Champion (opera)
Champion is an opera in two acts and ten scenes with music by Terence Blanchard and a libretto by Michael Cristofer. Based on the life of African-American welterweight boxer Emile Griffith,[1] this opera is a joint co-commission by Opera Theatre of Saint Louis (OTSL) and Jazz St. Louis.
Champion
Background[edit]
Champion developed out of conversations between OTSL and Jazz St. Louis, and the companies' shared desire to collaborate on a commission that would combine opera and jazz. Blanchard himself described the work, his first opera, with the term "opera in jazz" rather than a "jazz opera".[2] In 2011, the Whitaker Foundation of St. Louis provided the initial $200,000 leadership gift needed to fund the commissioning and development costs of the new work. In 2012, Opera Theatre received a $1M (USD) challenge grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which would underwrite a substantial portion of the production costs of Champion, as well as Ricky Ian Gordon's opera 27 (premiered at OTSL in 2014) and a new production of Tobias Picker's Emmeline (presented in 2015). Additional support for Champion was provided by the Fred M. Saigh Endowment at Opera Theatre, the National Endowment for the Arts, OPERA America's Opera Fund, Emily Rauh Pulitzer, Phoebe Dent Weil, and The Aaron Copland Fund for Music.
Performance history[edit]
It received its premiere at the Loretto-Hilton Center for the Performing Arts, Webster University, on 15 June 2013.[3] The opera received its second production, with a revised orchestration by Blanchard, by Opera Parallèle in San Francisco, in collaboration with SFJAZZ, on February 21, 2016.[4] The third production of the opera was on March 5, 2017 by Washington National Opera at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.[5]
A 2020 production scheduled at Michigan Opera Theatre was cancelled due to COVID-19.[6] Boston Lyric Opera presented their cancelled 2020 production in May 2022.[7]
In December 2021, the Metropolitan Opera announced that they would stage Champion in April 2023. Composer Blanchard and librettist Cristofer intend to make revisions for the production. The announcement came after the Metropolitan's successful production of Blanchard's second opera, Fire Shut Up in My Bones.[8]
Critical reception[edit]
Premiere[edit]
At its premiere, Champion received generally favourable critical reviews, with respect to the production, direction, and performances of the cast. Several critics noted the coincidence of the production of Champion with then-current events in the USA related to violence against gay people, the attention given to basketball player Jason Collins (the first openly gay athlete with a major American sports team), and the ruling earlier in 2013 by the Supreme Court of the United States on the Defense of Marriage Act.[1][2] Commentary on the music and libretto was more mixed, though on balance favourable: