"Fire Shut Up In My Bones" at the Metropolitan Opera

Great art hits us on so many levels. Opera, especially, can speak to us in many ways. As I left the movie theater after the Met’s latest opera, Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in my Bones”, I was humming little snatches of music, but I was also hearing that gorgeous libretto in my head, and I found myself examining parts of my own life through those haunting words. It was extraordinary to experience that most rare thing: a new opera with a real hold over its audience. It was full of power. Power to captivate and entertain. Power to contend with any show on Broadway. Power to draw in new people to see our art form done afresh. 

One power that I wish the show had, but that it could not possibly possess, is the power to have appeared decades ago. As everyone is saying, this should not have been the first opera by a Black composer at the Met. But the given reason people say this, that it is a case of lack of representation and of active prejudice on the part of the opera world, is not the only reason I feel that way. I have a more selfish one, as well. 

I think that, had this opera and many operas like it appeared even 20 years ago, opera might be in a very different situation today. When I look at how other broad realms of theater (say, Musical Theater and Shakespeare) have diversified consistently over the past decades, I see what opera might look like in a different timeline where it had done the same. Audiences with younger faces, auditoriums regularly filled up, young artists looking to get in on the action, exciting new projects injecting fresh energy into the repertoire. Now the boards that run opera houses are starting to see the possibilities that lie in diversifying our art form… and it’s all so late. 

Opera comes from Italy, a culture that values outspokenness, passion, emotional catharsis. It found its essence there (whatever the Germans did to it later). And it’s in that kind of an atmosphere that it makes the most sense to me. When I look at the diverse pockets and sub-cultures of this country, I see so much outspokenness and so much emphasis on the need to express. Terence Blanchard and the all-Black cast of “Fire Shut Up in my Bones” proved that, ramming the message home time and again over the course of the night that the cultural voice of Black America is nothing if not Operatic, with a capital O. And it makes so much sense to see and hear that energy on the stage of the Met. What makes less sense is why it should seem so novel.

Next, I want to hear more great composers expressing their cultural truths through the lens of bel canto and verismo and tinta. I want to hear other cultural voices expressed on the opera stage. I want to regularly go see and hear the cultural truths of Hmong people and Latine people and… and, and, and. Yes and.

If opera is to have any future, it MUST embrace this vision. The old model is killing an art form that has never been more needed, something organic and inspiring with the power to offset the tawdry commercial glitz of so much of our entertainment (now that Broadway is practically an extension of Disney). And, ironically, it’s the people that are most afraid of losing opera as a cultural mainstay that are often most opposed to seeing it grow into something better. I hope they were paying attention to “Fire Shut Up in my Bones.”