AN OPERA BASED ON MALCOLM X

...He taught blacks to help themselves, stirred their racial pride, and gave them hope that they could achieve political and economic power...

...Instead of a tragedy centered in the parasitic world of the hustler and the nihilism of racist black nationalism (as opposed to reasonable ethnic pride), they settle for a series of cartoon posturings...

...Though such observations can easily be gleaned from the Autobiography, the Davises, cowardly and cotton-candy militant all, never touch any of the man's human qualities with aesthetic and emotional daring...

...Given national recognition by television in 1959, Malcolm X was just beginning to realize how empty his platform had been when he was silenced in 1965, shot down in the very same Harlem that he had victimized either materially as a street hustler or intellectually as the loudest mouthpiece for the Nation of Islam...

...irresponsible whites who think themselves "sympathetic" have also helped fog the horizon...

...Though they avoid the human and political facts of the matter at every turn, the three unwise Davises apparently think themselves the authors of a heroic tragedy...

...When African students were contemptuous of democratic debate and willing to assault anyone who disagreed with Malcolm X's speeches, he was incapable of recognizing what he was witnessing—the ruthlessness that has long bedeviled post-colonial African politics...

...We want them to be horrified, not crying or upset...

...His ideology gave off a loud report but had no chance of hitting a target...

...It is a fumbled opportunity, no more, no less...

...Although I greatly admired Martin Luther King—I met him when I was a boy—Malcolm's life was just so dramatic...

...During his celebrated trip to Mecca and to West Africa, Malcolm X was again taken in...

...His problems with projection are increased by orchestration that too frequently puts a field of instruments in his register as obstacles— perhaps breaking convention, but rather stupidly...

...His life was a dramatic odyssey—he went from a destitute childhood to street life to prison...

...Still, we should get more from those who pose as artists...

...The music for the Mecca segment is dull and totally lacking in religious intensity...

...Instead of the prisoner so swollen with hatred and spiritual pollution that he was dubbed "Satan" by his fellow convicts, the Davises give us a caged prophet who pompously says his "truth" is "too rough...

...for the most part, Malcolm X's notions—save in the confused last eleven months of his life—were defeatist, were a racist program of surrender and smug hopelessness grounded in separatism and the belief that white people were devils incarnate...

...He had been a peer to the man on the street, so he could come back and tell them, "You have to change your life...

...Composer Anthony Davis says in the program notes: I always viewed Malcolm X as a truly heroic figure, and thought that he would make a great subject for an opera...

...In X, his wife and children merely appear, magically, before the trip to Mecca...

...X treats its audience as much like children as any slave master ever did...

...The man who converted to an Islam based on race hatred and a homemade version of a chosen people doesn't appear either...

...What we are given is one of the most ruthlessly dishonest renditions of a historical figure I have ever seen...

...Beverly Sills is the latest culprit...

...So what must be faced about the ambitious man who was Malcolm X, who hoped to go down in history as a significant martyr, is that the bulk of his career was spent passing out intellectual and political blanks...

...nor did Malcolm X ask whether the numerous racist black images in A Thousand and One Nights that clearly parallel the ones he railed against in Hollywood films were perhaps accurately translated by Sir Richard Burton...

...Written by Anthony, Charles, and Thulani Davis, X manages to be neither musically creative nor mythically resonant, tragically piercing nor provocatively memorable...

...That so few are willing to admit how much more he made of the thorns than the bud that never truly opened, is yet another example of the intellectual dishonesty that has dogged Negro America since too many in positions of influence and responsibility started sipping at the well of a black nationalism...

...Malcolm X was so overjoyed to be greeted as a celebrity that his purported abilities for hard analysis were put on hold...

...Again, melody never really rears its lyrical head, except in three or four note snippets and an occasional ascending arpeggio...

...it fails to address adult problems and avoids the terrible murkiness of the human soul at every occasion...

...Tragedy, however, demands that the doomed hero face his involvement in his fate, that he recognize the merciless consequences resulting from the interplay between his personality and his circumstances...

...But the opera itself is woefully lacking in drama and is given to the kind of intellectual cowardice that some Negroes justify with terms like "positive black images" and "the need for black heroes...

...As a singer and stage presence Priscilla Baskerville is such a sweltering wonder that one cannot understand why the romance between Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz was reduced to no more than symbolic passing...

...Such is the flight from dramatic confrontation, from characterization, from the Mississippi nights of the soul...

...Xis neither about the life and times of Malcolm X nor anything else deserving so much press attention...

...I felt like a fool," he told Alex Haley, "out there every day preaching and apparently not knowing what was going on right under my nose, in my own organization, involving the very man I was praising so...

...But then little of tragic merit can be expected from those who took the saber-rattling politics of Malcolm X seriously...

...The way she magnetized him is one of the most charming parts of the Autobiography...

...Actually Malcolm X gloried in the status he achieved as a sharp and clever debater who never missed an opportunity to inject race into any discussion...

...Malcolm X was given to the cynicism of the parasitic street hustler, of the convict so embittered and atheistic he was nicknamed "Satan" in prison, and of the homemade and racist parody of a theology offered by Elijah Muhammad...

...The libretto only has the sorrowing follower sing to his leader, "I hear things I cannot believe...

...The insistence that the white man was the devil and the born enemy of black people, that Christianity was no more than a tool used to subvert black consciousness, that the Civil Rights Movement was generaled by boot-licking dupes and cowards, and that separation from an America doomed to fiery destruction by God was the only solution to the race problem, never comes from the mouth of this Malcolm X. Nor do the Davises give us any idea of what Malcolm X meant when he told Gordon Parks, "I did many things as a Muslim that I'm sorry for now...

...Are we given this remarkable scene...

...Surface bluster and occasional insight is what he had to offer...

...THULANI DAVIS, who wrote the rhymed couplets that in their ineptitude seem embarrassing by comparison with the human illuminations of the blues, suggests a desire for tragedy in her program quote: "We wanted the audience to see the events in Malcolm's life clearly...

...This is especially unfortunate because the singer Thomas Young was clearly capable of giving much more range and color to the role of Elijah Muhammad...

...they say the Messenger has his own law...

...This supposedly brilliant man and student of black history never questioned the Arab slave trade or the Islamic conquest of African countries and the destruction of indigenous African culture which Ousmane Sembene took to task in 107 Ceddo...

...By removing the emotional intestines from Malcolm X's life and by avoiding the facts of his career as a hustler and an evangelist for racism, the Davises don't give baritone lead Ben Holt much to really do...

...In her position as general director of the New York City Opera, Sills is serving up some buzzard meat incinerated to charcoal, covered with a glistening glop of honey, and calling it pheasant under glass...

...As he was disentangling himself from one snarl of misconceptions, Malcolm X was strapping himself into another intellectual and political high chair and was gratefully accepting spoon-fed political baby food from another jar—the simplified, self-serving, and sometimes fascistic notions and platforms of Arab and African politicians and students...

...It is ironic that we should get from three AfroAmericans the same thing that almost every wing of the black community so often complains of when white historical figures are sentimentalized beyond recognition...

...He then educated himself, became a minister, and evolved into a powerful political figure...

...When he saw the old man and told him, Muhammad supposedly said that he was only fulfilling prophecy as he impregnated his secretaries, implying that it was his duty to experience sin in order to truly combat it...

...Malcolm X was referring to his discovery that the Messenger of Islam was guilty of the paternity charges brought against him by former secretaries...

...when, for instance, ice-hearted killers are remade into gleaming folk heroes or defenders of slavery are presented as sublimely humane and intrepidly democratic...

...He was a man who was constantly misled, both by his ego and by the distortions of one sort or another that he so willingly accepted from others...

...Hardly...

...In the last few minutes, when the tension bubbles as the assassination approaches, drama actually arrives—only to be iced by the curtain as the killers stand and take aim...

...As The Autobiography of Malcolm X shows, the man who died at the Audubon Ballroom eleven months after breaking away from the Nation of Islam never really examined the personality flaws that made him so gullible, or so dangerous...

...In fact, he is so much more powerful a singer than Holt that he should have had the lead...

...Well, I guess a man's entitled to make a fool of himself if he's ready to pay the cost...

...According to Malcolm X, the secretaries not only confirmed all the rumors but informed him that Elijah Muhammad saw his most charismatic minister as a potential threat...

...Malcolm's transformation was such a model...

...It cost me twelve years...

...He accepted the excuse that any Arab racism toward black Africans was the result of "Western influence," yet another version of the white man as the snake in Eden...

...EVEN SO, THE DAVISES HAD THE OPPORTUNITY TO reach tragedy, to create pathos, to pull the covers off a figure whose psychological and emotional birthday suit was as much that of an elephant man as anything else...

...He was a man whose bad judgment meant that he eventually had to repudiate his every stage of development, and whose vision, however clever at times, never reached the poetic grandeur he so begrudgingly recognized—as did the vast majority of Negro Americans—in the work and thought of Martin Luther King...

...The name of it is X (The Life and Times of Malcolm X), and it had its world premiere in October...

...Ever the hustler, however, Malcolm X admitted searching for passages in the Bible that would justify the Messenger's highhanded morality if—and when—everything pub108 licly exploded...

...Nothing in Afro-American music is digested well enough to express the emotional forces available at least since the spirituals...

...The second act is an abysmally anonymous encyclopedia of twentieth-century concert music cliches...

...In the first act, the score poorly approximates some blues grooves, now and then nearly reaching inspiration but settling for second-rate excitement no more authentic than the Motown imitations of Dream Girls...

...I was a zombie then—like all Muslims—I was hypnotized, pointed in a certain direction and told to march...

...The music matches the libretto in superficiality...

...He merely puts on different clothes and listens to some chanting celebrants who seem more hipsterish than those who have made wrecks of so many black communities —and whom Malcolm X described with such depth, detail, and disgust...

...But misbegotten political programs coming from Negroes haven't been fostered or upheld in isolation...

...Silent in the hustling world of X, Holt isn't allowed to change from a country boy into a piranha rising from the mud to show his teeth...

...Malcolm X's first descent into despair came when he found out how successfully Elijah Muhammad had converted him into a chump...

...Is Malcolm X shown as a man desperately trying to maintain his faith in a fraud when the facts point in another direction...