Immoral Decisions

Update, 10/6/23: WCPE announced via its website that, “After careful deliberation, due consideration, and hearing from our supporters, listeners and the public, The Classical Station has decided to broadcast the entire 2023-2024 season of New York Metropolitan Opera.”

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Last month, Berlin’s newly-nomadic Komische Oper opened its first season in exile with Hans Werner Henze’s “Das Floß der Medusa.” With the company’s theater scheduled for a multi-year renovation, director Tobias Kratzer turned Hangar 1 of the decommissioned Tempelhof Airport into a massive swimming pool, bookended by 1,600 seats. Based on the 1816 wreck of the Napoleonic warship “Méduse,” which spared the onboard nobility and officers but left nearly 150 enlisted men (and one woman) on a raft for dead, Henze’s secular 1968 oratorio was dedicated to Che Guevara and cited by musicologist Ernst Helmuth Flammer as the catalyst for a renewed debate on the relationship between music and politics. Reviewing the work’s 1969 recording for the New York Times, Theodore Strongin saw things differently: “It’s true that the record jacket bears the dedication, ‘For Che Guevara.’ But there’s very little else in the text or music to arouse political emotions, one way or another.” 

It must be a blessed feeling to listen to a work that deliberately and repeatedly vilifies class and capital (“Salvation is only for the pursers,” the oratorio’s hero, Jean-Charles, sings more than once), to hear the final scene punctuated by a timpani tapping out the rhythm to the ’68 rallying cry “Ho-Ho, Ho Chi Minh,” and not think about the laundry list of issues plaguing the world at the time of “Medusa”’s premiere. To see only a “vivid story of a shipwreck” and not the parallels between the brief, tense revival of the Ancien Régime and a contemporary era of oppression that culminated in the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. 

For Kratzer, it’s impossible to present Henze’s work as simply the story of a shipwreck. Not one to let the past dominate the present (even with frothier works like Johan Strauss II’s “Zigeunerbaron”), he goes even further with his staging of “Medusa.” You couldn’t watch the production without thinking of the multiple migrant shipwrecks that happened this year—especially in Tempelhof, a site that was itself a temporary home to asylum seekers at the height of the current refugee crisis. In an interview with the Times, Kratzer also links Henze’s raft to “every country which will remain inhabitable after the climate crisis.” The fights over food and water rations, staged in the 15-inch-deep pool of water, are visceral in their depiction of what happens to the vulnerable masses when resources are depleted by the handful of people in power. Kratzer deftly maps the present onto the past. 

Coincidentally, I saw “Das Floß der Medusa” last Thursday, just a few hours after a letter from North Carolina-based classical station WCPE began to make the rounds on social media. In it, station manager Deborah S. Proctor outlined her decision to omit seven of the Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday Matinee Broadcasts from the station’s lineup: Daniel Catán’s “Florencia en el Amazonas,” Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking,” Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” John Adams’s “El Niño,” and Kevin Puts’s “The Hours.”

“This coming season, the Metropolitan Opera has chosen several operas which are written in a non-classical music style, have adult themes and language, and are in English,” Proctor wrote to WCPE members. “I feel they aren’t suitable for broadcast on our station.” She cited the murders and rape that open “Dead Man Walking” (based on Sister Helen Prejean’s memoir of the same title) as reason for omitting the work, which is among the most performed operas written this century. “X,” “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” and “The Hours” were all deemed “not suitable for a general audience,” owing to “adult themes,” “offensive language,” and, in the case of “The Hours,” several references to (and one act of) suicide. Adams’s “El Niño” was censured for depicting a Biblical story using non-Biblical sources. Speaking with NPR, Proctor called the letter and the station’s programming choices “a moral decision.” 

This is not a new debate. Beverly Sills, whose run as director of New York City Opera included the world premiere of “X” in 1986, recalled the programming choice in her 1987 memoir as being “highly controversial…on the grounds that there were periods in his life when Malcolm X had been an immoral man as well as anti-Semitic.” She anticipated Proctor’s objections by nearly four decades when she wrote, “If I wanted to suppress immorality, I would stop presenting ‘Rigoletto,’ which is about a pimp and a rapist, and ‘La Traviata,’ which is about a whore—no matter how well paid, that’s what she was.” (The instinctive clench you felt while reading that last sentence is the friction of the present mapping itself onto the past. Not even Beverly Sills was perfect.) 

In her NPR interview, however, Proctor (whom VAN was unable to reach for comment, despite several attempts) argues that the difference between airing a work like “Dead Man Walking” and an opera like “Tosca,” a 1988 performance of which was the first Met broadcast that WCPE aired, was that the former was based on a true story, while the canonical works that have been the bedrock of the Met’s programming for the last half century were not. 

It must be a blessed feeling to listen to “Tosca,” a work about the abuse of power and female autonomy and agency, and not think about the truth in the story, both in the era it’s set and today. To not worry about the moral implications of the first act finale, which culminates with one character declaring that Tosca “makes [him] forget God.” To see “Vissi d’arte” as a tender paean to art and love and not see the parallels between Tosca’s own dawning realization that she cannot use opera as an ostrich hole to ignore the struggles around her, and a contemporary era of oppression and power in which millions of Americans are realizing the same. 

Proctor’s false dichotomy ignores the fact that other, canonical, works in this year’s Met broadcast lineup—as well as many of the works that WCPE has suggested as potential replacements for the operas they do not plan to air—are also based on true stories. It also ignores the historical pushback on pieces like “Le nozze di Figaro,” whose contemporary source text by Beaumarchais was banned in Mozart’s Vienna. After reading a German translation of the Beaumarchais play, Emperor Joseph II declared that the piece “contains much that is objectionable.” (That Lorenzo da Ponte wrote the libretto in Italian helped to land the Emperor’s approval.) 

But that seems to be beside the point, along with Proctor’s argument that WCPE’s mandate is to broadcast works from the Baroque, Classical, and Early Romantic periods. She cites this as her reason for omitting “Florencia en el Amazonas,” Catán’s 1996 opera, which is sung in Spanish and without any content advisory. However, holding fast to the question of genre would also mean that many of the operas that WCPE is “happy” to present from the Met’s season—including “Carmen,” “Madama Butterfly,” “Tannhäuser,” and “Turandot”—fall out of this stylistic remit. So, too, do several of the operas that WCPE broadcast last season from the Met, including “Dialogues des Carmelites,” “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” “Peter Grimes,” and (yes) “The Hours.” The station’s list of potential replacement operas is even more imbalanced: Of 68 operas listed for supporters to choose from, fewer than one-third fit into what Proctor calls “the bounds of our musical format guidelines.” 

Proctor’s real reasoning seemed to become clearer when she spoke with NPR, telling Anastasia Tsioulcas through tears: “What if one child hears this? When I stand before Jesus Christ on Judgement Day, what am I going to say?” 

“In the age of Trump, we’re always fighting these battles,” one employee of another southern radio station that carries the Met Saturday broadcasts told me last week. While he spoke with me on the condition of anonymity so as not to alienate listeners or supporters, he added that his station is “not big on censorship” when asked if the concerns voiced by WCPE were shared in his workplace. A representative from the Met confirmed that the company follows FCC guidelines with all broadcasts, omitting “profanity and questionable language.” Participating stations are not allowed to pick and choose broadcasts from the Met’s season, although in May the company did agree to a one-time exemption for WCPE to replace its scheduled broadcast of “Champion” (which Proctor says was due to “vulgar language and a theme unsuitable for a general audience”). Per the Met’s spokesperson, this was because “it was such a last minute request and towards the end of our broadcasting season.” However, she also noted that “content advisories about ‘Champion’ were sent to all the Met’s participating stations the previous fall, well in advance of the first broadcast of last season.” 

“I think that the name of Jesus is thrown around far too much by both sides. It’s doing no one a favor by just making a cheap joke with it on the one hand, and on the other hand using it as a kind of blank check or stamp of approval,” says George Drance, S.J., a Jesuit priest and artistic director of New York’s Magis Theatre Company (and whose acting resume happens to include the Met). In WPCE’s case, Drance adds: “It seems to be really drawing a line in the sand and saying, ‘That’s the end of this conversation.’” Proctor has invoked “the children” more than once in this case. Quoting one listener from Idaho, who says she likes to keep classical music playing “as background music” for her kids, Proctor wrote in her letter: “We must maintain the trust of listeners like this mother for the sake of her children and the many other parents with families who trust us, not only in North Carolina, but across our Nation.” 

This, too, is not a new debate. “Plato saw theater as a deliberate descent from the truth and something that excited the passions. And as such, it was ruinous to the Republic,” says Drance. “Aristotle said it’s not lying, it’s not an imitation of a person: It’s an imitation of an action. And as the imitation of an action, we can learn from the action without suffering the consequences of the action. It’s a great corrective that Aristotle gives us, but how do we invite people to learn in a context where people think they don’t have anything to learn anymore, where they sometimes believe that they have everything they need?

“I think as a society,” Drance continues, “we are shutting doors to things that used to keep us growing, and used to keep us consistently reconsidering questions that are meant to be lived in—not questions that are meant to be crossed off the list.” 

Drance, who also teaches acting at Fordham University, cites “Dead Man Walking” as one example of a work that poses questions meant to be lived in. These are questions that the star of the current Met production, Joyce Di Donato, and her character’s real-life counterpart, Sister Helen Prejean, brought to a recent event at Fordham. Speaking of her own emotional and spiritual journey in ministering to inmates on death row, Prejean told students: “You’ve got to go into both sides and meet the ambivalence in your own heart.” She may as well have been speaking to Proctor, whose own reaction to ambivalence—to the questions meant to be lived in—has been to sterilize. The wreck of the “Méduse” is just that: a shipwreck devoid of social, political, or economic context.

WCPE recently published its opera survey in full on its website, in an effort to counter what it calls “several hundred news articles…greatly misrepresenting the contents of this document.” To an extent, they’re right: The first, second, and fourth pages of the survey were widely shared online. But the contents of these pages are more accurately represented when taken in context with the third page, which asks listeners some unambiguous Yes/No questions, including:

Some have postulated that the Met is trying to bring in a new generation of listeners specifically using adult themes and profanity. Do you think this is a good idea for the Met?

Do you feel the Met should return to their prior practice of choosing operas from the great composers of the past?

There’s a moral decision here, but I’m not sure it’s the one Proctor thinks it is. Reading the full survey, it’s clear that the moral onus is on the “new generation of listeners” to subjugate their present for the past (even/especially if they aren’t male or white). It’s fitting that opera critic James Jorden, who was found dead at his home earlier this week, was the one to initially share Proctor’s letter last Thursday. While he could be brittle about certain topics, Jorden also knew that cultural revanchism is a trick mirror. “The solution for the future is not retreating into the past,” he wrote in 2014. 

The revival of the Ancien Régime didn’t work out for France, either.