In the early pages of the score, Blanchard establishes a lingua franca for the lead character’s tense, turbulent world: quick harmonic movement, astringent orchestral textures, added-note dissonances, unison string lines that twist about and fail to find repose. What Blanchard possesses, above all, is a gift for musical storytelling: he summons up disparate characters and scenes within the frame of a distinct personal voice. But the opera-writing profession has no conventional avenue of approach: the skills it requires are so idiosyncratic that they can be discovered only in practice. He first tried his hand at opera in 2013, when he wrote “Champion” for the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, which also premièred “Fire,” in 2019.
Blanchard’s path to opera has hardly been a conventional one: he began as a jazz trumpeter, and then established himself as a prolific film composer, collaborating regularly with the director Spike Lee.
There’s a compensating gain, though, in the addition of a sophisticated, agile compositional personality. Much of that interiority inevitably goes missing in the operatic adaptation, as Blow’s writerly consciousness no longer controls every scene. The title comes from the Book of Jeremiah: “His word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay.” He doesn’t go through with the act, and finds his way to a different future. Shame and rage bring him to the brink of violence: at the beginning of both the book and the opera, he is on his way to his mother’s house with a loaded pistol, intending to kill the cousin. He attempts to bury his feelings through zealous churchgoing, and at college he loses himself in frat-house culture. He is preyed upon by an older cousin and also by an uncle at the same time, he feels intermittently attracted to men. The book is very much an interior narrative, with Blow recounting, in lyrically candid prose, his youthful struggles to define his masculinity and his sexuality. The libretto is by the screenwriter, director, and actor Kasi Lemmons, who adapted it from the eponymous memoir by the Times columnist Charles M.
This is, in fact, the first time that a Black composer and a Black librettist have found their way to the Met: until now, Gershwin’s “ Porgy and Bess” has been the principal, problematic vehicle for capturing African American experiences.
ROSS DAVID FIRE BURNIN MOVIE
Such a story would be nothing too newsworthy in an Off Broadway theatre or in an indie movie house, but it’s a radical novelty for the mainstream opera world, which dwells largely in the European past. Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which opened the Metropolitan Opera season, tells of a young Black man growing up in a rural Louisiana town, his exuberant childhood shadowed by family discord and sexual abuse.
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