The most poignant -- and disappointing -- moment for me when attending a recent performance of the contemporary opera "Blue" was near the end when the unnamed Mother gets up out of her seat in what is presumably a church and walks over to stand one last time at the coffin of her son.
"At last, an aria," I thought. This is the moment she is going to actually sing a song -- a musical tour de force through her thoughts and emotions -- highly memorable melodies requiring exemplary vocal technique, in the finest tradition of opera. The sort of thing that leaves one exclaiming in due course: "wasn't she fabulous!"
But, no, just more of the same bits and pieces of often almost recitative-like vocalization, occasionally soaring with the continuous orchestration into one variety of crescendo or another.
While I'm sure she didn't do it, I can just see Briana Hunter, who sang the role of The Mother, down on her knees, begging librettist and director Tazewell Thompson and composer Jeanine Tesori "please, please, please, let me SING!" My heart goes out to her, as would have those of Handel and Mozart.
But that's where it's at these days in contemporary opera: "Singing? What's that? Some sort of distraction." I can hear Thompson and Tesori dismissing Hunter along those lines.
But what about the rest of "Blue," which I saw in a Seattle Opera production the other day. Widely praised, the almost entirely Black (librettist and performers) piece centers on the story of an angry and idealistic young Black man, the son of a police officer, being killed at what was supposed to be a peaceful demonstration by another officer. He's an only child and beloved by his father despite sociopolitical differences and thus a sometimes tempestuous relationship.
While the race of the officer who kills The Son isn't identified in the program or promotional material, he's identified as white in the lyrics, giving the opera additional currency in the post-George Floyd era. But interestingly, The Father at one point bemoans the fact that his son was killed by one of his "brothers" on the police force.
Young Black men are not always killed by white officers. Notably, in "Between the World and Me," Ta-Nehisi Coates relates the trauma he experienced when he learned that a man named Prince Jones he had apparently known at Howard University had been killed by a Black police officer in a jurisdiction controlled by Black politicians. And, according to Coates, the officer who supposedly mistook Prince for someone else was sent back to work.
Well, the first half of the opera, which runs for two hours not counting the intermission, is about the risks young men run being born Black in America and the second half opens with news of the death of The Son as a result of police violence, and of course the racial inequities of that in America.
But almost immediately thereafter, the opera changes course in a fashion that none of the reviews that I have read mention. Race relations fall into the background and what comes to the fore is religion -- Christianity in this case. What's at issue in the lengthy segment that follows news of the death is whether the Chruch, and a particular Reverend, can offer the family and eventually their friends any consolation. The message there is at best mixed.
This jumped out at me in part because I had just finished reading "On Consolation," subtitled "finding solace in dark times," by Michael Ignatieff.
His bottom line: "It is not doctrine that consoles us in the end, but people."
Perhaps in that vein, the final scene of the opera takes the form of a flashback to a family dinner at one point during which father, son and mother join hands at the table. Perhaps the audience is led to believe the Mother and Father are consoled more by such memories than by anything else.
