The Stage Opened

On September 27, 2021, the Metropolitan Opera opened its season with Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones, the first opera by a Black composer presented in the company’s 138-year history. That was an achievement worth naming. It was also a sentence whose congratulations could not quite conceal its arithmetic.

The useful question is not whether the evening mattered. It is whether we can recognize what changed without making the institution’s progress the most interesting thing about the art.

More than a first

Writing for NPR the following day, critic Nate Chinen described the premiere as both a singular achievement and a shared success. His account supplies the reporting for this look back at the opening night; the Met’s original production page was inaccessible during retrieval.

The opera adapts Charles M. Blow’s memoir, with a libretto by Kasi Lemmons. Its central character, Charles, confronts the effects of childhood sexual abuse, isolation and the search for connection. Will Liverman played the adult Charles, with Walter Russell III portraying his younger self. James Robinson and Camille A. Brown co-directed the production.

Those particulars matter because “historic first” can become a remarkably efficient way of not discussing a work. The label is accurate, the achievement enormous—and suddenly the characters, language and music become supporting material for a story about the venue.

Chinen’s review resists that reduction. He describes the opera’s musical attention to work, family, loneliness and longing, and the fraternity step routine choreographed by Brown that opens its third act. These are not decorative signs of inclusion attached to an unchanged story. They are part of what the production asks an audience to encounter.

Blanchard, in a conversation quoted by Chinen, described the production’s collective ownership: “One of the beautiful things about this for me is that it doesn’t belong to me.” His collaborators were not simply present for his milestone. They were making the evening.

The difference between celebration and completion

There is a temptation to demand that one opening night prove everything. Did the institution change? Was the exclusion repaired? Can we put the problem down now?

That demand assigns impossible work to the people who finally receive an opportunity. A production can change what is performed on a stage. It cannot, by itself, demonstrate a durable change in commissions, leadership or the repertoire. This account establishes the opening and its creative particulars, not those longer-term outcomes.

The opposite reflex—dismissing the evening as merely symbolic—also misses something real. An opera was performed. Artists’ work occupied the season’s opening. An audience encountered a story it could not have encountered there through congratulations alone. Symbolism and material consequence are not mutually exclusive categories.

Through a coherenceist lens, widening the circle means allowing what enters to change the shared account. Here, that means listening to the work rather than treating it as evidence of the host’s generosity. It also means keeping future opportunities open to scrutiny without requiring this production to certify them in advance.

A first records a boundary being crossed. Repeated opportunities would tell us something different about how the institution operates. Neither observation cancels the other.

Celebrate the opening. Listen to the opera. Then keep asking who gets to make the next one—without making the people onstage responsible for answering on the institution’s behalf.