That first championship bout took place in April 1961, with Griffith winning in a 13th round knockout. Paret won a rematch six months later on a narrow split decision. A third fight was organized at Madison Square Garden for March 24th, 1962 and it is that bout which in many ways forms the central turning point in Griffith’s life. During a weigh-in several days before the fight, Paret taunted Griffith, calling him a maricón— a word roughly equivalent to “fag.” Whether intended as an anti-gay slur or more general pre-fight provocation, Griffith had to be restrained at the time, and later, in the ring, may have used it as motivation. When Clancy told Griffith, in his corner prior to the 12th round, to keep punching and not let up, Griffith took the advice to heart, landing 17 unanswered blows in seven seconds before the referee stopped the fight. Griffith was once again world champion, but for Paret the stakes were greater than a title belt: he never regained consciousness and died ten days later.
Though Griffith continued in the ring for a further fifteen years, the incident haunted him. Not only riddled with guilt over Paret's death, the truth was that Griffith was bisexual, a fact he shared with NY Times columnist Bob Herbert many years later. Griffith couldn’t possibly have revealed this during his career, and it wasn’t much easier even later. In 1992, Griffith was savagely beaten outside a gay bar near NYC's Port Authority, an attack which left him near death and hospitalized for more than four months.
A public reading of “Champion” took place last weekend (Oct. 27-28) in Cincinnati as part of the College Conservatory of Music’s “Opera Fusion: New Works” series. The program pairs the artistic and creative teams of new operas with CCM student vocalists and musicians so as to further develop and perfect their work. (Last year’s inaugural effort, the opera “Doubt,” composed by Douglas Cuomo and based on the award winning play and film by John Patrick Shanley) receives its NY premiere this evening at the Guggenheim Museum. [The performance is streamable online through the museum’s website, beginning at 7.30.]) I was there to see my daughter, Chelsea, a senior mezzo-soprano at CCM, and one of the fifteen vocalists in the cast. (Chelsea was one of the small ensemble chorus.) Though the team had spent about two weeks working on the entirety of the piece, our performance was limited to, perhaps, a dozen selections from the work presented three or four at a time. In between, James Robinson from Opera Theater of St. Louis, who was integral to the commissioning of the work and will direct its world premiere next June, filled in the narrative gaps.
In selecting Terence Blanchard as composer, OT-StL clearly chose someone who clearly doesn’t want to be pigeon-holed. Yes, he has the musical chops of a successful jazz trumpeter: Summer camps as a kid alongside fellow New Orleans-native Wynton Marsalis, stints on tour with Lionel Hampton and Art Blakely’s Jazz Messengers, a shelf full of recordings complete with Grammy nominations, five of which he has won. He’s scored more than 30 films, including almost all of Spike Lee’s work, and wrote music for the revival of A Streetcar Named Desire that ran on Broadway earlier this year. He’s an educator, and served as artistic director for the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz at USC and (currently) at the Henry Mancini Institute at University of Miami’s Frost School of Music. Clearly, he’s not afraid of musical challenges.
But what drew him to spend two years developing an opera? An opera based on the life of a mostly forgotten boxer? Blanchard’s father, it turns out, was an amateur opera singer, and he has been a fan since childhood. Perhaps the creation of “Champion” was partly an act of personal homage. This project was also an opportunity to challenge the boundaries that keep genres like “jazz” and “opera” separated. Blanchard’s music in “Champion” uses traditional operatic form but finds moments to incorporate American and Carribbean rhythms and idioms. A haunting duet between Emelda (Griffith’s mother) and a young Emile, for example, contained shades of the lyrical beauty of Gershwin’s “Summertime” while finding the emotional resonance of the finest duets by Puccini, say, from “Madame Butterfly.”
But, sitting center stage at Cincinnati’s College Conservatory of Music last Saturday evening, Blanchard got straight to the point, noting a motivation that was equally important and so much simpler, more humane: “There’s a line in ‘Nine, Ten, and Out’— a book that tells the story of Emile Griffith’s life— that went right to the heart of the story. Griffith says, ‘I killed a man, and the world forgave me. I loved a man, and the world wanted to kill me.’” That tidy couplet, Blanchard said, spoke to him. He mentioned that when he won each of his Grammies, he turned to his wife and kissed her. What would it be like, he wondered, not to be able to share your triumphs and achievements with the one you loved? Michael Cristofer, whose talents as a playwright have been rewarded with an armful of awards (a Pulitzer Prize, Tony Award and a Golden Globe included), has penned a libretto that skillfully weaves intimate episodes between a small cast of characters into a fabric that unearths core universal truths. Truths about freedom, identity, and authenticity. As such, the opera feels like a moment of both gifted storytelling and pointed advocacy. Advocacy for the values of tolerance and mutual acceptance, of the possibility of lives lived without shadows and shame. "Champion,” the work reminds us, is not only a noun but also a verb.
CHAMPION premieres June 15, 2013 at Opera Theater of St. Louis, with a cast including Denyce Graves, Aubrey Allicock, Arthur Woodley, and Robert Orth. Several CCM students (who were fabulous, btw) involved in last week’s reading will serve as “covers” for the production. The run will include six performances. Let’s hope this work finds its way to NYC soon!
