The work of Jeanine Tesori, who relates the tragic history of a black adolescent killed by a white policeman, is part of an unprecedented movement to create African-American operas since 2019.
by Marie-Aude Roux (Amsterdam (Netherlands), Special Envoy)
Monday, November 7, the latest notes have not finished breaking out that the public of the Amsterdam opera has already stood up, enthusiastically welcoming the Blue first, US composer Jeanine composer Tesori presented by the Dutch lyric scene until November 22. The work is at the heart of an unprecedented movement in history, which saw, between June and July 2019, the birth of three “black” operas and their consecration.
Created at the Glimmerglass Festival in New York, a work sponsor, Blue won the Music Critics Association of North America in 2020. At the same time, The Central Park Five, written by African-American Anthony David, became the first opera to win a Pulitzer Music Prize, while Fire Shut Up in My Bones, De Terence Blanchard (on a booklet Kasi Lemmons), was essential in October 2021 as the first lyric work of a black composer never given to the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
Universal tragedy
In the United States, the Black Opera is born from the street, which is dressed in dramatic news-the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement. “Blue” is the color of the police. It is also the one that sticks to the skin of a population victim of endemic violence. A threat of death that weighs on boys before their birth, as the horrified clamors of the three friends of the mother learn the sex of the child she carries. Consequently, history can give birth to a tragedy that the symbolic trilogy of the main characters – father, mother, son – makes universal.
Uniformly white, this building courtyard with blind windows where the African-American free-to-the-American theater Tazewell Thompson staged the story of this Harlem couple who tries to raise their son in the principles of law , community and religion. “Staying alive is what you have to do,” insists the father with the rebellious teenager, whose jacket carries, in the back, the closed fist of Malcolm X. The young man, artist and activist, will be killed In a pacifist demonstration by a white policeman, colleague of his father.
There is a lot of humor and love in Blue. On the one hand, these portraits of women with relationships as spicy as “ancestors cuisine” whose flavors they perpetuate, double memory of slavery and African origin. Thus in the meal of reconciliation at the funeral of the son. On the other, this unwavering faith in a god, who himself sacrificed his own only Son, and whose law orders forgiveness. The whole last part, essentially choral, like an ancient tragedy, will only be immense prayer.
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