These incidents, in the aggregate, merely make one nervous about Oja’s ability to evaluate Anderson’s Met debut. But the moment she starts to attempt that, it becomes clear that her purpose is to reclassify that event as, really, an example of inclusion by ghettoization. She begins by asserting that Ballo was “seldom performed at the time.” That’s just not true, and the only motive I can imagine for the claim is to make it appear that the Met was going out of its way to mount an obscure piece that contained a character of color. (Ballo was returning to the Met repertory after an absence of a few years.) Much more important, though, is Oja’s confusion among the functions and attitudes of stage characters, the “message” of a given stage work, and the presumed biases of creators and audiences. The problems center around two characters, the Judge in the opening scene, and Ulrica herself.

Oja is under the impression that in 1955 the Met was performing Ballo in its Boston setting. But this production was a revival of one that had been premiered in 1940. It made a point of reverting to the originally intended Stockholm venue, and the sets and costumes studiously reflected that, as well as the stipulated period (1792, the date of the historical Gustavus’ assassination). Admittedly, it can be confusing. Verdi and his librettist, Antonio Somma, had searched for a time and place that would allow for the already-completed score to play out its drama for their audiences after censors had nixed Sweden and the idea of a royal protagonist. Verdi still wanted a Northern setting, and one that would allow for the elegance and playfulness of the Swedish court of Gustavus, modeled on the French royal court. They chose Colonial Boston in the late Eighteenth Century and turned Gustavus, King of Sweden, into Richard (“Riccardo”), Count of Warwick and Governor “of the Northeastern states,” as their aristocratic but non-royal protagonist. They no more cared about a historically accurate Boston than Bertolt Brecht cared about a historically accurate Chicago or Florida. They simply needed a suitably remote location (preferably non-Continental, considering the ubiquity of censorship) with an otherness, a touch of exotica, to it. New England seems ridiculous to us as a setting for a Verdi opera precisely because for us it lacks those qualities, but in a way the sheer goofiness of it accomplishes something of the same purpose. The Boston version became the standard one, and although the Met’s 1940 production looked Swedish, self-identified as such, and eliminated Anglo-American references, it retained all the  character names—Riccardo, Renato, Silvano, Sam, and Tom—familiar from the American setting.^(I) It also retained the established notion of Ulrica as a woman of color, rather than as the “Mlle. Arfvidsson” of the Swedish version.