Perhaps the Met’s administration felt that bringing Fire into the fold would earn it some bankable goodwill against whatever social justice storms may break. Sounds sensible, but from my observation that is not how these things usually work; the storm only redoubles its fury. In one of two spacious follow-up articles afforded Fire by the New York Times after its initial review (and I cannot remember another instance of such magnanimous coverage of an opera), we glimpse another angle into the company’s calculations. (See Javier C. Hernandez: Taking Diversity Up Another Octave, NYT, 9/30/21. Not all of his descriptions are direct quotes from Met spokespersons, but there can’t be much doubt that they reflect trending policy.) After a quote from Gelb assuring us that the company is “firing on all cylinders right now trying to make opera accessible for the broadest number of people” and naming some of the celebrities of the popular culture that helped give the opening night “the air of a Hollywood premiere,” Hernandez takes note of three of the events meant to ensnare this “broadest number”: “mounting striking productions by the South African artist William Kentridge in the hope of appealing to an art crowd; or Philip Glass operas that might bring Brooklyn Academy of Music enthusiasts to the Met; or a recent new production of “Porgy and Bess” to appeal to Gershwin fans.”^(I)

Sigh. I recall an amusing bit from the comedian Robert Klein. He was married to the mezzo-soprano Brenda Boozer, who attained a nice altitude in the profession when she essayed Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier at the Paris Opera. It was a tremendous triumph, reported Klein, adding “Of course, it was Helmet Night.” Whatever success the ball clubs may have had in adding ethnic Appreciation Nights to their giveaway games (and mark those outreach constituencies: an art crowd; BAM enthusiasts; Gershwin fans!), the track record of trying to make High Culture regulars out of grownups not already predisposed by setting little honey traps along the trail is not encouraging; habituation needs to start much earlier. For sure, there were more faces of color for Fire, as for Porgy, than we normally see at the Met. I’ll be watching for an uptick at Meistersinger, Rigoletto, Don Carlos . . . My prediction for this marketing notion is slim pickin’s, and rather than a “broadest number,” a further cultural fragmentation.

The second social justice/diversity artifact to intrude on consciousness while receiving Fire is the real-life Charles Blow. Though we experience the characters of the opera as fictional, as we do all stage figures even when they represent real persons, we cannot suppress the awareness that the Charles of the opera is the double of the man who wrote the memoir, who writes the NYT column, and now has a TV show as well. He has become nearly a single-issue commentator, the issue being race, though he will make intersectional forays and once in a while (as in this week’s Monday column) venture to a subject like the doom he sees awaiting the Democrats in the coming midterm elections. ^(II) He sometimes writes in a quite personal, even confessional mode, and appears to see his life story as paradigmatic and (I infer) its telling as therapeutic for some who follow in his footsteps. That’s laudable. Yet there is a grandiosity in how the story unfolds. I assume that the Old Testament epigraph evokes not only the prophet reviled by his own people for proclaiming holy truth, but the identification of the African-American community with that of the Israelites, and so with a persecuted people taken into bondage, and seen as chosen—persecuted because chosen, and chosen because persecuted.  And then we have these allegorical figures, external forces that select Charles and shepherd him on his journey, so that his destiny is not merely the outcome of his actions, but is Destiny in a vaguely numinous sense, and his loneliness is not only that felt by all of us, especially of any outsider status, but a  Loneliness greater than that, a special Loneliness. My mind drifted on and off to the passage in Act 2 of Andrea Chénier wherein, amid the tribulations of the Revolutionary times, Chénier tells Roucher of his belief in Destiny, in “an arcane power, which for evil or good tells one man, ‘Thou shalt be a poet,’ and another,’ For thee, a sword—thou art a soldier!'” A high-Romantic, glorifying notion that we buy into in that spirit, and because Giordano lays it out for us (and for the type of tenor he was writing for) so effectively. But this is not a high-Romantic subject or musical style, and somehow the extension of the arcane power’s pronouncement to “And for thee, Charles, this sacred laptop—thou’rt a Timesman pundit!” balloons things to slightly grotesque proportions. The tone of humility I mentioned in the Dickey and Moran memoirs is not there. Destiny forfend that they become operas.