The arts world was scandalized this past spring when the Washington National Opera announced that the sponsor of the production that would be opening its 2023-24 season was the General Dynamics Corporation, one of the world’s leading arms manufacturers. Things got all the hotter for the WNO when the schedule for the season showed it would feature the world premiere of Jeanine Tesori’s Grounded, an opera based on a play about a fighter pilot-turned-drone operator. The people who appropriate taxpayer money to buy Reaper drones had apparently given this corporation so much business that some of its leftover profits had been donated to the local Washington opera company to entertain them with a propaganda piece about the benefits of Reaper drones. Or so it was assumed.

The bad optics sent the Metropolitan Opera, which had commissioned the work and farmed it out to the WNO for an out-of-town tryout before a date opening the New York institution’s 2024-25 season next September, into a panic. The connection with General Dynamics led at least one left-wing think tank and the wags at New York magazine, which gave the opera a “despicable” tag in its weekly “Approval Matrix” of fashionable liberal opinion, to believe that it must be a pro-war (or at least pro-killing machine) opera. That led Met General Manager Peter Gelb and his D.C. counterpart to go into desperate spin mode, assuring their subscribers and potential critics that General Dynamics had no input into what would be staged. As the New York Times reported, they were at pains to point out that the only reason that the company gave $500,000 to the WNO was because its chairman had been an opera buff since childhood. The drone company funding a drone opera had been a coincidence.