Trajectory To Martyrdom

By Michael Walsh

COMPOSER: ANTHONY DAVIS

LIBRETTIST: THULANI DAVIS

ALBUM: X, THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MALCOLM X

LABEL: GRAMAVISION

THE BOTTOM LINE: A powerful opera brings vividly to life the rage and pain of an incendiary figure.

THE GAP BETWEEN THE DEATH OF A public figure and his operatic commemoration is getting shorter all the time. The ancient Greeks and Romans had to wait millenniums before their reincarnation on the European stage; even Don Carlos' career move from Spanish royalty to Verdi opera took a couple of centuries.

Modern artists aren't so patient. The past decade or so has witnessed operas on such subjects as Mahatma Gandhi (Philip Glass's Satyagraha) and Richard Nixon (John Adams' Nixon in China). The latest example is Malcolm Little, known best as the black-power firebrand Malcolm X, who was gunned down in New York City 27 years ago. Spike Lee's already controversial film Malcolm X is due to open next month, but before there was Lee there was composer Anthony Davis and his powerful, chilling opera X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X, first produced in Philadelphia in 1984-85 and now released on CD.

Like its incendiary subject, X is notable not only for its accomplishment but also for what it represents. Before X, the number of great authentic African-American operas stood at precisely one: Scott Joplin's underrated Treemonisha, which foreshadowed X's themes of black self-reliance and self- determination by 70 years. In between came the faux noir of Porgy and Bess, which is really a Russian grand opera in blackface (the choral scenes are closer to Rimsky-Korsakov or Mussorgsky than they are to anything Catfish Row ever heard). With a fierce, angry and brilliant libretto by Thulani Davis, the composer's cousin, X is at once a musical entertainment, a folk epic, a cautionary tale and a cri de coeur.

The plot follows the trajectory of Malcolm's short life, from his tragic childhood in Lansing, Michigan, through his career as an urban hustler in Boston, his conversion to the Nation of Islam under Elijah Muhammad and his assassination at 39. The less savory aspects of his life are glossed over in favor of his iconographic significance as the avenging angel of black America. "My truth is a hammer," sings the jailed Malcolm in the extraordinary aria that ends the first act. "It will beat you down when you least expect . . . You want the truth, but you don't want to know."

Davis frames the text's tough words with equally uncompromising music. Incessant rhythmic ostinatos reflect Malcolm's deepening monomania; the voice line shears off unexpectedly in outbursts of rage and pain, while the jazz- tinged orchestration firmly locates the action in time and place.

A strong cast, headed by baritone Eugene Perry as Malcolm, brings X sharply to life, and conductor William Henry Curry leads the Orchestra of St. Luke's and Davis' own avant-garde jazz ensemble, Episteme, with verve. With the greater pictorial resources available to the cinema, no doubt Lee's film will have a stronger initial impact. But music's power to persuade, destabilize and immortalize should never be underestimated. Just ask the ancient Greeks.