"To save opera, we have to let it die"
By Olivia Giovetti
Washington Post Opinion, 2019-08-19
Olivia Giovetti is a New York-based classical music writer.
The summer of 2019 has been a fraught one for opera. In June, diva soprano Anna Netrebko came under scrutiny not only for her use of skin-darkening makeup to sing the role of Verdi’s Ethiopian princess Aida but also for her blunt defense of a practice that has been widely discredited. This month, the legal battle between the Metropolitan Opera and its one-time music director James Levine — which began when the former fired the latter last year after accusations of sexual misconduct — quietly ended with a settlement. And last week, nine women accused superstar singer and conductor Plácido Domingo of sexual harassment over the past 30 years. (I previously worked for a consulting firm that did work on behalf of both singers.)
It would be hard to come up with three artists more famous and beloved. Netrebko and Domingo have especially transcended the insular world of opera to make names for themselves in popular culture. Despite the headlines, fans and colleagues have defended all three musicians. All are regarded as assets in an art form that has been considered to be “dying” for decades due to declining ticket sales and an aging audience.
But to really save opera — and classical music in general — we have to let it die.
Imagine if Hollywood were to issue shot-for-shot remakes
of D.W. Griffith’s gauzy history of the Ku Klux Klan,
“The Birth of a Nation ,” every few years.
Imagine Tom Hanks re-creating Mickey Rooney’s infamously slant-eyed Mr. Yunioshi in a new “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,”
or Morgan Freeman cast in a live-action remake of Disney’s “Song of the South.”
This is the reality of opera-house programming year after year.
[KH comment: No, it's not. The Griffith flick was explicitly racist, about the American Ku Klux Klan.
How many operas, if any, are about that subject?
Phony comparisons like this are the staple bread-and-butter of political correctness.
There may be some operas that can be viewed as containing racist material
(I don't know of any, but that doesn't prove that such don't exist).
However I am familiar with, at the very least, the operas of Handel.
Some do involve drama between Europeans and more exotic (to Europeans) people.
Consider, for example his 1736 opera Berenice, HWV 38.
Take a look at its plot.
It, like about all of the plots of Handel's operas,
involves a mixture of dynastic and romantic conflicts.
Where's the racism?
I doubt very seriously that there is any racism in Handel's operas.
So what's the problem?
For another example of a lovely opera which, so far as I can tell,
has ZERO racism in it,
see Handel's extremely enjoyable Deidamia, HWV 42: Now back to the Giovetti's complaining:]
It is an art form that, like Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens’s “Great Expectations,”
insists on wearing the same wedding dress every day for the rest of its life.
Only one of the 25 operas scheduled for the Metropolitan Opera’s 2019-2020 season, Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten,” was written in the past 50 years.
...
For another example, see
"Classical Opera Has a Racism Problem",
by one Katherine Hu, who, according to the article, is "a student at Yale",
featured on the Times website on 2019-12-19.
The point is that the editors of the Times are pushing this point of view.
If you do a web search on "classical opera has a racism problem"
you will find a number of articles claiming such.
Okay, sure some classical operas may have had plots which involved a degree of racism.
But as I noted in my discussion of Handel's operas above,
there are very many which do not.
So please do not tarnish the whole genre with the "sins" of a few instances of the genre.
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