‘Otello’ Unmoored

What should have been a feast of pure aesthetics, however, quickly shrank to just one detail that has dominated discussion: For the first time since Otello entered the Met’s repertoire in 1891, the tenor singing the title role did not appear in “blackface,” the catch-all theatrical term for any kind of makeup used to darken a performer’s complexion (see “P.C. at the Met” August 24, 2015). The Met’s embattled general manager, Peter Gelb, announced this decision over two months before the premiere, attracting oodles of casual praise hardly more courageous than the millionth retweet of “Je suis Charlie.”

Gelb’s decision was, by all accounts, precipitous. Met promotional materials, including its website and mass-mailed season calendar, carried photos of the production’s star, the serviceable Latvian tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko, made up in a brownish hue to suggest the character’s North African origins. But all that disappeared when he made his thunderous entrance as the Met’s first white Moor of Venice.

Does the decision matter artistically? Of course not. Any true opera aficionado will go out of his way to tell you that the art form’s power lies in emotional rather than literal truth. If it were about literal truth, the convoluted plots and logical leaps of so many treasured works would fail any test.

What we most care about is Otello and Desdemona’s pure love running afoul of Otello’s easily provoked jealousy, not the color of the singer portraying him. No one, after all, ever quailed at the sight of African American singers appearing without wearing white makeup. Jessye Norman’s iconic Sieglinde in Die Walküre proved no less effective, even when she appeared opposite white tenors singing the role of her character’s identical twin brother. White sopranos singing the leads in Met revivals of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and Turandot have looked progressively less Asian over the years without provoking comment. 

In Verdi’s opera, the racial issue registers far less noticeably than in Shakespeare’s play, appearing in passing on two occasions. The first is in an exchange during Otello and Desdemona’s love scene at the end of the first act. The second appears in a solo line that Otello utters in self-pity, wondering whether his race—and age—have driven his bride to her supposed infidelity. 

The Met’s subtitle system has long sanitized even these minor lines, translating “my darknesses” (“mie tenebre”) metaphorically as “my shadowed life” and rendering “obscure temples” (“tempie oscure”) as simply “face.” It also alters his triumphant first lines, “Rejoice! Muslim pride lies buried in the sea!” (“Esultate! L’orgoglio musulmano sepolto è in mar”) by replacing “Muslim pride” with the more anodyne “Turkish fleet.”

But if race really doesn’t matter, then why is ditching blackface such an issue? (“Who gives a s—?” one famous critic asked me on the day of the premiere.) Is it just another example of political correctness run amok? Is it an infantilizing insult to a sophisticated audience now presumed incapable of distinguishing the highest reaches of the Italian repertoire from a deliberately offensive minstrel show of three generations ago?

In our age of relentless hypersensitivity, facile “trigger warnings,” and quasi-Maoist “sensitivity training,” Peter Gelb’s decision has one salient characteristic: He made it himself with no apparent suggestion or pressure from anyone else. There was no protest outside the opera house, no smug social media campaign littering cyberspace with platitudinous hashtags, no moving plea from the NAACP. When Otello last appeared on the Met stage, in 2012, no one minded or cared that the production’s leading tenor was “blacked up.”

But like the various Internet retailers, flag manufacturers, and video-game companies who voluntarily removed the Confederate battle flag from their products after the shooting in Charleston, Gelb has added the nation’s most venerable cultural institution to the rapidly expanding self-censorship club. The PC mavens could hardly have asked for a more stunning success, and they did not have to say a word or lift a finger.

Gelb’s reasons may, perhaps, be understandable. The Met has suffered some political tension over the past couple of seasons. The opening night of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin in 2013 was marred by a protest from patrons who objected to superstar soprano Anna Netrebko and conductor Valery Gergiev’s closeness to Vladimir Putin and, by proxy, his regime’s anti-gay laws. Last season, Jewish groups assailed Gelb for staging John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer, which features antisemitic terrorist characters depicted in what some observers felt was a sympathetic way. 

At the same time, the Met’s general manager has had to deal with a perfect storm of falling attendance, truculent labor unrest, and ineffective campaigns to make his company more “accessible.” And on the eve of the opening, New York’s Gilbert and Sullivan Players canceled its planned production of The Mikado after an (obviously related) outcry about racial stereotypes that its largely white cast threatened to perpetuate. Now that the PC crowd has succeeded in assigning financial consequences to breaches of its fluid mores, Gelb undoubtedly desired to escape accusations of thought crime.

So why should he stop at race? In an era when “fat shaming” is tantamount to crime, we may soon see thin Falstaffs in productions of Verdi’s next Shakespearean opera. Pervasive railing against ageism, now legally actionable in many work contexts, could sweep away depictions of old age to leave us with youthful Grand Inquisitors, a visual meme that should make the Torquemadas of Title IX swell with pride.

It is a terrible shame that their victory overshadows the plaudits Sonya Yoncheva so richly deserves. But at least the high arts are now under control.

Paul du Quenoy is associate professor of history at the American University of Beirut.