Politicizing The Opera

The ongoing effort by the left to politicize every aspect of American culture was even visible during 2023’s programming at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera, the nation’s leading opera company.

While offering audience-pleasing classics by composers like Mozart, Puccini, and Wagner (with the opening performance of the latter’s Tannhauser repeatedly disrupted by a group of climate protestors), the Met also included on its schedule “The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” “Dead Man Walking” (based on a book and film tracing a nun’s “spiritual guidance” to a convicted murderer, and her unsuccessful effort to have his death sentence commuted), and “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” derived from a memoir by New York Times columnist Charles Blow recounting his sexual abuse at the hands of his cousin, culminating in his decision not to seek revenge.

But not even the classics are immune from politicization. At the start of last year, the Met debuted a new production of one of the most beloved 19th-century operas, George Bizet’s “Carmen,” which portrays the tragedy of a strong-willed gypsy woman finally killed by her jealous lover.

The Met proclaims that its production aims at “reinvigorating” the story by transposing it from a cigarette factory in Seville two centuries ago to today’s American border with Mexico. The customary, gorgeous gypsy costumes of the traditional setting are replaced by the new Carmen’s tiny cutoff jeans and turquoise cowboy boots.

The border is represented by a chain-link fence, while the tavern used by bandits in the original is replaced by a tractor-trailer lying on its side after a crash. In place of the original opera’s bullfighters, three pickup trucks are added, full of men waving automatic weapons presumably being smuggled across the border after being stolen from a gun factory.

Romantic Spanish flourishes like flamenco dancing and a bullfight arena are supplanted by a rodeo setting. Carmen and her lover meet around a pair of gas pumps.

The new production’s director, Carrie Cracknell, is known (according to Wall Street Journal critic Heidi Waleson) for not only “modernizing” classic texts but giving them a “feminist tinge.” (She describes her directorial approach as “looking [at the world] through a feminist lens.”) Her goal in this production, Cracknell explains, was to “find [Carmen’s] relevance to contemporary concerns.”

Instead of the escapism that “Carmen” offered nineteenth-century as well as contemporary audiences through its exotic setting, Cracknell seems to have thought that operagoers would benefit more from being reminded of controversies over the border and gun control, as well as its locale in “flyover” country, as Woolfe puts it, “the part of the country that fascinates the operating elite as much as Seville fascinated 19th-century Paris.” (That seems highly doubtful.)

To add to the feminist touch, Cracknell replaces the stabbing of Carmen by her lover with his bashing her with a baseball bat they have been struggling over. As Zachary Woolfe notes in a review for The New York Times, “a security guard walks by during Carmen’s final confrontation with her lover [but] doesn’t intervene.” And at the end, women sitting in the rodeo bleachers “rise in solidarity” with their fallen comrade, while the men remain seated. Sisterhood is powerful.

But have Cracknell and the Met really read contemporary opera audiences’ sensibilities correctly? Do couples typically say to each other, “Why don’t we go see an opera portraying the world through a feminist lens and also remind ourselves of controversies over gun control and open borders?” And if classic music, art, or literature really need to be updated to make them “relevant” to us, why do we need them at all? Just turn on a cable station of your choosing to find out more about those issues than any opera could teach you.

The entire notion that a work of art can’t be “relevant” to us unless it is updated and politicized rests on a denial that there are any permanent human problems – love, war, passions like jealousy, longing, envy, and righteous indignation – that transcend the limits of time and place, class, and sex.

Great art can never solve any such problems. Nor can any political act make them disappear. But granted that people have legitimate reasons for engaging in political activities aimed at alleviating societal problems, aren’t human beings entitled to some time away from the “issues” of their time, to have their souls moved through great works of music, art, theater, and literature that depict in a beautifying way the thrills and sadness to which all of us are exposed? If ideology and activism must permeate every aspect of our lives, how can we ever be friends with our fellow citizens, aside from those few who agree with us on everything?

A few years ago, my wife and I, lovers of Shakespeare, stopped attending performances of his plays because it seemed impossible to find a production that aimed to fulfill his vision, rather than portraying it through the director’s ideological “lenses.”

For instance, because King Lear goes mad in the eponymous tragedy, the last performance we saw had all the characters dressed in doctors’ and nurses’ outfits, stethoscopes aplenty, since the entire performance was set in a mental hospital. Another time, when we took our then-young teenage granddaughter to one of the comedies, we thought it necessary to explain to her – unnecessarily, it turned out – that sadomasochism, including the imprisonment of a woman in a constricting cage, wasn’t really part of the plot.

With classic theater collapsing and art museums required to post messages alongside their paintings explaining the artist’s connection to slavery or some other social ill, will opera be the next art form to fall?

David Lewis Schaefer is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at College of the Holy Cross.

Pitiful.

Carmen is quite feminist as it is, no matter it debuted in 1875. Carmen as a character is a VERY liberated woman. Absolutely modern - and self destructive in her compelling glamor.

Or maybe things in the 19th century weren’t quite as we imagine today. On the evidence of French arts (say, Zola, “Nana”) I would say so.

Elina Garanca may have done the definitive modern role - she can act too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2snTkaD64U

The sad part is that one COULD do a “modern” Carmen, very easily. And that is precisely because the original Carmen is very modern in its sensibility.

I may be going off the rails here, but a Hip Hop “hood” Carmen would definitively work. The parallels between Bizet’s exotic foreign demimonde and the American underclass (of various sorts, 1920’s-today) are striking.

Just last week I was directed to a production of Handel’s Messiah that was performed in Vienna few years ago.

Although Handel knew all about Opera, he chose to write “Messiah” as an Oratorio, which is performed without sets, scenery, costumes, or action. Nevertheless, the Singers “Act” as they express themselves through the Historically Correct Lyrics (taken from the KJV and Book of Common Prayer) which tell the story of the Birth, Death, Resurrection, and Coming Glory of Jesus Christ.

The Oratorio has survived nicely for nearly 300 years without sets and costumes.

But this Vienna Company just HAD to mess with it. The set is one long corridor from what looks like a 1940’s era office building, complete with a deaf cleaning lady.
“Comfort Ye My People” is sung by a competent Tenor at a FUNERAL, and the thing deteriorates from there on. “How Beautiful are the Feet of Him Who Brings Good News” is sung by a woman obsessing over her illicit lover’s FEET. Yuck! The whole thing was done in shades of black and grey, was very “political”, and was the most depressing experience of “Messiah” ever performed, in my humble opinion. I hesitate to provide the link, but if you are stout of heart and have no problem understanding that the emperor has no clothes, here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NgXggn91uY

Don’t say I didn’t warn you! Arrggghhhh!

To go a little deeper, the song Bizet stole from for his “Habanera” tune is also originally a “demimonde” fantasy.

This was originally a duet in “Habanera” style by the Spanish composer Iradier, from about 1860.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9l0e3M3Ek4c

“El Arreglito” - the little arrangement, which should give you a clue as to the subtext.

I cant provide this with English subtitles, as it is not a normal part of the modern “art song” repertoire, unlike Iradiers “Paloma”.

The subject is a fellow trying a pickup line, and succeeding, in the context of the Havana, Cuba, bar scene of the mid 19th century, quite notorious in the Hispanosphere at the time. In other words, it is loaded with demimonde glamor.

As such it works superbly for, say, a setting in a San Francisco fern bar of the 1980’s. Which scene I knew very, very well.

As for its antecedents, consider Mozarts “La ci darem la mano” from “Don Giovanni” (1787). That thing is an absolute classic pickup scene. The brilliant lyricist, Da Ponte, packed absolute mountain ranges of irony and hypocrisy and lubricious subtext into that, with a handful of words that outdoes Tom Wolfe at his best.

I stopped going to symphony and opera just because these modern “improvements”.

People, going to classical music performances are by nature conservative or al least respectful for traditions.

You can have your gangsta rap, but stop fiddling with my opera!

A lot of opera IS gangsta rap, but with beauty, literary quality (the words matter) and technical sophistication.

What, after all, is the message in, say, the Queen of the Night aria in De Zauberflote?

Consider “Die Fledermaus” “Herr Marquis” lyrics, and how they would work in a Taylor Swift song -

You’ll never see the charms
That you find here displayed.
You really must admit, in fact,
Your words were quite devoid of tact!
You’re amusing, ha, ha, ha,
You’re delightful, ha, ha, ha,
Can’t help laughing, ha, ha, ha,
Feeling spiteful, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha;
You’re amusing, ha, ha, ha,
You’re delightful, ha, ha, ha,
Can’t help laughing, ha, ha, ha,
Feeling spiteful, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha;
A comical mistake, Marquis.

I detest modern renditions or as the progressives say, reimagining of operas and classical Broadway plays!

I attended a performance of Camelot where a black male was cast in the role of Lancelot. The story is based on the medieval period of England, and it should conjure up that world otherwise what am I watching? I’ve experienced the same issue at opera performances.

DEI casting is destroying the whole connection with the Arts.

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