I wonder to what extent such radical confusions of theatrical credibility as those proposed by the Met and La Scala productions are influenced, on an if-you-can’t-lick’em-join’em principle, to forestall accusations of Western condescension and cultural appropriation. With Butterfly and Turandot about to rejoin the repertory, the NYT‘s chief music critic, Zachary Wolfe, wrote a sensible article on the complications of such complaints, perhaps in anticipation of their renewal (see the NYT, 4/7/24). In it, he noted some of the harebrained distortions to which opera companies are resorting to vouch themselves clean and feel permission to play and sing Puccini’s music. This season, the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players, who left their former venue at NYU’s Skirball Center in 2015 following an online furore over “yellowface” insults and “harms,” presented its production of The Mikado at the Kaye Playhouse with a cobbled-up Prologue, at a  level of prose well short of the Gilbertian, in which G&S and a couple of other interested parties try to explain how their fantasy Japan may be entertained without bruising tender contemporary sensibilities. Similar devices have been used elsewhere for similar predicaments.

So far as I am aware, neither Butterfly nor Turandot occasioned outcry this spring. But that doesn’t rid us of cultural discomforts with racial implications. And I hate rising to this point, because it will inevitably be wrongly interpreted as prejudicial. But: the casting of an African-American artist as Kate Pinkerton is an out-and-out impossibility. In fact, I’d say that Kate is the only character in the opera who cannot be so cast. We have had Cio-Cio-Sans of color (here in New York, I recall Camilla Williams and Martina Arroyo) and at least one Pinkerton, George Shirley. Their undoubted difficulties en route notwithstanding, they were received on their artistic merits. But Kate has no chance to display artistic merit. Nothing she sings, nothing she does, can overcome a lack of visual verisimilitude with the verisimilitudes of voice, language, style, or behavior. Her sole function is to act as a visual shock, the intrusion of the stereotypical “vera sposa Americana” Pinkerton has all along intended to marry.^(I) And it is inconceivable that around the turn of the last century, an officer in the American navy would have married a woman of color—it’s an obvious and deliberate contradiction of theatrical believability that undercuts the powerful emotional undertow of this entire scene.^(II) I hope the artist in question (Briana Hunter, listed as a mezzo-soprano) is given an opportunity to show what she can do. This wasn’t it.

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I have written often and at length about Carmen (see Opera as Opera, especially pp. 225-228, and n. 12 on p. 249, and note the sources cited therein), but this opera has not presented itself in this series before now, except in the form of one of its many adaptations, Carmen Jones (see the post of 8/24/18), and that of a recording of a concert performance led by Paul Paray (5/22/20). It has had a strong pull for me from first acquaintance, and not only because it’s one great opera. From the first glimmerings of my thesis concerning the E-19 protagonist couple’s redundant narrative as the principal generating force of our artform’s development over that crucial century-plus, Carmen has seemed to me a central piece of evidence, and something of what we now like to call an “inflection point.” Dramatically, it introduces an agonizing twist on the narrative: the couple’s bond holds the seed of its own destruction, and tragedy ensues not when one or both partners die in the struggle against antagonist forces, but when one partner kills the other. Musically, it brings an unprecedented depth and darkness to a tone that is predominantly one of brilliant, crowd-pleasing entertainment, and once past the dashed expectations of its first audience, has found no contradiction there. And there is one more layer. While the history of opera is studded with works derived from mythical sources and which take place either in a mythical world or else one wherein mythical figures and disputes govern and/or intrude into the “real” one (opera began that way, after all), there are only a few wherein a central character assumes a legendary status that itself verges on the mythical, and wherein mythical law, subliminally but quite clearly, guides the “real world” action. The subtitle of my old Carmen monograph was, in fact, Sexual Warfare Out of the Closet: The Conflict of Myths.^(III)