The Art of the Libretto: A Conversation with Thulani Davis

Courtesy of Thulani Davis.

X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X is opening at the Metropolitan Opera on November 3. It originally premiered in 1986 at New York City Opera and is the result of a collaboration between three cousins—Anthony Davis, who wrote the music; Christopher Davis, who wrote the story; and Thulani Davis, who wrote the libretto. I spoke with Thulani Davis on the phone about the niche art of writing a libretto, how she transformed Malcolm X’s speech into arias, and the many American stories that might be operas.

INTERVIEWER

How did you first approach writing the libretto for X, back in 1981?

DAVIS

My cousin Anthony Davis asked me to write one, which he would then set to music for an opera. I had never written a libretto, so my first thought was, Oh my God, that’s a lot of poems. My first problem in 1981 was trying to figure out how much I could do in a day, alongside a full-time job. It was a challenging and deep learning experience. But having done a few of them now, I think it’s a better job for a poet than for a playwright. Poets usually don’t write plays, and playwrights don’t usually write in verse, so writing a libretto is a weird little niche.

I used to read the librettos in the opera house before they had implemented the idea of putting the words on slides or screens above the stage—I was used to trying not to be heard turning pages at the opera. The only librettos I ever read as a result were in English, and they wouldn’t strike you as poetry. They were not felicitous reading. I wanted X to be more graceful. American English is a rhythmic language. Over time it has become more percussive, and more casual, so there are ways to have fun with it while still writing poetry.

INTERVIEWER

How did you think about the use of language in an opera that spans such wide geographic and temporal dimensions?

DAVIS

I really had to refresh and research. I lived through most of the time period that X covers, but the opera starts before I was born. So the first third of the opera is in a language that people were not necessarily using as I was growing up. I talked to a lot of people who knew Malcolm. When I was thinking about writing the character of Malcolm especially, I listened to records of his speeches that were put out at some point after his death. I read books of his speeches. I was a little horrified because he spoke in run-on sentences and you really need shorter lines in a libretto. Nobody’s ever mentioned this to me as a criticism, but I made him a much terser speaker than he really was. I put some periods in there.

INTERVIEWER

Did you always know that opera was the form in which you wanted to approach the life of Malcolm X?

DAVIS

The original thought that I had was musical theater, not opera. There were works being done around that time that were on very serious topics. They didn’t have fun dancing and choruses, but it was all set to music. Opera fit because it really is an epic story. So many American stories are operas, like gangster stories. They’re epic—The Godfather is an epic. You could write three operas with that kind of material, but people in this culture tend to want to see it as a movie. We have operas in the culture that are taking place all the time. We’re living through one right now. Our language is so singable that there are many more operas that should be created in it. 

I should also say I saw West Side Story live when it was first done. That blew my mind about using American English and New York Puerto Rican English. And I thought, Okay, that’s something to do.

INTERVIEWER

 Were there other early experiences of performance that influenced you?

DAVIS

When I was a teenager, the first time I heard Shakespeare performed live, I was just overwhelmed by its musicality. I thought, How do you do that? When I was about thirteen, I joined the Washington Theater Club because I wanted to take acting classes. It was there that I realized I shouldn’t be an actor. But we did go to see Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas. I got my mind blown because, again, it was so musical. 

Now, as a seventy-four-year-old, I understand why somebody like Dylan Thomas would make you want to write very musically. He’s playing with all the tones and vowel sounds of Welsh spoken word, or English as I heard it, and using all these other sounds that were not like the way I talked. So that’s what I became interested in, and didn’t know what to do with when I was a teenager.  

INTERVIEWER

How did you first start collaborating with your cousin Anthony? What were you working on with him before X? 

DAVIS

We did a show called Where the Mississippi Meets the Amazon. After for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, Joe Papp wanted Ntozake Shange to do something else at the Public. He came to see a show that she and I and Jessica Hagedorn did, a night of just the three of us doing our poetry at a women’s club in New York. Anthony played piano. Gail Merrifield at the Public was really taken with it and said, “You got to bring them to the theater. They can do this on a theater stage.” So he did, and we hired a band. Anthony was the piano player. David Murray played saxophone. Fred Hopkins was on bass. We did more poems for them, and they structured music around it. It involved a lot of improvisation. It was tremendous fun. That’s when Anthony really started to compose for my poems.

The only reason I said yes to working with Anthony on X is that his musical emotional life is really close to my poetry’s emotional life. Most of the time the music really matches whatever mood I wrote the words in or whatever voice I was writing in. There was one point in time when he wrote music from the opposite emotional framework of what I had imagined, and it really upset me. My intention was a painful sense of loss, having to do with a baby. He wrote a lullaby and it was heartbreaking but very sweet. When I first heard it, I thought, Oh, no, no. But in the end it was so much more moving that way, done in the opposite tone of my intention.

When Anthony wants to ask me to change a word at the end of an aria, he’ll suggest words with the same vowel sound. He’s very attuned to what I’m actually doing, especially to my internal rhyming. Those internal rhymes will happen with notes in the middle of two lines. It makes the words more musical for me, even when I read it out loud to myself. I didn’t even realize for a long time that he was doing that.

INTERVIEWER

I’d love to hear about how you wrote the scene in the libretto when Malcolm goes to Mecca, which includes an extremely moving aria. What were you thinking about when you were envisioning the scene?

DAVIS

This was, as far as I’m aware, the first time Islamic prayer has ever been put in an opera. I was originally going to write a scene in which Malcolm was in Mecca, near the Kaaba, the great Black Cube that people circulate around. Someone who ran a playwrights’ workshop that I had belonged to when I was younger called me up. He said, “I hear you’re writing an opera about Malcolm X.” I said, “Yeah, I’m writing a Mecca scene as we speak.” And he said, “Oh my God, you’re not going there, are you?” He said, “You can’t show the Kaaba. You’re not supposed to photograph or replicate it.”

I thanked him. He hung up, and I was scared to death I was going to do something offensive. But it was such a wonderful accident that he called, because I rewrote the scene so that he is waiting outside Mecca in kind of a dormitory where pilgrims would stay. And all of the other people onstage are going through the motions of morning prayer, so I put the actual morning prayer into the libretto. 

Malcolm had belonged to a religion that was imitating Islam, but had made changes to it for the sake of this idea of black dignity. Elijah Muhammad didn’t want anybody kneeling, and he felt like black Christians were doing plenty of kneeling, and he wanted people to stand up and pray. So in my version Malcolm is trying to get down on his knees, which physically isn’t something he was often doing. He’s watching all the other people and imitating their motions. And instead of being triumphal, his aria is, “Will they accept me? Will they let me in?”

INTERVIEWER

How did you revise the libretto for this run?

DAVIS

There’s an aria in there that’s a duet between Malcolm and his wife, Betty Shabazz, which wasn’t in there before. Just before Malcolm goes off to Mecca, she talks about how the henchmen will come for him. It’s really a scary aria. I wrote it thirty-seven years ago. But at the time, Shabazz and her entire family were coming and sitting in the box with Beverly Sills. There were many more people who knew Malcolm who would be in the audience. And I just didn’t think they could take it. So I wrote another aria, note for note the same. About a year ago, Anthony said, “Can we put the original aria back in?” And I said, “Okay. Yes.”

INTERVIEWER

How did it feel to see X performed again, after all this time?

DAVIS

I went to a rehearsal in Detroit, and there were high school students there. There was one group that was sitting right across the aisle from me in the orchestra, and they were kind of rustling around in the beginning. Then the child Malcolm sings his first aria, called “Mom Help Me,” where he’s trying to get his mother to hear his situation. I just burst into tears—a reaction to it I’ve never had before.

Hearing the eleven-year-old child sing it, I experienced what I felt when my mother died when I was six. I had never connected those things in my life. I was sitting there crying, and it was quiet as a chapel while this eleven-year-old was singing this aria angelically. At the end, the high school students were the first people to come out of their seats to give us a standing ovation. It was very moving.

A friend of mine who’s in his sixties, a very worldly person, came to the next performance. At the intermission, I saw him in the hall and he said, “Okay, that aria totally just screwed me up. It just messed me up.” I realized there was something going on for men in the audience as they heard the delicate feelings of a black male child. It goes into this place that we don’t often see in this culture. We don’t see black men expressing vulnerability or the vulnerability they have as children. It’s like a quiet secret place. To me, that’s what opera should be like. A lot of people go to opera in this country to see operas they’ve heard all their lives and to cry in the same places where they usually cry. 

Sophie Haigney is the web editor of The Paris Review.