Politicizing the Opera

The ongoing effort by the left to politicize every aspect of American culture was even visible during 2023’s programming at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera, the nation’s leading opera company.

While offering audience-pleasing classics by composers like Mozart, Puccini, and Wagner (with the opening performance of the latter’s Tannhauser repeatedly disrupted by a group of climate protestors), the Met also included on its schedule “The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” “Dead Man Walking” (based on a book and film tracing a nun’s “spiritual guidance” to a convicted murderer, and her unsuccessful effort to have his death sentence commuted), and “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” derived from a memoir by New York Times columnist Charles Blow recounting his sexual abuse at the hands of his cousin, culminating in his decision not to seek revenge.

But not even the classics are immune from politicization. At the start of last year, the Met debuted a new production of one of the most beloved 19th-century operas, George Bizet’s “Carmen,” which portrays the tragedy of a strong-willed gypsy woman finally killed by her jealous lover.

The Met proclaims that its production aims at “reinvigorating” the story by transposing it from a cigarette factory in Seville two centuries ago to today’s American border with Mexico. The customary, gorgeous gypsy costumes of the traditional setting are replaced by the new Carmen’s tiny cutoff jeans and turquoise cowboy boots.

The border is represented by a chain-link fence, while the tavern used by bandits in the original is replaced by a tractor-trailer lying on its side after a crash. In place of the original opera’s bullfighters, three pickup trucks are added, full of men waving automatic weapons presumably being smuggled across the border after being stolen from a gun factory.

Romantic Spanish flourishes like flamenco dancing and a bullfight arena are supplanted by a rodeo setting. Carmen and her lover meet around a pair of gas pumps.

The new production’s director, Carrie Cracknell, is known (according to Wall Street Journal critic Heidi Waleson) for not only “modernizing” classic texts but giving them a “feminist tinge.” (She describes her directorial approach as “looking [at the world] through a feminist lens.”) Her goal in this production, Cracknell explains, was to “find [Carmen’s] relevance to contemporary concerns.”

Instead of the escapism that “Carmen” offered nineteenth-century as well as contemporary audiences through its exotic setting, Cracknell seems to have thought that operagoers would benefit more from being reminded of controversies over the border and gun control, as well as its locale in “flyover” country, as Woolfe puts it, “the part of the country that fascinates the operating elite as much as Seville fascinated 19th-century Paris.” (That seems highly doubtful.)

To add to the feminist touch, Cracknell replaces the stabbing of Carmen by her lover with his bashing her with a baseball bat they have been struggling over. As Zachary Woolfe notes in a review for The New York Times, “a security guard walks by during Carmen’s final confrontation with her lover [but] doesn’t intervene.” And at the end, women sitting in the rodeo bleachers “rise in solidarity” with their fallen comrade, while the men remain seated. Sisterhood is powerful.

But have Cracknell and the Met really read contemporary opera audiences’ sensibilities correctly? Do couples typically say to each other, “Why don’t we go see an opera portraying the world through a feminist lens and also remind ourselves of controversies over gun control and open borders?” And if classic music, art, or literature really need to be updated to make them “relevant” to us, why do we need them at all? Just turn on a cable station of your choosing to find out more about those issues than any opera could teach you.

The entire notion that a work of art can’t be “relevant” to us unless it is updated and politicized rests on a denial that there are any permanent human problems – love, war, passions like jealousy, longing, envy, and righteous indignation – that transcend the limits of time and place, class, and sex.

Great art can never solve any such problems. Nor can any political act make them disappear. But granted that people have legitimate reasons for engaging in political activities aimed at alleviating societal problems, aren’t human beings entitled to some time away from the “issues” of their time, to have their souls moved through great works of music, art, theater, and literature that depict in a beautifying way the thrills and sadness to which all of us are exposed? If ideology and activism must permeate every aspect of our lives, how can we ever be friends with our fellow citizens, aside from those few who agree with us on everything?

A few years ago, my wife and I, lovers of Shakespeare, stopped attending performances of his plays because it seemed impossible to find a production that aimed to fulfill his vision, rather than portraying it through the director’s ideological “lenses.”

For instance, because King Lear goes mad in the eponymous tragedy, the last performance we saw had all the characters dressed in doctors’ and nurses’ outfits, stethoscopes aplenty, since the entire performance was set in a mental hospital. Another time, when we took our then-young teenage granddaughter to one of the comedies, we thought it necessary to explain to her – unnecessarily, it turned out – that sadomasochism, including the imprisonment of a woman in a constricting cage, wasn’t really part of the plot.

With classic theater collapsing and art museums required to post messages alongside their paintings explaining the artist’s connection to slavery or some other social ill, will opera be the next art form to fall?

David Lewis Schaefer is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at College of the Holy Cross.