Opera Rape Scenes Outrage Audiences
At the Royal Opera House in London, audiences booed Damiano Michieletto’s new production of Rossini’s opera “Guillaume Tell.”
The outrage at that premiere in June was provoked by a scene of sexual violence added to one of the work’s ballets.
According to Richard Morrison of The Times of London, the scene was “inexcusably nasty.” In The Telegraph, Rupert Christiansen called it “dismally brutal,” “prurient” and “in blatant contradiction to the spirit of the music.”
Staging opera means interpreting a score’s ambiguities, and each performance must bridge the space between operatic history and the present. Inevitably, modern anxieties and prejudices fill the gaps. And few issues are more personal and contentious than the representation of rape.
As depictions of sexual violence against women have proliferated on the opera stage in recent years, questions have arisen. How should a director bring a centuries- old score and libretto into the contemporary world? And should Rossini’s time-tested and thus presumably virtuous music accompany something as horrible as rape?
A notable standard for violence was Calixto Bieito’s 2004 production of Mozart’s “Die Entführung aus dem Serail” (“The Abduction From the Seraglio”) at the Komische Oper in Berlin. The first line of Konstanze’s aria “Martern aller arten” — “Tortures of all kinds” — is explored at lengths never imagined by an 18th- century audience. But for an opera in which two women are abducted into a harem, Mr. Bieito’s depiction of sexual violence was fair, if unsubtle.
That performance also came with a clear warning, something the Royal Opera did not place on “Guillaume Tell” until after the chaotic first night.
In opera, the foisting of male aggression upon a struggling woman seems to have become directorial shorthand for the condemnation of the world’s wrongs.
The Royal Opera’s director of opera, Kasper Holten, said in a statement after the “Tell” premiere that the rape scene was intended to “convey the horrible reality of warfare.”
Similar thinking could be behind Bartlett Sher’s production of “L’Elisir d’Amore” at the Metropolitan Opera in New York (aggressive Italian soldiers) and John Fulljames’s “La Donna del Lago” at the Royal Opera (aggressive Highlanders). The problem with these scenes is that they generalize and make abstract a painful personal experience by co- opting individual trauma for symbolic currency.
The sacrificial onstage woman, usually an actress or lady of the chorus rather than a principal character, is rarely given an identity and is discarded as soon as her illustrative role is complete.
“I would not stage a rape scene in an opera ever again,” the director Francesca Zambello wrote in an email, referring to her recent experience directing the premiere of Marco Tutino’s “Two Women” at the San Francisco Opera. “It makes too much of the audience too uncomfortable. As directors we can convey the atrocities of the world, past and present, by using images and dramatic situations, but we must use nuance.”
A rape scene is not only too much for audiences, Ms. Zambello said, but it also overshadows everything else. “The point is fine,” she added, “but when it is so graphic it becomes the end rather than the means.”
But the musicologist Sarah Hibberd, the Royal Opera’s writer in
Modern depictions of sexual violence have proliferated.
residence for “Tell,” argues that the scene is merited. “‘Tell,’ ” she said, “is an opera about violence, about violence against women, and it’s implicit in the story.”
The entanglement of entertainment and critique is what makes the rape scene so difficult to take in. The musicologist Arman Schwartz, who attended the “Tell” premiere, said “the ballet music is exaggerated and grotesque,” but still within the bounds of operatic convention. “For me,” he said, “it’s the combination of sexual violence and ‘normal’ operatic pageantry that makes the scene especially creepy.”
For all its noble goals, this particular strain of directorial revisionism only occasionally concerns itself with women’s agency. It is not insignificant that most of the sexually charged productions were — like a vast majority of opera productions over all — directed by men. Ms. Zambello said: “Clearly women are going to be more sensitive to this. And people forget we make up more than half the audience.”