TERENCE BLANCHARD / LIBRETTO BY Michael Cristofer
Champion
LIVE IN HD
Overview
Six-time Grammy Award–winning composer Terence Blanchard brings his first opera to the Met after his Fire Shut Up in My Bones triumphantly premiered with the company to universal acclaim in 2021–22. Bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green is the young boxer Emile Griffith, who rises from obscurity to become a world champion, and bass-baritone Eric Owens portrays Griffith’s older self, haunted by the ghosts of his past. Soprano Latonia Moore is Emelda Griffith, the boxer’s estranged mother, and mezzo- soprano Stephanie Blythe is the bar owner Kathy Hagan. Yannick Nézet-Séguin takes the podium for Blanchard’s second Met premiere, also reuniting the director-and-choreographer team of James Robinson and Camille A. Brown. This live cinema transmission is part of the Met’s award-winning Live in HD series, bringing opera to movie theaters across the globe.
This production uses strobe-light effects.
Content Advisory: Champion contains adult themes, sexually explicit language, and physical violence.
English StreamText captioning is available for the Met’s transmission of Champion here. A transcript of the transmission will also be available to view after the live performance.
Buy tickets for Champion live in the opera house here.
An opera by Terence Blanchard
Libretto by Michael Cristofer
Commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera. Originally commissioned by Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, co-commissioned by Jazz St. Louis.
A co-production of the Metropolitan Opera and Lyric Opera of Chicago
Production a gift of C. Graham Berwind, III and Lynne and Richard Pasculano
Additional funding from the Edgar Foster Daniels Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The Francis Goelet Trusts, The National Endowment for the Arts, and Ann Ziff
World premiere: Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, 2013
Champion was the first opera composed by Terence Blanchard—following numerous high-profile film scores and many years as a leading jazz artist—and depicts the conflicts and crises in the life of boxer Emile Griffith. When Blanchard was initially approached to write an opera, this subject emerged as the story that he felt most inspired to set to music. He saw the truly operatic dimensions in the confluence of love, violence, death, and forgiveness, and in bringing them to the stage, he wove together both contemporary and classical musical idioms to create a wholly new sound world, one that he characterizes as “opera in jazz.”
Creators
Seven-time Grammy Award–winner Terence Blanchard (b. 1962) is a celebrated composer whose many works express his roots in jazz but defy further categorization. His opera Fire Shut Up in My Bones opened the Met’s 2021–22 season and was the first opera by a Black composer to be performed by the company. Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright, filmmaker, and actor Michael Cristofer (b. 1945) provided the opera’s libretto.
Production
James Robinson
Set Designer
Allen Moyer
Costume Designer
Montana Levi Blanco
Lighting Designer
Donald Holder
Projection Designer
Greg Emetaz
Choreographer
Camille A. Brown
Composer
Terence Blanchard
Librettist
Michael Cristofer
Articles
Videos
Setting
The opera opens in a nursing home in Hempstead, Long Island, in the early 21st century but unfolds largely through extended regressions to important times and places in Griffith’s life: St. Thomas in 1957, New York City from the 1950s to the 1990s, and flashbacks to moments in his international boxing career—from Las Vegas to Paris to Buenos Aires and beyond—in the 1960s.
Music
All of Blanchard’s musical background, from his gospel-infused youth to his experience as a jazz soloist to his mastery as a film composer, comes through in the score of Champion. He employs a compositional approach rooted in—but not limited to—the many different possibilities of jazz itself, from dream-like internal states to rhythm-driven dissonances of the external modern world. Orchestral richness is also evident throughout the score, as are bravura vocal solos, most notable in the Puccinian sweep of young Emile’s stirring Act I aria, “What makes a man a man?”.
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