A Fairytale for the Soul It begins, as many tales do, with a young man lost in the woods—fleeing a...
A Voice that Still Reverberates
The lights rise on a pulpit, a street corner, a jail cell—a Black man’s voice fills the air, railing, preaching, hoping. It’s the voice of Malcolm X, resurrected not in a film reel or a speech recording, but through the soaring, electrifying music of Anthony Davis’s X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X. When the opera first premiered in 1986, America was still wrestling with the legacy of the civil rights movement and the shadow of racial tension. Nearly forty years later, the work feels as if it were written for today’s news feed, reminding us that the cries for justice and identity are never truly silenced—they echo until we finally hear them.
The Radical Sound of History
Anthony Davis, a composer known for merging jazz, minimalism, and modern classical styles, sought to redefine what opera could sound like—and who it could speak to. Collaborating with his cousin, the playwright Thulani Davis, and his brother, Christopher Davis, he crafted a libretto that traces Malcolm’s transformation from street hustler to political icon to martyr. The music pulses with polyrhythms and blues inflections, a soundscape as multifaceted as Malcolm himself. When X premiered at the New York City Opera in 1986, it was both revolutionary and overdue: an opera that didn’t just include a Black story but was born of one.
At a time when opera houses were still dominated by Verdi and Wagner, Davis’s score fused the improvisational energy of jazz with the discipline of modernism. The orchestra doesn’t merely accompany; it confronts. Brass instruments wail like sirens. Percussion mimics protest marches. Voices interlock in angular harmonies, evoking both gospel call-and-response and dissonant modernist chorus. The effect is not comfortable—it’s purposeful. X was never meant to lull; it was written to awaken.
The Journey of a Man and a Movement
The opera follows Malcolm Little from his troubled youth in Lansing, Michigan, through prison, his awakening under the Nation of Islam, and his eventual evolution into an international human rights leader. Along the way, Davis’s music illuminates the inner contradictions of a man constantly redefining himself—Malcolm the hustler, Malcolm X the disciple, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz the visionary.
In the second act, as Malcolm’s world view broadens during his pilgrimage to Mecca, the music opens, too. Jazz gives way to lyrical lines and luminous orchestration, representing a kind of spiritual transcendence. But that clarity is short-lived. The third act unfolds with tragic inevitability: internal division, FBI surveillance, and his assassination at the Audubon Ballroom. Yet even in death, the music refuses to fade quietly. Instead, it crescendos into a collective cry—a reminder that the man’s ideas outlived his body.
Then and Now: Why X Still Matters
In the wake of recent reckonings over race, identity, and power, X feels startlingly contemporary. Its questions—about who controls the narrative, about the cost of speaking truth to power—resonate across generations. In 2022, the Metropolitan Opera brought X back to the stage in a landmark production, marking one of the few times a major opera house presented a work centered on Black American experience. Audiences who watched that Met: Live in HD broadcast witnessed not just a revival, but a restoration—a long-overdue acknowledgment that stories like Malcolm’s belong at the heart of American art, not its margins.
Today, in an age of protest movements, social media activism, and polarization, X asks us to reconsider how art can drive change. Where some operas deal in fates and gods, this one deals in history and humanity. It challenges us to see opera not as an escape from the real world, but as a mirror held up to it.
The Courage to Listen
Opera, at its best, amplifies what society whispers—or refuses to say aloud. Davis’s X dared to give voice to a man America often tried to silence. The work’s enduring relevance lies in its refusal to choose between beauty and truth. It demands that we listen to both at once, even when the sound is uncomfortable.
As Malcolm X himself once said, “Truth is on the side of the oppressed.” Davis’s opera translates that conviction into music, forcing audiences not just to hear it, but to feel it in their bones.
Opera Insight
When X premiered in 1986, many critics compared it to Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess—but Anthony Davis rejected the comparison, arguing that Porgy was written about Black Americans, while X was written from within their experience. Davis would later win the Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for another work about race and justice, The Central Park Five, proving that opera’s future can—and must—speak to America’s past and present alike.
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