And yet the opera’s willingness to look unflinchingly at these moments and to engage honestly with emotional growth may give students a much-needed space to talk about their own experiences. It is important to recognize that Fire Shut Up in My Bones addresses difficult subjects: Over the course of the opera, Charles revisits a past troubled by both verbal and physical abuse.
The materials on the following pages include an introduction to Blanchard’s musical language, an overview of operas by Black creators, historical context for Blow’s story, and classroom activities that will bring the opera’s music and story to life.
As the first opera by a Black composer ever to be performed by the Met, Fire Shut Up in My Bones offers an opportunity for both celebration and reflection. The guide also asks students to think deeply about opera performance in a broader historical context. This guide presents Fire Shut Up in My Bones as a multimedia memoir, and it invites students to examine and celebrate their own memories and experiences through art, poetry, and music. But Robinson’s observation that, in opera, “anything can sing” offered the key: By casting Loneliness and Destiny-two powerful forces in Charles’s childhood-as onstage characters, Lemmons and Blanchard gave the young boy’s innermost experiences a riveting voice. Yet Blow’s memoir is marked by a complex interplay between young Charles’s external experiences and his rich interior life-a structure that does not easily translate to the conventions of grand opera. “There are parts of the memoir that sing, are beautiful poetry,” Lemmons recently observed in an interview with the Met. Blow, they observed that the project presented both opportunities and challenges. When James Robinson, the artistic director of Opera Theatre of Saint Louis and a co-director of this production at the Met, approached Blanchard and Lemmons about crafting an opera based on a memoir by New York Times columnist Charles M. Yet with this work, composer Terence Blanchard and librettist Kasi Lemmons have ventured into a fascinating and unusual genre: opera based on personal memoir. At first glance, Fire Shut Up in My Bones, which tells the story of a young boy growing up in rural Louisiana, seems to follow this tradition. The passion of first love, the search for belonging, and the process of finding oneself are ideal fodder for opera’s heightened emotions. The coming-of-age story is a tried-and-true format for opera.
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