Anthony Davis Wins Pulitzer Prize For His Opera 'The Central Park Five'

Anthony Davis' opera The Central Park Five, with a libretto by Richard Wesley, has won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Music.

The Pulitzer jury cited The Central Park Five as "a courageous operatic work, marked by powerful vocal writing and sensitive orchestration, that skillfully transforms a notorious example of contemporary injustice into something empathetic and hopeful." The full opera was premiered last June at California's Long Beach Opera; it was reworked from an earlier piece, Five, which premiered in Newark at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in 2016.

The piece is a musical treatment of a still-raw, real-life subject: the 1989 convictions of five African-American and Latino teenagers of the rape and assault of a white woman, Trisha Meili, in Central Park that April.

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