I maintain that opera is ear-led, eye-confirmed. That means that while at the aspirational level all the verisimilitudes are attained and are only facets of a bonded whole, in this our vale of  very imperfect strivings that is rarely the case, and among the verisimilitudes, those of the ear have greater artistic value than those of the eye. Further yet, among the verisimilitudes of the eye, those of behavior have greater value than those of mere appearance. Beyond the underlying agon between priorities based on artistic merit vs. those of Diversity, the main tension created by inclusion initiatives in opera has to do with finding a compelling mix of the verisimilitudes, as prerequisite to our giving-over to unconditional theatrical belief. I’ll return briefly to skirmishes along this front below (and see the posts referenced in the preceding footnote). But perhaps a clearer illustration can be found in an earnest, unequivocal example of up-front defiance of the verisimilitudes and rejection of the principles—ethical and virtuous by its own lights, if not by mine.

Among the intrepid smaller companies we have in New York, one of the most prominent and critically endorsed of late has been Heartbeat Opera. I’d read and heard about this company, but had never seen its work until I accepted a social invitation to its adaptation of Beethoven’s Fidelio. It would, I was told, set the opera in a contemporary prison, and tell its story by way of Black Lives Matter advocacy. That was indeed the case. For a concise, accurate rundown on the outcome, consult Heather Mac Donald’s report, here. Trigger warning: her home base at present is City Journal, sponsored by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. She’s an outspoken antiwoke activist, who’s also written a book I’ll touch on in Part Two. Especially for readers who may shy away from a writer so credentialed, I urge her piece upon you for her take on the Heartbeat Fidelio, and even more for her pursuit of the distressing project, initiated by the previously sane Marin Alsop at the Baltimore Symphony and then metastasized to other sites, to woke up Schiller’s An die Freude in the finale of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. Mac Donald gives us the rewritten text of this repurposing—created by a local rapper who is, at least with respect to this assignment, talent-free—along with the efforts of other poetasters to conform the text to their parochial situations. I particularly like her observation that “Nobody would write Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ today. That is exactly why it should be performed intact.”^(I)

Mac Donald does not evaluate the performance itself or its effect—she’s not an opera critic, after all—and her account of the revisions, accurate as far as it goes, is not complete. So I’ll add some comment of my own. Heartbeat performed this score with a small instrumental ensemble (two pianos, two horns, two cellos, and an extensive battery of percussion), and without chorus. So obviously there was no overture, no insertion of Leonore No. 3, and no celebrative finale—the latter not only by reason of choral deficiency, but because the BLM scenario (Daniel Heard, adaptor and director) could not possibly conclude, as does the original, with rescue by a beneficent state and a well-positioned friend, with Pizarro as merely a rogue governor. So Don Fernando was MIA, and the elimination of the character of Jaquino meant not only that the Canon Quartet became a trio, but that the entire opening scene was redacted. The considerable trouble that Heartbeat went to to film in situ choirs from several correctional institutions for an onscreen Prisoners’ Chorus meant the rewriting of that number—the one most closely identified with a yearning for freedom—in order to add women’s voices to the all-male original. All the live characters are black, except for bad-guy Pizarro. The rescue-opera plot is bracketed by spoken monologues that have no parallel in the original libretto, to establish the premise of a BLM activist wife trying to penetrate the system on behalf of her imprisoned activist husband. With the dialogue in English but the musical numbers in German, the surtitles did not merely fudge inconveniences in the original, as most do, but baldly lied about what was being sung (big laugh when “Roc’s” announcement of the Königsnamensfest was proclaimed as “Martin Luther King Day”).