In August, the Metropolitan Opera announced that the 2015-2016 season performances of Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello would not feature the traditional presentation of the lead tenor in blackface. New York Times reporter Michael Cooper called the announcement a “seismic shift” and wrote that opera houses’ continual use of blackface is likely “more surprising to many people than that the practice is now being ended by the Met.” Yet seemingly without regard for cultural backlash, the Met’s 2013 Otello revival featured blackface. For an audience of modern sensibilities, Cooper claimed that “an Otello in blackface is likely to register somewhere on a scale of awkward to offensive.”
That Otello is far from the only offender, and that blackface is far from the only race-related complaint, speaks to opera’s status in modern society. For more than a century, opera has remained under the purview of the rich. Its elitist underpinnings, coupled with the irrealist nature of the art itself, perpetuate the posh stigma that guards it against adapting to contemporary sensibilities. Today, even to remark that you have gone “to the opera” is to shoulder an albatross of pretension regardless of your socioeconomic status. In the era of salient inequality and identity politics, the opera must adapt in order to attract new fans that appreciate its content as opposed to its status.
Opera’s Special Status
At least part of opera’s unique status—in which it is excused from the political standards of other performance arts like musical theatre, drama, and cinema—stems from its designation as a “highbrow” cultural art form. Contemporary scholars agree that opera was a popular art form in the United States until the mid-to late-19th century. After that time, social elites “classified” opera through practices like preventing English translations, building extravagant opera houses, and instituting lavish dress codes.
History aside, the nature of operatic performance does little to distance the audience from the performance. The malformed realism of the opera—what writer Will Self describes as “irrealism”—encourages viewers to engage with the content complacently and uncritically, with little concern for its relevance to real life. On the whole, such an audience demands little change, which provides little incentive for opera to reevaluate racially insensitive traditions and to attract a new audience. In a Guardian review of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny’s 2015 run at the Royal Opera House, Self reconciled that opera’s Marxist social commentary with the wealthy “apparatus” that Brecht himself claimed had turned opera into a commodity for the moneyed. Mahagonny satirizes consumerism, yet operagoers consume it without self-awareness. Self claims that “it’s precisely because of opera’s incredible form that [Brecht] can relax into its irrealism—whereas other dramatic modes trouble [him] with their malformed naturalism. Brecht seemed to understand this when he wrote: ‘A dying man is real. But if he sings at the same time the sphere of irrationality is attained.’”
Opera, so performed, distracts but does not provoke, and that could be its downfall. According to Self, no Brechtian innovations, outreach programs, live transmissions at the multiplex, education about the art, or other attempts at population can rescue opera from “the preserve of the rich.”
The Opera Fights Back
The Met is fighting to survive the wounds this stigma has inflicted, and in some ways it is succeeding. However, the Met’s prospects of long-term success are more questionable, and unless it adapts, it could deplete its already dying fan base. Local opera houses have shut down, ticket sales have dropped, and the Met is running a multimillion-dollar deficit. As Anthony Tomassini writes in a 2013 New York Times article, most people who attend the Met’s HD live-streamed performances in movie theaters are already opera fans.
Although the success of HD streaming could mitigate the drop in attendance, whether it can attract new fans is unclear. Tomassini argues that opera broadcast in a movie theater is an “alternative opera experience” because camerawork and directing is impossible on the stage and a film’s acoustics are manufactured. Although more people are experiencing opera than ever before, they do not experience the art as it was meant to be experienced originally. The Met’s success in attracting crowds— at least to the multiplex—is a kind of victory for opera houses like the Met, but certainly not for opera.
Meanwhile, in cultural discourse, perceptions of the opera as posh remain, despite industry efforts to overcome the stigma. In a Guardian article, Alexandra Wilson blames media rhetoric for opera’s elitist stigma, which she claims is far removed from the audience’s experience at the opera. Wilson argues that “changing the conversation” about opera is necessary.
But mere discourse does not lie at the heart of the matter: real issues of inequality and access persist. At the Met’s opening night, lavishly attired celebrities prance down a red carpet and disappear into Lincoln Center for the evening. Although the Met has begun simulcasting its opening night performance in Times Square and sometimes outside Lincoln Center, the contrast between the two gatherings exacerbates opera’s classist undertones. The Met, not the media, controls this part of public perception. Moreover, the experience of those outside Lincoln Center is far removed from the experience of those inside. Instead of expanding the purview of opera appreciation, the company’s efforts further reinforce boundaries between those who can afford a ticket and those who cannot.
A Way Forward?
Opera can determine its own fate, and it might have already. Writing for The Guardian, disillusioned opera fan Robert Thickness dismisses the claim that opera was intended as mass entertainment and argues instead that opera “was created in the late 16th century as entertainment for the rich, and for most of its history has remained just that.” Like Self, Thickness vividly condemns opera as “an affair where the supposed main event is actually a sideshow to a rigmarole of Issey Miyake shawls, mudcaked mules, champagne and salmon on the lawn.” But the most poignant thing Thickness says about the art is this: “The worst advertisement for opera, the worst publicity for opera, is opera.” As long as opera carries an elitist stigma, it will struggle to find new fans. The special treatment it has received regarding race is a quickly expiring privilege. The opera has tried and mostly failed to adapt.
Although it is tempting to blame the fundamental lack of critical distance between the audience and the performance for opera’s inability to shake its stigma, this explanation does not account for opera’s middle and lower-class fans. Many devoted fans do not watch and listen to opera to accumulate social capital, but rather because they love bel canto. Opera must offer more avenues of access for these fans by lowering ticket prices, ending unnecessary extravagances like opening night fashion shows, and reforming age-old but offensive traditions. Attracting a new, diverse group of fans of the art itself, rather than the experience of consuming it, is the only way the opera can survive in the modern age.
Image credit: Flickr/Pank Seelen