A nightmare at the opera

I must admit, I'm not a big opera buff. 

Oh, when I do happen to hear opera, I like it just fine. It's just that I rarely if ever seek it out.

I think I've only seen an opera once. I was in high school, and we bussed into Boston one afternoon for either La Bohème or La Traviata. One of those operas where the woman dies of consumption. I just can't recall whether it was Mimi or Violetta. 

Most of what I recall of that day is that we were one of the few high school groups there, and that the grammar school kids in the audience were completely running amok, screaming up and down the aisles and blowing on their Good 'n Plenty boxes as if they were horns. 

I also recall that Mimi and Rodolfo - or was it Violetta and Alfredo - were cracking up on stage at the mayhem in the audience.

And that was my one and only in person opera experience, unless one of the handful of performances I remember as ballet was actually an opera. 

But I know enough about opera to know that the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts are a Saturday staple on NPR. This year's season is kicking off soon. 

The Met's Saturday afternoon broadcasts are slated to begin on Dec. 9 and run through June 2024. The Met has been broadcasting productions from its house since 1931; currently, the broadcasts are heard in 35 countries worldwide, including via 600 stations in the U.S. (Source: NPR)

But one North Carolina radio station, WCPE, doesn't approve of much of what's on the agenda. The show might go on in NYC, but in Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, station management won't be broadcasting six operas because of their content. 

WCPE's protest comes at a time when the Metropolitan Opera is eager to showcase its commitment to recently written operas and works from outside the traditional canon of music written by white men. Three of the operas that WCPE plans to reject in the 2023-24 season were written by Black or Mexican composers. This past April, WCPE also refused to broadcast another Met-produced opera written by a Black composer that included LGBTQ themes....Most of WCPE's objections relate to depictions of violence or the presence of LGBTQ subject material; in another instance, [founder and general manager Deborah[ Proctor objects to a composer's "non-biblical" meditation on the birth of Jesus.

While it's somewhat surprising that an NPR station, especially one in a pocket of liberalism like Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, would object to edgy content, it turns out that this NPR station hasn't used any NPR news for a decade, presumably because it's a bit too liberal to their taste. So there's that.

One of the operas that Proctor objects to is Dead Man Walking, which is based on Sister Helen Prejean's book about Louisiana's death row. First performed in the year 2000, Dead Man the opera is "reportedly the most performed opera written in the 21st century."

Proctor terms it a "shock opera" that may not stand "the test of time."

In its current Met production, Dead Man Walking opens with a graphic depiction of rape and the murders of two teenagers and concludes with another vividly depicted death; as with some of its other offerings, the Met uses a content warning about the work.

Hmmm. I'm no opera expert, but isn't there a lot of violence (often against women) in a lot of operas.

Ah, but that's different. I guess.

In her conversation with NPR, Proctor contrasted Dead Man Walking with other, much older operas in which sexual violence, rape, suicide and murder are major plot points. Dead Man Walking, she argued, is based on a true story, while other operas that are canonical repertoire but violent as well, are fictional and therefore less potentially traumatizing. Such operas — all scheduled as part of the Met's 2023-24 broadcast season, and all of which Proctor still plans to broadcast — include Bizet's Carmen and Gounod's Roméo et Juliette, as well as Puccini's Turandot and Madama Butterfly.

Oh, I see. Violence that's canonical and fictional isn't traumatizing, but violence that's current and real-life isn't.

Proctor also objects to The Hours because there's a suicide in it. (C.f., Madama Butterfly. But I guess that's canonical and fictional, while The Hours is fictional and noncanonical. I guess The Hours is a baddy because it's based on the life of Virginia Woolf, a real person, and thus traumatizing. Not to mention the Woolf was bi.)

Another problem she has is with vulgar language, which is not only present, but in English. (Fainting couch, please.) Please note that the Met blanks out the vulgar language in its broadcasts.

There's some pretty contorted reasoning going on there. 

In an interview with NPR:

Repeatedly, Proctor also appealed to the sensibilities of any children who might tune into her station or come across it online and said that her personal values were integral to her decision-making. Breaking into tears on the phone, Proctor said: "I have a moral decision to make here. What if one child hears this? When I stand before Jesus Christ on Judgement Day, what am I going to say?"

Children tuning into their local NPR station on a Saturday afternoon to listen to opera? Maybe the kids in Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill are different than the kids in any other American area, in that they're sitting in their house listening to the radio As opposed to running around a soccer pitch. Or sitting in their bedroom playing something on their tablets. As we used to say in the early days of texting, ROFLMAO.

And, if I'm not an expert on opera, I'm not an expert on Judgement Day, either. But while I may be proven wrong, I don't believe that Jesus Christ is going to be all that judgey about Deborah Proctor enabling an opera-listening child to hear something more appropriate for a mature audience. 

But if he were going to go full bore judgmental, why wouldn't that apply to a child's witnessing Jose killing Carmen, or Butterfly killing herself?

And every day there are roughly 150,000 deaths worldwide. Won't Jesus Christ be too busy to focus on the minutia of Met broadcasts?

Maybe Deborah Proctor knows her audience. She claims they support her decision, and they may well. But objecting to operas for their adult themes and violence, their blanked out strong language, is pretty hypocritical. Why not just say that her supporters don't want to listen to anything modern, anything challenging, anything new, anything not written by a long-dead Italian, German, or Frenchman. 

Who knew that the opera was going to be yet another focus of the culture war? What a ridiculous nightmare.