Amistad Story As A Major Opera

The glow they saw seemed to come from the African coast.

That was good news for the mutineers aboard the Amistad, a Spanish slave ship two months into what had started as a three-day trip, a vessel encrusted with barnacles, its shredded sails flapping to little avail. The Africans ordered the captain, one of two Spaniards they had decided not to kill, to head for what held the promise of home.

Unfortunately, it was the Montauk Light.

Storytellers from Herman Melville to Steven Spielberg have made great hay of the true tale that followed in 1839: a landing at Culloden, Montauk, where a local whaling captain tried to swindle the Africans out of their cargo; a United States Supreme Court trial in which former President John Quincy Adams came to their defense; the final return, two years later, of the Africans to Sierra Leone.

Melville To Spielberg

In Melville's case the tale took the form of a short story called "Benito Cereno." In Mr. Spielberg's it will be, come December, a feature film.

And in the case of Anthony Davis, it will be a full-orchestra jazz opera, with a primarily black cast, to open at the Lyric Opera of Chicago on Nov. 29, two weeks before the release of the Spielberg film.

It makes good opera sense that someone would choose to use the story of the most significant anti-slavery victory prior to the Civil War as a libretto.

Proper Credentials

Mr. Davis brought "The Life and Times of Malcolm X" to the New York City Opera six years before Spike Lee's film about the militant black leader. He put the story of Patty Hearst, another captive - and, depending on your point of view, insurrectionist - to music in another opera. He also wrote the music for "Angels in America," Tony Kushner's Broadway play about AIDS.

According to Opera News, Beverly Sills, the City Opera's general director, declined to mount "Amistad," calling its subject matter too grim - although she admires the power of Mr. Davis's music.

The Mende Revolt

"It's really an American story. The clash of cultures, the clash of theology and philosophy, the idea of enslaving another person - what our country is made of is essentially a creation of slavery," Mr. Davis says in a release.

Despite a ban on the international slave trade in 1839, 53 people, mostly Mende from Sierra Leone, were abducted, shackled to each other, and shipped off with other "cargo" to Cuba. After being sold in Havana, they were packed aboard the Amistad, whose Spanish name ironically means "friendship," for transport to a Cuban port three days away.

Some historians have concluded that the Mende believed deeply in their right to liberty. In any case, a bold 25-year-old Mende named Cinque led a mutiny in the middle of the night that spared only two Spaniards to steer the boat back to Africa.

By day the Spaniards followed the course they were directed to. By night, however, they steered north in hope of a rescue.

No Slaves Or Spaniards

For two months, they traveled off the North American coast. To mutual bewilderment, the landing party at Culloden met with five South Fork men on the beach at Montauk. Relieved to learn that there were neither Spaniards nor slaves in the area, the Mende offered to pay the South Fork men to take them back to Sierra Leone. That led one of the men to suspect that the Amistad bore valuable cargo, and decide to try to relieve them of it instead.

Then a United States naval cutter came by and relieved the Africans of their liberty as well.

What followed was two years of litigation revolving around Henry Green's, one of the men's, claim to the loot and the Spanish Government's desire to try the Africans for murder. The Africans' difficulty in defending themselves in their own language of course encumbered their effort.

Were Freed

But the abolitionists took up the Africans' cause, using the case as an example of the immorality of slavery. On the other hand, President Martin Van Buren agreed to help the Spanish Government satisfy its slave traders and was prepared to use a Navy ship to return the Mende to Cuba.

From a New Haven, Conn., jail, one of the African children wrote to former President John Quincy Adams beseeching him to help, and he agreed. Even without taking his endorsement into account, however, the Supreme Court ruled on a technicality that the captives were free men, and that their mutiny had been justified.

"Musically it's a profoundly demanding piece. I have to represent those clashes musically. There are so many dramatic moments - on the ship, the capture, in the courtroom," Mr. Davis also says in the release.

Clashes

"We're dealing with icons - Cinque, leader of the Mende revolt, John Quincy Adams, the former President, the abolitionist Tappan, as well as African deities. We can tell the story from dialectically opposing points of view."

The African deities - the Trickster and the Goddess of the Waters, to be sung by the tenor Thomas Young and the mezzo-soprano Florence Quivar - are Mr. Davis's embellishments. An impish African deity known for disguise and translation, akin to Shakespeare's Puck, the Trickster stays on in America after the other Africans go home.

Mr. Davis reportedly has turned the tables on the Americans who viewed the Africans as "primitives." The opera will be sung in English with projected English titles, but the Trickster's music will be more elaborate, with West African percussion, than the Americans'.

Opening Symposium

Mark S. Doss, a bass, will portray Cinque, who was said to give a spirited defense in his native tongue. "I never heard his eloquence surpassed, although uttered in words not understood," wrote Henry P. Hedges of Bridgehampton, a law student and historian who attended the district court trial.

Dennis Russell Davies will conduct the opera, which also stars Mark Baker, Eugene Perry, Stephen West, and Kimberly Jones.

The day the opera opens, there will be an all-day symposium, with Amistad scholars, the composer, and Thulani Davis, the opera's librettist and the composer's cousin. The Lyric Opera of Chicago, which commissioned the work, also plans to host student performances of "Amistad" and to provide Chicago schools with an Amistad curriculum, including visiting lecturers and artists and a sourcebook on the opera, and a benefit in January will commemorate Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday.

The legacy goes on.