San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Opera a family project
San Diego resident Anthony Davis, his brother and their cousin collaborated on ‘X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,’ now at the Met
Christopher Davis (left) and Anthony Davis after a rehearsal of “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” at the Metropolitan Opera in New York last month.
‘X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” which is now playing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York through Dec. 2, was a family affair. The meditative yet dramatic work has a score by San Diego resident Anthony Davis to a scenario by his younger brother, Christopher Davis, and a libretto by their cousin Thulani Davis.
When they were working on the opera, in the early 1980s, the three were living in New York. Christopher appeared as Malcolm X in a play in Jamaica, Queens, and Anthony was playing experimental, improvised music in ensembles alongside Thulani’s poetry in productions downtown.
“There was a lot of energy in the air,” Christopher, 70, said in a recent interview at the Met alongside Anthony, 72 — with Thulani, 74, joining by video from her home in Madison, Wis.
In the decades since “X” had a celebrated New York City Opera premiere in 1986, Anthony and Thulani collaborated on another opera, “Amistad,” and Anthony wrote “The Central Park Five,” which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2020. But “X” wasn’t revived until last year, in Robert O’hara’s Afrofuturist staging at Detroit Opera, the production that will appear at the Met in expanded form.
Anthony Davis a distinguished professor of music at the University of California San Diego and an internationally recognized composer of operatic, symphonic, choral and chamber works who has been on the cutting edge of improvised music and jazz for more than 40 years. In September, he was inducted into the Opera Hall of Fame. He lives in University City with his opera-singer wife, Cynthia, and their son, Jonah, a professional baseball player.
In the interview, the Davises discussed the opera’s creation; their experience with Malcolm’s widow, Betty Shabazz; and revising the piece. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Anthony Davis: When we moved to New York, Thulani and I were part of this scene of music and poetry, what were called choreopoems; Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls” was the most famous. And Thulani and I worked with Ntozake and Jessica Hagedorn on “Where the Mississippi Meets the Amazon.” We ran at the Public Theater for several months.
Thulani Davis: The band improvised, and we did our words. It was different every night. That was eye-opening for me. That’s how I realized Anthony and I had similar sensibilities: Whatever emotion I was coming from, he was playing it.
Christopher Davis: I had talked to Anthony about doing a music piece about Malcolm X from
when I was in college. I’d taken a course in African American autobiography, and I remember calling Tony and saying I’d just read “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” and there’s so much music in the book. The spiritual development of Malcolm paralleled the spiritual development — in a different religion — of John Coltrane.
Anthony: I had done some concerts at the Kitchen, and Mary Macarthur, who was running it, said they were looking for new composers to write operas. She asked me if I had any ideas, and I said sure, I’d like to write an opera about Malcolm X. So we put together a grant application. Eric Bogosian wrote it; he was working there at the time.
Thulani: I had never written 50 pages of poetry, much less in one concerted period of time. I started at the beginning. This is the easiest and best part of how we work: I write something, I send it to Anthony, he calls me up and plays it on the piano, I swoon, and we move on. We still do that.
My biggest challenge was that Malcolm spoke in run-on sentences. I made them much more rhythmic, with short sentences so Anthony could set them. That was the liberty I took. And repetitions — more of a hammer sound.
Christopher: There was an original treatment by Thulani that came to me, and I reworked it, and did a scene-by-scene breakdown. I imagined it as being in three acts, and I labeled each act: Hate, Fear, Love.
The first act for me was one sentence: “And you wonder why we hate you.” Act 2 is the first reclamation of Malcolm, through the Nation of Islam, and it was important for people to see the power of that message for someone like him. It was very personal to me, as a younger brother, to have Malcolm’s little brother Reginald coming into his prison cell and telling him, “You have to straighten up.” The third act is all about the second conversion. I thought of it as a classic tragedy, where there’s a false unity that’s destroyed and you come back to the real unity, the real salvation that comes from the pilgrimage to Mecca. And then he can die.
Betty Shabazz said that we made the Nation of Islam look too good. And I said, “If the Nation isn’t compelling, your husband’s a fool.” Kind of a tough thing to say to the widow.
Thulani: I met her when I was writing. I was at the point when Malcolm was about to go to Mecca, and I was trying to write her aria. I sat with her, and she had my intestines for lunch. Her first words were, “Who do you think you are?” It was a terrifying experience. The thing that was hard about it was that she said Malcolm never had any doubt ever in his life.
Anthony: She was very protective, and I understand why she acted that way about his legacy. But we were trying to create a drama, and make him human and vulnerable, so that people identify with him.
Christopher: Before the opening at City Opera, there was a meeting that was arranged for us and Betty by Bill Lynch, who was David Dinkins’ chief of staff when he was Manhattan borough president. And Dinkins said it was really important that the whole community be behind the piece.
Thulani: I changed her aria for City Opera, because the family was going to be there, and it seemed brutal. In the original, she feels the henchmen coming, that they’re coming for Malcolm. And I thought, because words like “blood” are in it, that it would be rough for anyone who knew him to sit through. So I wrote a nicer one. At the opening night party, Betty said, “All’s well that ends well.”
Anthony: It was the beginning of a new direction in my music, knowing that opera was something I wanted to continue.
There were several occasions where there might have been a revival of “X.” Los Angeles was interested. I talked to Julie Taymor at one point. But it never
Thulani Davis, a cousin of Anthony and Christopher, wrote the libretto for “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X.”
Christopher Davis
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3.“Fourth Wing”
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Anderson Cooper grew up in the shadow of great wealth: His great-great-greatgrandfather was Cornelius Vanderbilt, one of the richest men in American history. His mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, was at the center of a sensational trial in the 1930s when her mother and aunt battled for custody of the little girl and her trust fund — worth more than $80 million in today’s dollars.
Like so many family fortunes, it didn’t last. The Vanderbilt descendants (including Gloria) frittered most of it away. As a teenager, Cooper distanced himself from the complicated legacy; as an adult, the CNN anchor confronted it in the bestselling “Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty.”
Now he has teamed up with historian Katherine Howe for another book and another empire: “Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune.”
John Jacob Astor, son of a German butcher, came to this country in 1784 and ruthlessly amassed his astounding wealth by selling North American beaver pelts — a fur so prized that the animal was almost extinct in Europe — and then acquiring large parcels of land in Manhattan.
He exploited Indigenous fur traders by introducing alcohol to their tribes and became New York’s biggest slumlord in the 19th century, making him America’s first multimillionaire.
His descendants built magnificent mansions and ruled New York for the next 100 years: Caroline Astor — the “Mrs. Astor” — was the undisputed queen of the Gilded Age; the famed Waldorf-astoria hotel was created by two Astor cousins. When John Jacob Astor IV died on the Titanic in 1912, his oldest son, 20-yearold Vincent, inherited $69 million — about $2 billion now.
The Astors and the Vanderbilts competed for power and prestige over decades; the Vanderbilt fortune was so massive that the Astors were forced to accept the nouveau riche interlopers. Cooper met the last “Mrs. Astor” — another grand dame of New York society — as a young man, but she did not recognize or acknowledge him when he was working as a waiter at a chic New York restaurant. By then, the Astor fortune was almost gone.
Cooper recently sat down with The Washington
Post to discuss money, power, history and the myths of the American dream. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Q:
Why did you want to write a book about the Astors?
A:
I am fascinated by these families. I see it as somebody who grew up looking at the Vanderbilt family from a distance, through my mom’s eyes, without feeling very much involvement with it. I’m very interested in the pathology of how the fortune is made, the psychology of the person who was so invested in amassing money that they created this fortune, whether it’s Commodore Vanderbilt and certainly John Jacob Astor. And the ripple effect of that mythology over the generations: From afar, they’re called great fortunes and great families, and yet just about every biography that’s ever been written about any Astor male refers to them as morose.
Q:
You use the term “pathology.” Why that word?
A:
I remember when “Good Will Hunting” came out. I loved that movie, and I’m a big fan of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. When that movie came out, there were all these articles written about the “two regular guys” who made this movie. I remember thinking at the time: “Regular guys don’t make movies. Regular guys do regular things and have regular lives.” For Commodore Vanderbilt at age 11 to leave school and start working on his dad’s boat and then, by 16, get his mom to give him money so he can buy his own boat, and then run his dad out of business and then do all the things that it took for him to amass this empire: There’s a pathology. He sent his wife to the mental asylum. He sent his son who may or may not have been gay to the same asylum. At the end of his life, when he is being fed by a nurse, he’s still obsessing about clawing the rent out of some poor old lady. And that’s a pathology to me.
Q:
Do you think that these great dynasties are doomed to a kind of unhappiness, a kind of misery?
A:
I don’t think it’s just these great fortunes. Most of the people who have achieved unusual levels of financial success or renown or fame, I don’t think it comes from a good place. I don’t think the things that make people, early on, outliers — focusing on something that other people around them are not focusing on — I don’t think that comes from necessarily a happy place.
Q:
Let’s start with the first John Jacob Astor. He was not a good guy. He starts out by ripping off the Indigenous people, then there’s an incredibly successful run as a slumlord. Everybody wants to believe that the American dream is about good guys doing good and becoming successful. That is not this story.
A:
The founding of the Astor fortune was brutal. The plying of alcohol to Indigenous populations wasn’t just an occasional thing; it was part and parcel of the business. The U.S. government actually tried to stop the sale of alcohol, and John Jacob Astor did everything possible to circumvent that. He wasn’t just ruthless with Indigenous populations; he was with the people who worked for him. And the lease structure that John Jacob Astor used and his son continued to great effect: Build, cram as many immigrants in as possible, divide up rooms, subdivide rooms, multiple families living in one room, no ventilation, and never fix up the building because it’s going to revert back to the Astors in the end of the lease. So why fix it up? Vincent Astor, 100 years later, stunned people by trying to get out of this slum business.
I think the view that many of the family seemed to have, which justified their actions, was that John Jacob Astor came here with nothing and worked hard and made a fortune. All these other immigrants could do it if they wanted to, but they’re just not willing to work as hard, which is obviously a very limited way to see things.
“Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune”
by Anderson Cooper and Katherine Howe (Harper, 2023; 336 pages)
Q:
Let’s talk about income inequality. You make comparisons to the historical Gilded Age and our current Gilded Age — the same fascination with the rich, the same resentments.
A:
What I find so fascinating about just being alive in history is we all think we are the first to experience things: “Oh, my God, there’s never been an Elon Musk before or a Jeff Bezos.” Obviously, they’re doing extraordinary things and they’ve created extraordinary companies and all of that. But I know there has been an Elon Musk before and there has been a Jeff Bezos before. It was Cornelius Vanderbilt and it was John Jacob Astor and a whole bunch of other people.
It’s very interesting how we look at these people now: We read about them, we see their yachts, we imagine what their lives are like. I see it differently. I view it through the lens of these past families, and what will the ripple effects be in their lives and their families’ lives? I’m fascinated by the cycles of history — we’ve all been here before, and there has been a version of you here before and there’s been a version of me.
Q:
We live in the heightened present of now, the immediate with all its immediate demands. But history can be very instructive, and we can see pattern in all these cycles.
A:
To me, it’s comforting to know that we are on a road that has been welltraveled. I have said this about grief, this idea that we are not alone in that we are terrified about the future.