With its offensive echoes of The Black and White Minstrel Show and the Fu Manchu “super-villain”, opera has had to move on. And in opera, blacking or “yellowing” up also persisted until very recently in productions of Otello, Madama Butterfly or the Peking-set Turandot. These attitudes persisted in popular culture well into the 20th century: see for example Mickey Rooney’s grotesque yellow-face impersonation in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. So, too, is the concurrent assumed racial superiority and its corollary: at best inexact and at worst distastefully caricatured representations of non-white characters. The west’s physical theft and destruction of cultural artefacts by force is a fact of 19th- and early 20th-century history.
Most operas were written in a period of European imperialism, and feature attitudes to both women (inferior) and the white race (superior) that we find objectionable today. An Italian writing about a country he never saw, while incorporating Japanese (and even Chinese) musical motifs into his score is seen as cultural appropriation – nothing less than a supporting effort in the west’s attempts to dominate Asia politically. Meanwhile, male composers fetishised the suffering of women, whose powerlessness is signalled by their inevitable deaths by murder, suicide or agonising illness.įrom a modern perspective, and despite its prescient denunciation of American colonialism, Madama Butterfly appears to embody these concerns. Predictably, non-white characters or societies were invariably stereotyped, demonised or ridiculed in opera. It was a rare artist who didn’t hold views we would find abhorrent: Wagner’s antisemitism being only one of the more notorious examples Verdi’s casual racism (he called his opera of Othello “the chocolate project”) or Handel’s investments in the slave trade are perhaps less well known. Most were also written in a period of European imperialism, and feature attitudes to women (inferior) and the white race (superior) that we find objectionable today. Until recent decades, opera’s historic centre of gravity has always been western Europe, and its most popular works were written exclusively by white men. What to do with its overt misogyny? Sabina Puertolas (Despina) with Johannes Martin Kranzle (Don Alfonso) in Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte at the Royal Opera House in 2016. Instead of cancelling them we should find creative ways to live with them – their indestructible openness to interpretation being the key to their future.
Notwithstanding their subject matter, these operas are masterpieces.
Yet plenty of other operas contain content that is troubling for modern sensibilities, for example Così Fan Tutte and its overt misogyny, the Ring Cycle’s incest, and Tosca’s troubling depiction of sexual assault. More importantly Butterfly’s racial dimension feels just too hot to handle. There seems to be concern that representing bad behaviour could be seen as endorsing it (a fallacy that especially affects opera today). Puccini, in his work that was premiered in 1904, did what the best opera composers do: craft the most potent of dramatic situations and collisions to wring the maximum emotion from an audience, while writing music of unbearable emotion and dramatic effect.īut in 2022, opera houses are nervous about programming the work and some are even cancelling productions. Madama Butterfly, a nasty story about an American naval officer’s seduction and subsequent abandonment of a 15-year-old Japanese geisha, is a problem for opera houses today, despite its immense and enduring popularity.
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