In 1995, Seattle Opera experienced a minor crisis when patrons found its production of Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen too risqué. The Seattle Times published a series of impassioned letters to the editor that seem to anticipate modern social media fury.
‘This Carmen exudes violence and vulgarity,’ wrote one reader. ‘I would be ashamed to take my mother, and afraid to take my child.’ Another reader fumed: ‘Tasteful? I should say not! It was repulsive! Let’s keep everything in its place, and leave the operas the way the composers intended.’
Critics defended the production, which director Keith Warner set in 1950s Spain. But when Seattle Opera staged Bizet’s opera again earlier this year, visitors to its website were met with a warning label of sorts: a PG-13 rating, which in the US system of movie ratings signifies that ‘some material may be inappropriate for children under 13’. The stated reasons for the rating included a sexually explicit staging, violence against women, and cigarette smoking.
Opera companies are adding movie-style content ratings
In an attempt to shield their productions from complaining parents (or donors), a handful of American opera companies have added movie-style content ratings to their websites. ‘We don’t want audiences to be taken unawares by either some content or style of production,’ said Marc A Scorca, president and CEO of Opera America, a service organisation for the opera field.
A Dallas Opera production of Mozart’s great opera Don Giovanni recently drew an R rating – for ‘restricted’ – in accordance with the title character’s predatory behaviour towards women. English National Opera offers a softer ‘suggested age guidance’: for ages 11 and upwards.
But just as America’s film ratings system has been historically criticised for allegedly promoting self-censorship, some opera-watchers question whether the movie-style ratings are the tip of a larger, more troubling tendency. They argue that there is a growing willingness to tinker with librettos that not only contain risqué material but also carry vestiges of 18th- and 19th-century racism and misogyny.
'Sex has always been part of opera'
‘It’s very strange,’ said University of Kansas musicologist Martin Nedbal, who is author of the book Morality and Viennese Opera in the Age of Mozart and Beethoven. ‘Things such as sex in opera have always been part of the art form, and it has always been a major attraction of musical theatre in general. [But] there’s a big contradiction between trying to make it as tame as possible and, at the same time, attract as many different kinds of audiences as possible.’
In a related development, a South Dakota company called Tasteful Titles supplies sanitised versions of opera and choral music texts to performers. For Carmina Burana, Carl Orff’s famous cantata based on profane medieval verses, it claims to provide toned-down translations of racy passages like ‘Si puer cum puellula’ (If a boy with a girl). Clients have included the Cleveland Orchestra and the Indianapolis Symphony, the latter of which also used the company’s translation of Mozart’s The Magic Flute.
'A bawdy libretto is kind of the whole point'
Tasteful Titles’s representatives did not respond to requests for comment. Last year, co-founder Katherine Peterson described its approach to Carmina Burana to the Sioux Falls Argus Leader. ‘It was a matter of knowing what was said,’ she said, ‘and then searching in the English language for another way of expressing that same idea, but maybe not quite as earthily as the early century singers had done.’ Twitter users quickly chimed in. ‘Maybe it’s just me, but a bawdy libretto is kind of the whole point of Carmina Burana,’ quipped Brian Lauritzen, a host and producer at Classical KUSC in Los Angeles.
Nedbal contends that the same companies that tout their faithfulness to period instruments
and musical authenticity believe ‘the text does not matter as much, and it is OK to tamper
with it, especially when such tampering produces a conveniently sanitised product.’
He cites The Magic Flute as a perennial challenge for opera producers. For many opera-goers, Mozart’s late masterpiece is an enchanting fairytale about princes and princesses, a bird catcher and a damsel in distress.
Casual sexism, racial caricatures, white male privilege
But a closer reading of the libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder presents a lengthy inventory of casual sexism, racial caricatures and white male privilege. The most offensive character, Monostatos – a ‘wicked Moor’ – sings a second-act aria about a black man’s lust for a white woman. At times, the racist lines are expunged, though some companies keep the original German and rewrite the supertitles. ‘There are certainly good reasons for directors to want to change that, but to some extent, it’s censorship because it suppresses the original text of the work,’ said Nedbal.
Another, perhaps preferable solution, he says, involves casting Monostatos as a grotesque rather than the outdated practice of blackface. ‘It fits because the opera is so magical to begin with. Instead of a black man they turn him into some sort of a bizarre creature.’ A 2019 Glyndebourne Festival production presented Monostatos as a 19th-century hotel worker who carries coal to feed the furnace, his face covered in soot. The text was unchanged.
Other companies have taken greater licence with problematic librettos. Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio, about a comic abduction from a Turkish harem of two European women by their boyfriends, was reimagined in a 2018 Canadian Opera Company production. Among other changes, Lebanese-Canadian writer Wajdi Mouawad introduced new spoken dialogue to highlight the European characters’ xenophobia.
'You need to dial it back a bit'
Last April, a co-production of Puccini’s Madam Butterfly by Los Angeles’s Pacific Opera Project and Houston’s Opera in the Heights had the American characters sing in English and the Japanese sing in Japanese. The switch from the original Italian was intended to highlight cultural barriers in the Orientalist story of a Japanese geisha who is jilted by an American naval officer.
Yet what plays in Los Angeles or Glyndebourne may not succeed in other markets. Dallas Opera gives its Magic Flute a PG-13 rating because of both the libretto and production elements, according to Carrie Ellen Adamian, the company’s director of marketing and ticket sales. The company must be alert to matters like suggestive choreography, in case parents bringing their children are hoping for a wholesome afternoon at the matinee.
‘We have a more conservative crowd than you would in New York or Chicago or San Francisco,’ says Adamian. ‘They are very appreciative that we take the time and effort to rate operas according to the standards of artistic integrity, and to make sure we’re not offending anyone.’
This presents challenges when productions are imported from other houses, however. ‘Our general director and artistic team have had to go to the creative team and say, “You need to dial it back a bit for this market”.’
Even Mozart had to be careful around the censors
Opera has never been isolated from the grubby compromises of show business. From early on, composers and librettists were forced to comply with the agendas of government officials and theatre owners. Vienna established an official system of theatre censorship in 1770 under Emperor Joseph II and, as Nedbal notes, Mozart and his librettist Da Ponte often had to curb their creative instincts (or switch to a foreign language like Italian) in order to avoid bans.
Nineteenth-century Italy was particularly fraught. Censors compelled the heroine of Donizetti’s Maria Padilla to die of happiness – literally – rather than suicide, as originally indicated in the libretto. Before Rossini’s L’Italiana in Algeri got the green light, censors also applied their erasers to the aria, ‘Pensa alla patria’ (‘Think of your country’), in which the soprano rhapsodises about a unified Italy. Verdi and his librettists also changed aspects of Rigoletto, Un ballo in maschera and La forza del destino to comply with the authorities.
'Some works are of their time, and need to be put to rest'
Still, do ratings unduly force audiences to pre-judge a work? Might a composer or librettist think twice about a creative choice for fear that their opera might get slapped with an ‘R’ rating? And at the same time, how should companies proceed with canonic works that contain troubling material?
Marc Scorca of Opera America believes it comes down to astute directorial choices. ‘Are there some different ways of telling the stories of our inherited repertoire? Certainly. Can some of the stories be told in a way that creates greater agency for the victims, frequently women? Absolutely.’
And there are works ‘that are very much of their time, and perhaps need to be put to rest for a while’. Scorca points to once-popular operas by Giacomo Meyerbeer and Jules Massenet that are now rarely staged. ‘Our industry has cycled through repertoire preferences over the decades, and we will continue to do that. I certainly think that there is forever a process of examining the repertoire and figuring out what continues to have currency and what doesn’t.’
This article first appeared in the December 2019 issue of BBC Music Magazine