes. And you want to use all of what the Met is capable of. We were a bit like kids in a candy shop.”

“Champion,” which Blanchard calls “an opera in jazz,” premiered at Opera Theatre of St. Louis in 2013. It’s based on the troubled life of prizefighter Emile Griffith, who knocked out Benny Paret in a welterweight title bout in 1962. Paret never regained consciousness and died 10 days later. Griffith was haunted by guilt, his feelings complicated by the fact that Paret had humiliated him by calling him a “maricón,” (a derogatory Spanish term for homosexual) during their weigh-in. Later in Griffith’s life, he was savagely beaten after leaving a gay bar. 

Blanchard, who in addition to writing operas is known as a jazz trumpeter and composer of film scores, said he was inspired by Griffith’s own words, rephrased for poetic effect in Cristofer’s libretto: “I killed a man and the world forgives me; I love a man and the world wants to kill me.’” “To me, ‘Champion’ is about redemption and Emile forgiving himself for what happened in the ring,” Blanchard said.

The original production was directed by James Robinson, the artistic director in St. Louis, who said it was “kind of a chamber piece.” There were just 18 people in the cast plus a four-piece jazz combo that plays along with a traditional orchestra.

For the Met, Robinson devised what he calls a “supersized version” that now brings close to 80 people on stage. Besides the soloists, there are 12 dancers, 10 actors and a chorus of 46. The new production also adds choreography by Camille A. Brown, who created a sensation with her work on “Fire.”

And Blanchard made significant changes to his score, adding new material and rewriting some sections to accommodate the different voice types of his lead singers.

“I’d say maybe 15 to 20 percent has been revised, but the more I think about it, it’s probably a lot more than that,” Blanchard said. There are new chorus parts and two new arias, one for Paret and one for Griffith’s trainer, Howie Albert.

The role of Griffith’s mother, Emelda, was originally written for mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves. At the Met, it will be sung by soprano Latonia Moore, prompting substantial alterations, like moving her first aria, “Seven Babies in the Sun,” up by an interval of a fourth.

And Blanchard has kept making changes even during rehearsals, as Moore recounted at a panel discussion at the Guggenheim Museum last month:

“One day he came up to me and said, ‘I feel this scene is a bit too low for you. Mind if I take it up?’”

“I said sure, fantastic,” she added. “I thought he’d come back in a couple days. Less than 30 minutes later, he had completely rewritten the scene. Within half an hour you had new music coming from the composer! This is something I wish I could ask Verdi and Puccini to do.”

Bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green, who stars as the young Emile, was initially skeptical when Gelb asked him to take on the role.

“I had been offered it before and when I looked at the score I thought, ‘This is a little bit too high for me,’” Green said. “I like to sing high notes occasionally, but my voice doesn’t want to sit up there.”
 

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