New York (AFP)

After a year and a half of the curtain drawn due to the coronavirus, the Metropolitan Opera in New York returned to the public on Monday evening for a historic first: a work composed by a black musician, trumpeter Terence Blanchard.

For the occasion, the opera "Fire shut up in my bones" was performed in the usual lair of the Met Opera, at Lincoln Center, but also broadcast on a giant screen, in a large open-air amphitheater. Harlem Park, where entry was free.

In 138 years of existence and despite great African-American composers in the United States like William Grant Still, the prestigious house had never performed one of their operas, unlike other stages in the country.

It's been done since Monday, with this contemporary work, with jazz and blues accents by Terence Blanchard, renowned trumpeter famous for having composed the soundtracks of many Spike Lee films.

The libretto, written by American filmmaker Kasi Lemmons, is based on the memoir of Charles Blow, a New York Times columnist who chronicles his coming of age as a black boy in the southern United States, struggling with racism, mistreatment and discovery of one's sexuality.

More than an hour before the performance, in the shade of the trees of Marcus Garvey Park, near 125th Street in Harlem, a long line had formed to show his vaccination card and then sit on the benches, in the amphitheater with 1,700 seats soon to be filled.

Before baritone Will Liverman sang the first notes, the orchestra, conducted by Yannick Nézét-Séguin, played the American anthem, applauded by a crowd standing at Lincoln Center and Harlem.

- "Never for an opera" -

"I've been here (for cultural events) before, but never for an opera," one of the spectators at the park, Mark Thomas, 60, told AFP.

"It's nice, it gives access (to the opera) to people who would not usually have access to it," added this accountant from the neighborhood, an elegant straw hat on his head.

At the end of 2019, the Metropolitan Opera announced that it was putting Terence Blanchard's opera, already performed in Saint-Louis, on its program, without specifying what place this work would take in its season.

A year and a half later, and after the George Floyd affair, "Fire shut up in my bones" is on the bill for the post-Covid reopening, an even more important symbol.

This "goes beyond me" told AFP the 59-year-old musician, awarded six times at the Grammy Awards and nominated for the Oscars, seeing it as a sign which "says more about what is happening in our country and in the art world ".

But for Linda Talton, a 54-year-old education consultant who lives in the Harlem neighborhood, "it should have happened a lot longer ago."

"It is a shame that he is only the first. We are in 2021. We should be ashamed, as a country", adds this woman, short hair dyed in blond, who says herself nevertheless "very happy" .

"Terence Blanchard is incredible, he is a legend, it is very beautiful that he honors this space", she said.

During the pandemic, the Met, the largest employer in the United States in the field of live entertainment with more than 3,000 employees, also had to face long social negotiations, against a background of wage cuts, to be able to resume.

An agreement was finally reached at the end of August: it provides for salary cuts for musicians, with management pledging to restore some of it when ticketing revenues reach 90% of the level before the pandemic. .

© 2021 AFP