Fire Shut Up In My Bones

Jazz trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard’s earnest and heartfelt Met opera Fire Shut Up In My Bones, based on Charles M. Blow’s stirring memoirs, is often powerful with many moving performances by its principals (Will Liverman, Latonia Moore, Angel Blue), including a boy soprano as the young Charles (Walter Russell III), but I didn’t love the work as much as I wanted to.

Blanchard and librettist Kasi Lemmons have crafted a collection of beautiful pieces — borrowing from classical, jazz and gospel traditions — for solo and multiple voices. The opera is set in Blow’s Louisiana hometown and nearby Grambling University but the narrative — aside from young Char’seBaby’s (Russell) sexual assault by an older male cousin — is pretty inert. And the piece has a sameness of perspective and tone, inward directed and woeful, due, of course, to the nature of the source material, a first-person account of childhood isolation and abuse.

Even so, the opera does offer audiences levels of meaning, and an interesting storytelling device in that Destiny and Loneliness appear as characters played by the same actress (Blue) who then plays college-age Charles’s (Liverman) short-lived love interest. Other elements — a baptism and a fraternity step show performance were entertaining but seemed to serve more as African American cultural markers than fully integrated narrative pieces.

As the first piece by a Black composer on the Met’s main stage, the pressure was great and expectations high, of course. Some will wonder why such a contemporary piece that veers away from the modes of more traditional works? Why not present an established work by a Black composer or commission a work with more expansive scope and historical perspective? Fair questions.

It is clear the Met — and many of the other keepers of the venerable canon created by white males — are looking to diversify their seasons and their audiences. Fire Shut Up In My Bones is a worthy though not truly spectacular beginning.