These tales of self-discovery in the course of rising above a traumatic early episode are coin-of- the-realm in our culture. When told with directness and humility, they can be touching and inspiring. I think of Wherever I Wind Up, by the baseball pitcher R. A. Dickey, who performed the service of being open about his experience in his hypermasculine milieu, or (closer to home with Fire) of the beautifully written The Tricky Part by the actor Martin Moran, which was first a one-man theatre piece, then a memoir. But how to lift such a story to the plane of operatic drama, especially of a sort that can make an impact in one of the largest of grand-opera auditoriums? I can imagine its telling as an intimate chamber opera, or perhaps as a song cycle. The difficulty of upsizing from those dimensions is compounded by Blanchard’s stylistic comfort zone and his inexperience in writing for classically trained voices (or possibly in writing music of emotional urgency and depth for any vocality—but here he’s dealing with a classical one). His jazz orientation is most apparent in his orchestral writing. We’ve had jazz influences from the Met’s pit as far back as the 1920s, with John Alden Carpenter’s ballet Skyscrapers (with its “Negro Scene”) and Ernst Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf (about a cross-racial love affair), not to mention the jazz tintings in Porgy and Bess, or the interpolations in John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby. But those were works by white composers, incorporating jazz sounds into what were then modern-classical or music-theatre styles, and the jazz was that of The Jazz Age itself. Blanchard’s is contemporary and prevailingly laid-back. At times it establishes mood effectively, but having set in place a sort of timbral bedding and putting in motion often repetitive rhythmic patterns, it seems content with itself. I almost never caught it in dramatic action, or heard it either generating gestures that might be followed through in the vocal writing on one hand, or adding accompanimental urgency on the other.

With respect to the vocal writing, Blanchard has said that he’s sought to make it sound as close as possible to everyday speech, repeating the lines to himself to discover their inflectional rise and fall. This effort to fashion a singing line from the “line readings” of the spoken language has an honorable pedigree, with Mussorgsky, Debussy, Janáček, and Berg the most commonly cited referents for it—though as soon as one starts to actually deal with their music, one discovers how unlike speech most of it (including the best of it) actually is, and how interlocked with melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic happenings in the orchestra. Blanchard seems not to have much explored his line readings for their poetic or dramatic potential; they are pretty bare. In search of emotional emphasis, he takes the voices higher and into a more songlike mode, but without the  build that would make that sound organic. “Destiny” and “Loneliness” are given passages of sustained singing, listenable but unmemorable, and Spinner (Chauncey Packer,) has a raunchy song that has been claimed for the “It Ain’t Necessarily So” line of descent—true, perhaps, but not a comparison that does it any favors. So Fire could be said to be constructed on a through-composed, accompanied-recitative-and-arioso model, but with the constituent parts of only moderate interest on their own, and insufficiently fused to develop any sustained musico-dramatic force.