But First, Cue the Tenor

Composer Anthony Davis and librettist-journalist-playwright Thulani Davis ought to be in pictures, or so it seems. They have a nice knack for beating Hollywood to the punch. The cousins’ first operatic collaboration, “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” landed on stage at New York City Opera a full six years before Spike Lee filmed his version in 1992. This fall, they’re doing it again, although this time Hollywood is quicker on the rebound.

The Davises’ “Amistad,” commissioned by Chicago Lyric Opera, premieres Saturday in the Windy City, just 11 days before Steven Spielberg’s film of the same name is scheduled to open nationwide. Both works tackle the true story of an abortive slave-ship rebellion in 1839, led by the legendary Joseph Cinque. The uprising resulted in a Supreme Court case that pitted John Quincy Adams against the slavery status quo and would become the abolition movement’s first real victory.

Both the Davises and the Lyric Opera make the point that the opera/holiday-movie convergence is totally accidental. The story of the Amistad has been floating around in the composer’s head for nearly 20 years, ever since he first read Robert Hayden’s poem “Middle Passage.” It was the first project Anthony proposed to Thulani as a follow-up to “X.”

“I was interested, but somewhat reluctant,” Thulani Davis says. “It was potentially a story about a rebellious black guy leading his race into an uncharted situation, and I didn’t think I wanted to do that again.”

But then there was that pesky question of financing. With neither composer nor librettist willing to commit to such an intensive work on spec, the Davises completed two arias to show potential backers, then put “Amistad” in dock. Neither was hurting for work in the meantime: Thulani covered the 1988 presidential campaign for the Village Voice and the Nation, wrote poetry, a novel and theater works such as a 1990 adaptation of Brecht’s “The Caucasian Chalk Circle.” Anthony wrote two other operas, “Under a Double Moon” and “Tania,” as well as a number of orchestral pieces, including a “symphonic impression” of the Amistad voyage, and a choral setting of Hayden’s poem. “It was my way of working on my opera without really working on it,” he says.

Then in the early 1990s, “Amistad” was back in the water, following some preliminary interest from the Baltimore Opera and funding from the American Theater Festival. By 1992, Baltimore had drifted away, Chicago Lyric--along with director George C. Wolfe--had come on board, and the Davises’ “Amistad” embarked on its present course. The Lyric’s cast features Florence Quivar, Thomas Young and Stephen West, and the company has developed a number of supplemental programs including a curriculum packet for the Chicago city schools and an all-day symposium the day of the opera’s premiere.

Despite the Davises’ long claim to the material, neither composer nor librettist seems the least bit possessive, or worried that the cinematic version will steal their thunder. Instead, they see it as a marketing windfall. Chicago Lyric refers to the film liberally in its promotional materials, and the Davises even shrug off the idea of controversy over a version of “Amistad” directed by Spielberg--the filmmaker whose “Color Purple” aggravated audiences with its supposedly rose-colored view of black life.

“I think that this time he would avoid that kind of Disneyfication,” Thulani says hopefully. “He seems to be very chastened by the experience. The [filmmakers] I usually meet are the ones who’ve sworn off black stories forever, so I was heartened when he decided to try it again.

“Maybe it will be a movie like ‘Glory,’ ” she adds, “one that will make the incident take on an historic weight it would never have otherwise. A number of black filmmakers are already fretting over it, but I’m not worried. I’m doing my own version, and at least my version will be out there.”

The “Amistad” story begins with the facts of a slave-ship rebellion but soon blossoms into a larger clash between ideologies and continents, cultures and individuals. For the displaced Africans, the final result was a decisive return home. For the composer and librettist, telling the story meant first resolving some aesthetic clashes. In Anthony’s case, “Amistad” was about hewing coherence out of conflicting musical styles. For Thulani, the challenge was blending elements of fact and fiction.

Thulani’s work began with history, sorting through books and transcripts of interviews and trial accounts. But unlike her libretto for “X,” which largely stuck to research, her approach this time was altered by hearing author Toni Morrison telling how she turned away from a research-first method in writing “Beloved.”

“She had to sit down and write the story first so it would be her story,” the librettist recalls, “then go do the research. That rang a bell, because sometimes you just keep putting off the writing. And you have to get down, at least in sketch form, the elements that interested you in the first place.”

Take salt, for example. “Salt eats the inside of the trees and leaves a hollow shell. To me it was the perfect metaphor for slavery,” says Thulani, who made many of her “Amistad” characters salt miners. “I later found out that most of the captives were rice farmers, but I couldn’t come up with any arias about rice that were any better.”

Davis says she found her way largely through the guidance of Wolfe, who had previously directed her adaptation of “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” at New York’s Public Theater and for whom Anthony had composed the incidental music for “Angels in America,” which Wolfe staged in the early ‘90s.

Wolfe himself graciously refuses credit.

“Once you start collaborating you don’t remember what you do or what the other person does,” he contends. “I may have been some help dramaturgically, but everything I added was already there somewhere in the writing.”

The librettist, however, can spot the director’s touches all over her work. “I had started by making the opera about Cinque,” she says, “but George pointed out that I was more interested in the Trickster God.”

So the impish and amoral Trickster, a figure in many African myths, began taking on greater narrative significance. Not only did he become the perfect dramatic foil for the heroic Cinque, but as an ethereal character not beholden to time and space, he provided the device she needed to illuminate the slaves’ inner lives.

Likewise, the structure of “Amistad”--the first act unveiling the facts in courts, the second telling the Africans’ side through a series of Trickster-guided flashbacks--also evolved out of discussions with Wolfe, Thulani says. Under his guidance, she also labored to establish characters through using different speech patterns.

“The problem with 19th century language is that it’s long-winded,” she says, having gone through a number of period documents. “With today’s abbreviated American English, it’s a little startling to encounter a John Quincy Adams sentence. I had to truncate his points in shorter bits, while preserving his syntax.” The language of Davis’ Adams was much different from either the slaves’ “hillbilly American” vernacular, or the syntax of the reporters, which again was taken from press reports of the period.

“One thing about having been a journalist is that I have pretty awful reporters in everything I do,” says Thulani. “The language of racism has changed over the years--people don’t call each other ‘blubber lips’ today, but they did in the papers back then--and George requested that I be harsher, since the printed word still had an air of courtesy about it.”

The resulting libretto, she says, satisfies her in all her roles--poet, journalist and author.

“I’ve made a conscious effort to start putting my whole self in the room, whichever room I happen to be in at the time,” she says. “I end up pushing the formal boundaries of whatever form I’m working in. The characters in ‘Amistad’ are mostly real, but my [storytelling method] makes it less documentary.”

For Anthony, the balancing act in “Amistad” was over musical styles and compositional technique. Although the composer’s references tend to bounce between, say, Bartok and Ellington, the music itself is of a piece. In “X,” for example, the vocal line unfolds in a steadily flowing arioso style rather than contrasting a talky recitative with purely melodic aria. But “Amistad,” he says, will take a different course.

“If I’d written ‘Amistad’ in the style of ‘X,’ it’d be three hours long,” he says. “But we had to move the story faster, and it made more sense to keep the text in real time [recitative]. I don’t [usually] tell the audience where the arias begin. Someone asked me during “Under a Double Moon” where the melody was, and I was horrified. It was all melody. Then I realized, that was the problem. You only hear melody as a contrast.”

Just as the characters in “Amistad” have contrasting speech patterns, Anthony gave them different music styles to match. But while the libretto strives to achieve period authenticity, the score doesn’t even try.

“I didn’t do music of the period, because for me to write 19th century music would be ridiculous,” says the composer. “Each of my characters is different. The Trickster’s melodies are angular and rhythmic--Miles Davis was my model--and Cinque’s music has some very solid blues elements, which is probably inappropriate. I mean, why are Africans singing the blues? But this show is supposed to be speaking to our time.”

That applies even to the racist reporters in Thulani’s text. “There’s a real minstrel show aspect to portraying the scatological depiction of blacks in the 1840s,” the composer says. “The music can be fun and sick at the same time; the shock is so much greater once people realize what they’re laughing at. But as a composer I can’t enjoy it too much.”

This, coming from a composer whose “Tania,” his 1991 operatic version of the Patti Hearst story, featured a love duet between Betty Ford and Fidel Castro? “Yeah, we were pretty out there,” he admits. “It wasn’t exactly the official version.” Another love duet between Hearst and her kidnapper Cinque (who in real life took the name of the Amistad hero), included the seven principles of black nationalism. “Most of my black friends, couldn’t believe I had the nerve to do that,” he says.

Anthony’s music for “Amistad” is a blend of meticulous scoring and improvised jazz. “The great thing about opera,” he says, “is that you can shift moods on a dime.” The great thing about the cast, he adds, is that they are familiar enough with his style to pull it off.

Cast members Thomas Young (the Trickster God), Eugene Perry (the slave Antonio) and Mark Dobbs (Cinque) have all appeared in previous Davis operas.

“I like working with people who understand my language,” he says. “Thomas Young is the perfect Trickster, with this incredibly high range and both a scat and lyrical side. I realized as I was writing the character that I had him in mind, showcasing everything he can do.”

That relationship dates back to “X,” says Young. The day of his formal audition, Young, an accomplished jazz singer, invited Davis to his jazz concert that evening. Davis, who had already cast Young in his mind, went home and rewrote the first act of “X” based on what he’d heard the tenor do that night.

“The things you have to learn working with Tony are patience and humility,” Young says. “Especially if you’re used to learning new music quickly. Tony’s music is extraordinarily complex rhythmically, and challenging to even the most assured technique. He’s developed a kind of vocabulary you can recognize--the same way Harrison Birtwistle has his own vocabulary--but familiarity doesn’t necessarily breed ease. You might be able to recognize a high C more easily, but you’ve still got to sing it.”

The hard work does pay off on an emotional level, he adds. “When you come off all that effort, Tony’s work is genuinely compelling. Without even taking the words into account, there’s so much drama in the music alone.”

“Some composers have always had their voice and just need to develop craft,” says Davis. “I’ve always had [my own voice].

“Certain things I do now that I’ve done since I was 15, like ostinatos, or using different rhythms together. Even when I was writing parodies they’d still come out sounding like me.”

It was largely a question of confidence, he says. “Frederic Rzewski took one look at my first orchestra piece and said, ‘Boy, you really listen to Bartok and all that Eastern European crap, don’t you?’ I said, ‘Hey, it’s my first piece,’ but by my second piece I was trying to make my music work for an orchestra, rather than starting with an orchestra piece and making it mine.”

This kind of tinkering with a European art form has not earned him points among critics, he observes, recalling a New York critic who lambasted “X” for “not being Verdi.”

“Critics seemed threatened by ‘X,’ by the fact that opera could embrace other traditions, but for me music is about making connections. In ‘Amistad’ one of my inspirations for the relationship between Cinque and the Trickster was Schoenberg’s ‘Moses und Aron,’ where Aron’s music was very emotional and Moses had hardly any melody at all. My contrast comes from the high and low voices.”

Would anyone spot that connection from the music alone? “Probably not,” he admits. “I think I wrote one tone row in the show, but it was a joke--a real Trickster thing. If I use a row, my frame of reference would probably be [Coltrane and Mingus saxophonist-arranger] Eric Dolphy, not Schoenberg.”

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* “Amistad,” Chicago Lyric Opera, 20 N. Wacker Drive, Saturday to Jan. 15. (312) 332-2244.