Post-pandemic opera has the chance for a rethink

It can come as a shock to look back at opera performances half a century ago. The acting is often rudimentary, to put it politely, and the productions clearly come from another era when there was a quaint assumption that operas should actually look as the composers might have imagined them — but it is something else that is most telling.

This was a period when there was far less emphasis on how a singer looked. A sylphlike soprano or a matinée-idol tenor might have been regarded as a bonus, but as long as they had a good voice, singers of all kinds knew they had a fair chance of a career. 

The flood of online operas during the past year has put a very different picture in front of us. Audiences have been treated to productions performed by handpicked casts of singers, the vast majority of them white, slim, and at least tolerably beautiful.

Is this the future? At a time when the opera world is in an existential crisis, its financial model holed below the water line by long months of shutdown, there is an opportunity to look at everything afresh.

To get one’s bearings, think back to the sopranos of a generation ago (they are still familiar today thanks to their recordings). The top names included Montserrat Caballé, Rita Hunter, Margaret Price, and later Jane Eaglen, Sharon Sweet, Alessandra Marc. All of them individuals, in physical shape as in personality and voice. Would they all have had the careers they did if they were singing today? It seems unlikely.

Consider, too, how many black singers there were, and not minor artists, but A-list celebrities — Leontyne Price, Martina Arroyo, Reri Grist, Grace Bumbry, Shirley Verrett, George Shirley, Simon Estes, Jessye Norman, Kathleen Battle, Barbara Hendricks, Roberta Alexander, Leona Mitchell. Those who assume that opera is a fusty old art-form with a longstanding history of racial prejudice will get a surprise to learn that things have been getting worse, not better.

Today, it is possible to survey the season programmes of some of the busiest opera companies, such as the Vienna State Opera or Bavarian State Opera, and count the number of non-white singers in principal roles on the fingers of one hand (though it is good to see a few young artists such as African-American soprano Michelle Bradley and Samoan tenor Pene Pati being given encouragement by European companies).

In some programmes, you can count the number of non-white singers in principal roles on the fingers of one hand

On the other side of the Atlantic the casting looks rather different. Statistically, Americans generally have bigger waistlines, and a greater acceptance of larger bodies. And it is probably true that African-American singers are more likely to make their careers in the US (though that was not the case in the postwar, segregationist years, when any inspiring black singer had to make a name for themselves in Europe first). Even so, voice is paramount here and both large-bodied and black singers have a reasonable presence.

It is an irony that some Europeans look down on a company such as the Metropolitan Opera in New York as a dinosaur because of its reluctance to adopt cutting-edge productions (the kind that conservative Americans disparage as “Eurotrash”). Maybe it is actually in the US that opera is more modern, at least in terms of its equality and diversity, if not in the wild artistic frontier lands of Europe.

How did it come to this? The problem goes back to the emergence of a new style of opera production emanating in the latter part of the 20th century from Germany, which put the director’s concept first. This promised a more cogent presentation of the drama and better acting, but at the expense of giving precedence to singers who looked like the characters they portrayed. A black singer in period costume or a large soprano as consumptive little Mimì in La bohème was out.

A striking sign of what was going wrong came in 2004 when “fattism” in opera hit the headlines worldwide. American soprano Deborah Voigt had been booked to sing the title role in Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos at Covent Garden but was dropped because she did not fit into the production’s “little black dress”. A spokesman for the Royal Opera confirmed that it was a “question of the whole style and look of the production”. The dress went on as planned, but the singer took the plane home.

Equivalent public showdowns with black singers are rare, despite many issues and concerns behind the scenes. Instead, a gradual reduction in engagements has reached the point where opera often looks whiter than white.

As technology advances, the pressure on casting only looks set to continue. The start of live cinema relays from the opera house, pioneered by the Metropolitan Opera in 2006, put singers on the big screen, where those who look good in close-up automatically get preference. The success of online opera this year probably heralds the final triumph of looks over vocal ability.

The great shame is that a movement which promised greater realism in opera should have ended up shutting out so many wonderful artists. Surely it cannot be right that directors claiming to take opera forward have created an unequal playing field, in which certain categories of singers find themselves blocked from advancement and, at worst, racial prejudice is given a veneer of artistic integrity?

It does not have to be like this. As we look forward to the end of the pandemic there has been a lot of talk about refashioning opera for the future. What better way could there be of bringing the art form into the 21st century than making sure its singers are representative of society, big and small, black and white? If there are equal opportunities, and the best voices rise to the top, artists and audiences alike will be winners.

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Letter in response to this article:

Opera can be popular, diverse and experimental / From Elly Brindle, London E8, UK