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The epigraph of Anthony Davis\u2019s opera \u201cX: The Life and Times of Malcolm X\u201d<\/a> is a quote from an interview in which, asked about the cost of freedom, Malcolm responds, \u201cThe cost of freedom is death.\u201d<\/p>\n That tension \u2014 between hope and reality, between liberation and limitation \u2014 courses through a new production of \u201cX\u201d that opened at the Metropolitan Opera<\/a> on Friday, in the work\u2019s company premiere. This staging dreams of a better future, with a towering Afrofuturist spaceship that, at the beginning, appears to be calling Malcolm X home. But the beam-me-up rays of light are pulled away to reveal a floating proscenium, gilded at the edges and decorated with a landscape mural. It is a replica of the podium at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan, where he was assassinated on Feb. 21, 1965.<\/p>\n As an outlook it\u2019s unsettling, but true to Malcolm X. In his autobiography<\/a>, narrated to Alex Haley and posthumously published, he recounts the killing of his father and says: \u201cIt has always been my belief that I, too, will die by violence. I have done all that I can to be prepared.\u201d And since \u201cX\u201d premiered, in 1986, there has been only more violence, a fact lost neither on the work\u2019s creators<\/a> \u2014 Davis, following a story by his brother, Christopher Davis, and a libretto by their cousin Thulani Davis \u2014 nor on this production\u2019s director, Robert O\u2019Hara, who at times treats the surface of the spaceship as a memorial, projecting the names of Black victims onto it.<\/p>\n The list covers <\/span>decades \u2014 the Rev. George W. Lee, James Byrd Jr., Breonna Taylor, to mention just a few \u2014 and it\u2019s an unfamiliar sight at the Met, where complex, current political realities rarely make their way onstage. But \u201cX,\u201d Davis\u2019s first opera, has arrived there as part of a programming wave that inevitably speaks to contemporary life: After the murder of George Floyd, the Met announced that it would present its first work by a Black composer, Terence Blanchard\u2019s \u201cFire Shut Up in My Bones.\u201d<\/a> It wasn\u2019t long before \u201cX\u201d was in the pipeline, too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n