The Met Opera, presenting a nearly all-white profile in its streaming performance of La Traviata, faces (as far as I can see) no consequences for appearing nearly all white in 2019.
They aren’t publicly shamed. They aren’t picketed or boycotted. They don’t (as far as I know) lose funding.
Here I’m continuing my recent theme, by exploring yet another way in which our classical music community isn’t like the outside world.
Diversity.
I walk down the street, in Washington, DC where I live. Lots of people of color. I ride the busses there. Mostly people of color, at least in my neighborhood.
I watch TV. People of color. I especially like MSNBC. When they discuss any political subject on one of their evening shows, they get a panel of knowledgeable people to talk about it. Always women and people of color on those panels. A deliberate choice, of course, on their part. (Though I’m not happy that the hosts of all the evening shows are white.)
I see advertising everywhere. Full of people of color. I read about the Grammy awards show, on TV this past weekend. Full of people of color.
I watch Tennis, most recently the Australian Open. Players of color, especially in the women’s matches. Naomi Osaka, who won, is half Japanese and half Haitian.
When the US Open comes in the fall, the big matches will be played in stadiums named many years ago after people of color, Louis Armstrong and Arthur Ashe.
And meanwhile…
I go to a movie theater to watch a live stream of the Met Opera’s new production of La Traviata. Very impressive performance and production. I was just about in tears. Intelligent, revealing intermission feature, showing Diana Damrau, who sang Violetta, and Yannick Neszet-Seguin, the Met’s new music director, who conducted. They’re working on the drama in Damrau’s role. I just about fell in love with both of them. And thought having Yannick there was such a plus for the company.
But…
In the performance itself, looking at the soloists and chorus, and at the orchestra, when they were shown, and in the shots of the audience and stagehands, I saw only two people of color, an Asian singer and an African-American singer, doing small roles.
Not a deliberate choice, I’m sure, by the Met. But that’s how things play out right now. As they do in orchestras. Very few people of color, among the musicians and in the audience.
Nobody’s fault, exactly. But a huge fault of omission, that it hasn’t changed by now. What we see simply isn’t acceptable, in 2019. For institutions getting public funding. And given what I see elsewhere in my world.
Where do we go?
I can imagine that the Met has some diversity initiatives, as we find elsewhere in classical music.
But what are the results? And where is the pressure to change?
The Met Opera, presenting a nearly all-white profile in its streaming performance of La Traviata, faces (as far as I can see) no consequences for appearing nearly all white in 2019.
They aren’t publicly shamed. They aren’t picketed or boycotted. They don’t (as far as I know) lose funding.
Major classical music stars don’t publicly talk about how bad the Met looks, and demand change. Not so in other fields of art and entertainment, in the movies, or in nonclassical music. Movie and nonclassical music stars have strongly said that the Oscar and Grammy awards and shows have been too white. Said this, in fact, from the stage, during the shows themselves.
That’s not happening in classical music.
We have a lot of work to do.
I wonder if the Met — and other classical music institutions, big orchestras, for instance — would change a lot faster if they faced real consequences for not bring diverse.
I think we can all agree (or most of us can) that the Met is the pits, in a lot of ways. I sometimes think that the only way to experience their work is over the radio, which is the only way I do, except for those movie theater streams. The sounds they produce, and their hiring Yannick, are great, but the only kind of diversity they are really good at is hiring singers from many nations, and that of course they have to do because the best opera singers come from many nations.
One of the earliest experiences of classical music I had as a very young kid was listening to them on Saturdays with my mother (on an AM radio in the 1940s, of course, which was an experience that can’t be compared with radio listening today). I will always be grateful to them for that, but I would recommend that they reduce their operations to streaming internet audio; it would save them a lot of money. (Just kidding, of course!)
The Met had some daunting financial challenges, a diminished audience, and then the same problems as every other opera house has these days in casting the standard operas. Not as many highly capable singers as there used to be. (Which by the way is especially notable, since with a larger population and more ethnic and racial groups supplying artists, statistically there ought to be a bigger pool to choose from.)
The streaming performances can come across better in the movie theater than they do in the house, for various reasons. One being that smaller-voiced singers benefit from the microphones that have to be used, and sound more satisfyingly operatic than they might heard live. When the Met first stages its current Ring production, the tenor singing Loge benefitted that way.
Sorry ; I sometimes read some interesting ideas in your posts but this sounds like a minor but ambitious German “cultural official” in the early days of the Third Reich. If you haven’t studied the exact same vitriol in that period masked in mock shock and ersatz rectitude, and to what it led over time in the orchestras , opera houses, etc., reducing the number of Jewish performers slowly at first until there was an outright ban you need to bone up asap, pal. You have disgraced the institution where you work , and your own career and reputation with this racist or at least totally ignorant screed. Shame on you! You owe the fine arts community a big big apology. How dare you say that the stage – for Traviata, even ! was too White, anymore than would you in this age say the stage and pit looked too Jewish ???! Are you , then, advocating staffing changes to future Porgy and Bess’s to add more White players to be ” more reflective of” statistical fact ” (population percentages)?? Kabuki troupes to have more Hispanic or Slavic performers ?? I had a lot of respect for your trying out some new ideas in your posts but this latest is simply nauseating and chilling. I hope you will have the courage to print this and respond, and that others will shout down this repulsive hate speech.
Wow! I haven’t had a comment with so much anger since…well, never. I’m happy to post it, and I’d encourage you to send it also to the Met, to show them how you’ve defended Them. I’d be curious to see their response.
Hard to know which of your points to try to answer. Maybe start with the Kabuki one. Japan isn’t a multiracial society as we are in the US, and i don’t know if anyone not ethnically Japanese wants to be in a Kabuki troupe. Maybe if someone in their Korean minority wanted to be, and was turned down solely because they were Korean, there would be an issue. There has been in sumo wrestling, where there was resistance to non-Japanese who wanted to compete, and in fact were very good.
But I don’t know that in Japan there’s any outcry about Japanese performing arts being representative of the ethnic groups of Japanese society. There is such an outcry here. And the arts have responded. Could be that this discussion is new to you, but it’s not new to the classical music world. Chamber Music America, for example, has taken major steps to foster minority participation in chamber music. And on their board and staff. The League of American Orchestras recently announced a diversity initiative, funded by the Mellon Foundation. This isn’t the first such move in the orchestra community. One goal is to raise the proportion of players of color in orchestras above the 4% it’s been at for years.
The Washington National Opera has done nicely, in casting black singers in standard works and in staging operas -/ like Philip Glass’s Appomattox — with stories from black life and black history.
So you have more people to rage at than just me! :-)))
About La traviata — I’m not sure I understand the subject of your fury. Are you saying the very idea of having nonwhite singers in that opera is absurd and in fact racist and contemptible? Makes me feel bad for the African-American bass or baritone who played the doctor.
Or were you saying that it’s racist and contemptible to suggest there could or should be more?
Which anyhow wasn’t my point. I wasn’t keeping score on how white the Traviata cast was or wasn’t. I was talking about the whole enterprise, as perhaps you didn’t notice. Talking about the presence of almost uniformly white people in every group I saw in the streamed presentation, including stagehands, orchestra, and audience. I wasn’t asking for quotas. Just saying that the almost all white presentation didn’t fit with what I see in the world around me.
And much of what I see in the world around me, the diversity I see, exists because people cared to make it so. TV news shows, for instance, are remarkably diverse, especially (at least in my experience) local news. That’s because people in charge said, we’ve got to have a multiracial array of anchors, reporters, and weather people (not to mention women!) if we want to represent our community.
And so it was done. Was that, in your view, contemptible and racist?
Wat nonsense
Is there any hard data or even soft anecdotes that show that greater performer ethnic diversity leads to greater audience diversity? Isn’t it more driven by repertoire? I do know of one interesting story, but it is not a clarifying one . . .
Anecdote:
Decades ago the NY City Opera (now defunct) was a rival to the Met at Lincoln Center. 2000 tor seats, long season. One year they premiered an opera about Malcolm X, by Anthony Davis, a black jazz composer. Of course lots of singers of color in the cast. And so many African-Americans in the audience!
On the other hand, the National Symphony was a black timpanist, phenomenally good, and very visible, since he plays on risers at the back of the stage. That’s not going to produce a surge of black audience. But maybe if 20% of the orchestra was black!
The St. Louis Symphony saw an uptick of black audience when they developed relationships with 28 black churches.
I’m sure there are other stories. And maybe data. But another anecdote. DC, where I live, is a black majority city. Chocolate City, it’s been called. Ever since the federal government has relaxed its control enough to allow DC to have a mayor, the mayor has always been black.
And then we have the Kennedy Center, which makes no noticeable moves toward the black community. I bet they’d dispute that, saying they do X, Y, and Z. But it’s not visible, has very little impact. Doesn’t show up as part of the profile they show to the world. (In February, they fill their gift shop with Chinese stuff in honor of the Chinese New Year. February is also black history month, but I haven’t seen them do anything in the gift shop for that.)
The current DC mayor has a newsletter, which goes out by email every week. One issue was about the arts in DC. And she didn’t even mention the Kennedy Center! Suggesting that this august institution makes no impact on the mayor and her sense of what this community is. But if the Kennedy Center regularly had black programming, as the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark does, enough black programming to be inescapable for anyone looking at their season, don’t you think the mayor would have mentioned them?
Here is an article to back up your assumption that if we put more diverse artists on the stage that we will begin to see more diverse audiences. When I was the interim director at the Oakland Symphony, we thought A LOT about this question, and worked hard to ensure that our soloists, and even the works we chose, reflected the diversity of the community. Michael Morgan’s leadership in this area is unparalleled in the classical music world.
In regards to orchestras diversifying, that is a tougher nut to crack due to union constraints and the blind audition process. The Sphinx organization in partnership with the Mellon Foundation is working to address this from the backend, so to speak, by supporting more mentoring for performers of color to help guide them through the audition process. It’s a noble effort, but may not move the dial very fast- certainly not as fast as the growing concern for more diversity on our stages.
Cristine, welcome, and thanks for your thoughts! I can well believe you thought about this in Oakland, given the nature of that city, and of course because of Michael. I served once on a funding panel with him, and found him to be a ray of quite joyful light. Hope he was that way at the orchestra! And of course he takes these matters very much to heart.
Orchestras…isn’t it ironic that the blind auditions that were conceived as a way to fight discrimination of various sorts, are now an obstacle to diversifying. I often run into (right here on the blog a few days ago, for instance) people insisting that the process be unchanged, so orchestras can pick the very best person for each opening.
Which then raises questions about what anyone means by the very best. Probably, I’d think, not the most imaginative or adventurous or even lively musician, but very likely the best at doing orthodox things in the orthodox way, with of course the greatest technical perfection.
I can respect that, and I certainly understand it. But given the quality of instrumental players these days (which I can see from my perch at Juilliard, where I’ve been teaching for 22 years), would orchestras be sacrificing quality if, instead of picking whoever they decide is the absolute No. 1 best player, they decided they’d choose from the top five percent?
Then they could make a point of picking diverse people. Not just racially and ethnically diverse, but varied in other ways. People with varied musical backgrounds, varied lives, varied ways of thinking. I think then we might see orchestras made up of livelier people, people more willing to take risks, to do all kinds of things differently. And maybe then orchestras might also play with more individuality. Which to me would be a blessed change form what I see now as the high-level but uninspired playing we so often hear.
Greg: “Which then raises questions about what anyone means by the very best. Probably, I’d think, not the most imaginative or adventurous or even lively musician, but very likely the best at doing orthodox things in the orthodox way, with of course the greatest technical perfection.”
Which of course is absolutely true in many fields. The words “good,” “better,” and “best” are often (maybe most often) used without any thought given to what they are referring to in the real world. “Best” by what standards or criteria? And who is deciding who or what is best?
So this is a question about who is judging who is the best. Is it the wise elders of the tribe, who are assumed to know the most about everything? That’s how these questions about values were decided thousands of years ago, but maybe it is time to think a little more rigorously about the matter. (Speaking as a wise old greybeard, myself.)
Given all the problems that the Met is facing, as you enumerate them, I don’t see how a boycott, or pickets, or a raft of bad publicity focused on “diversity” would make things better.
Hey, Bob, I only meant that pushback on diversity could make the Met take some serious action to be more diverse.
But, considering their larger problems, low ticket sales, and troubling finances…I can imagine that becoming more diverse could invigorate the organization, make it a much more vibrant participant in the culture around it. Classical music exists in a bubble, within which we don’t hear much about what’s going on in the larger world. But out in the larger world, diversity is more than an issue. More than a topic of discussion. It’s an ongoing wave, sweeping everything before it.
So if that happened to the Met, if the institution changed its face in a dramatic, contemporary way, who’s to say that wouldn’t help with everything else they do?
I probably should have written this reply last week, when your post was new, so sorry about that, but …
I was a bit bemused to see this post scolding the Met appear juist a few days after the Met production that got media attention (including a viral video) was one whose stars were a Mexican tenor and a black South African soprano.
Well, on one hand, you have a point. But then a Mexican singer in leading operatic roles isn’t any kind of novelty, since there have been many of them, going back at least to Oralia Dominguez, who emerged on the international stage as Amneris in the legendary 1951 Mexico City performance of Aida with Maria Callas, and went on to a big international career. She’s Erda in the Karajan Ring recording.
And yes, a black South African soprano, but then black lead singers in opera haven’t been at all uncommon ever since Leontyne Price, at the very least. Now it’s common enough, too, to see black men in leading roles, though it wasn’t so many years ago when this was rare. Somewhat of a scandal in the opera world, back a couple of decades, that in the US there was a fear of casting black men who might play love scenes on stage with white female singers. Or who were told (a story I heard from a leading black tenor) that they couldn’t sing Don Carlo because Carlo didn’t look “like that.”
But I digress. My point was that in the Met’s total operation, including stagehands and the audience, as shown in this streaming performance, almost everyone was white. Yes, there’s diversity in the leading singers, but for sure a lot less in the audience and orchestra, and if my memory is correct, from what I’ve seen on stage, in the chorus as well. That’s a different realm from diversity in leading roles.