As the country begins to emerge from shutdowns, a desire to relieve pandemic tedium and to reembrace life as we once knew it may be enough to get fans out to ballparks or rock concert venues this summer. These fans can be secure in the knowledge that what they will be getting will provide the same thrills as the performances they enjoyed before their options were confined to a choice between Netflix and Amazon Prime. But what of the niche audiences that fill the seats at classical music performances?
The demographics of those who attend symphony concerts and operas skew much older than those for other genres, making them likely to be more cautious about crowding together as they once did. But in addition to the worries about whether the already dwindling market for classical music and opera will be even more limited in the future, there is the question of what exactly they are going to be confronted with when they do return. Unfortunately, Opera Philadelphia’s recent mashup of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca offered a discouraging reminder of the lasting effects of both the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement. As one of the first post-COVID, live-audience opera performances in a major American venue, it was intended to be a celebration of the arts’ return, but what it provided instead was a disaster that raised questions about the future of the art form.
Tosca was famously dismissed by music critic Joseph Kerman as a “shabby little shocker.” But it has been part of the standard opera repertory because it is a satisfyingly sturdy melodrama. Unlike many operas that have provided fodder for directors who currently dominate the field with updating or symbolic interpretations of standards that can sometimes amount to vandalism, Tosca is impervious to such “creative destruction.” First conceived as a play that served as a vehicle for the 19th-century superstar actress Sarah Bernhardt, it is set on a specific date in history (June 15, 1800, the day after Napoleon won the Battle of Marengo) and in three specific venues in Rome. Love it or hate it, it has provided a platform for great singers for 121 years since its premiere in January 1900 and rarely disappoints.
Or, at least it did, until Opera Philadelphia decided to rethink it.
This Tosca was originally intended as an intact opera production with traditional staging for the Opera Philadelphia’s venerable Academy of Music theater. Transferring it to the Mann, Philadelphia’s outdoor music venue, in the city’s Fairmount Park as a way to welcome the arts back was a fine idea and allowed for social distancing. But faced with pandemic restrictions that also required no intermissions, the company commissioned a rewritten version of Puccini that would reduce the piece’s two hours of music to 90 minutes.
Rather than content itself with edits, the company reconceived it as The Drama of Tosca, in which the music was not only played out of order and with the dramatic ending eliminated, but also included a narrator. The result was a catastrophe.
Why, one might ask, provide narration in a story in which the music and lyrics explain everything? Well, it was a chance for those involved to demonstrate their contempt for their audience’s intelligence and promote diversity.
Providing more opportunities for minorities is a noble desire that has been a driving force in not just American politics and culture but also the arts in recent years. However, since the death of George Floyd brought the Black Lives Matter movement into mainstream public discourse, for the arts, it has become an obsession.
As Bethany Mandel noted earlier this year, the Metropolitan Opera, the country’s largest musical institution, hired a chief diversity officer to orchestrate its commitment to inclusion. This new expense was incurred at a time when it was also seeking to break the unions that represent its orchestra, chorus, and stagehands, so as to ensure the Met’s financial survival. Like most of the arts world in the wake of the moral panic set off by Floyd’s death, the Met had committed to hiring more conductors, composers, singers, and administrators of color. Indeed, so pervasive was the commitment to this concept that even the Met’s unions included more diversity among their demands even though doing so might arguably endanger their members’ jobs.
Additional measures were suggested from within and around the world of the arts. Anthony Tommasini, the New York Times’s chief classical music critic, last year demanded that orchestras cease the traditional, merit-based method of blind auditions for musicians. His stated goal was to increase the number of black musicians and performers to reduce the racial disparity, but the most likely outcome of his demand would be to reduce drastically the disproportionate number of Asian players who now dominate the ranks of many orchestras.
Egged on by prominent critics such as Tommasini, the arts continue to court such flawed “woke” reforms to such an extent that critical race theory notions about “privilege” are likely to dominate the question not only of what gets performed in the future but who gets to perform. This bracing obsession with BLM-style diversity is also notable since many opera companies in recent years have been making a point to produce more operas by African Americans, and to highlight their experiences, even before Floyd’s death. Among them was Opera Philadelphia, which over the course of the tenure of its current president, David Devan, has embraced the ideas of “creative destruction” and rebranding of the arts in the hope of creating a new audience.
Thus, it was little surprise that the narrator of Philadelphia’s version of Tosca would be prominent African American storyteller Charlotte Blake Alston. Alston, it should be emphasized, has a speaking voice that is as beautiful as that of many singers. But the narration, which was written for her by director Francesco Micheli, was less for the purposes of the opera than for the company to use its first post-pandemic production as an opportunity to genuflect to a certain kind of BLM-aligned leftist audience.
The entire existence of the narration was as off-putting as it was unnecessary. Her talking constantly interrupted the music, giving the impression that had her intrusions been eliminated, there would have been time to hear the entire score. She didn’t so much tell the story of a religious opera singer and a republican artist victimized by a royalist police chief as she made generic speeches about oppression. There were also foolish analogies to the mafia, which included Alston even speaking in a fake Italian accent (raising ironic issues of cultural appropriation).
When she paused for breath, there were moments of great singing from a first-rate cast, especially soprano Ana Maria Martinez in the title role and international star baritone Quinn Kelsey as the villain, Scarpia. But even then, Alston’s narrator did her best to steal the show, as she waved around props, sometimes gesturing with them in a comic manner. This not only second-guessed the composer’s famously adroit sense of timing and sapped the opera of its dramatic tension but made the abridged version seem longer than a Wagner “Ring” cycle.
Opera Philadelphia has drawn raves from the Times for some of its unorthodox pre-pandemic productions, as well as its embrace of video performances during the lockdown. In an era when classical music has little traction in popular culture, any attention can be positive, and the company has occasionally even achieved artistic success under Devan. But Devan’s notion that mashups such as this Tosca will save opera was given the lie by the dismal turnout for what should have been a much-anticipated return of the arts. Though only 500 seats of an outdoor venue that can accommodate as many as 11,000 people were put on sale, only a fraction of them were filled on Tosca’s opening night. Indeed, the parking lots for artists and staff seemed to have more cars in them than the one reserved for the audience.
Allegiance to woke notions about diversity may help Opera Philadelphia and other companies win grant money from liberal foundations. But a production that was not so much opera for dummies but one seemingly intended for those who don’t much like opera at all is not a prescription for building an audience, much less preserving the one that already exists. As with so much else, the influence of critical race theory on the arts is a permission slip for self-important “re-imaginings” that amount to travesties. This is not so much producing a more diverse revival of music or theater as it is a new bonfire of the vanities that threatens to destroy them.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS.org and a columnist for the New York Post. Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.
