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Page 150 →Page 151 →Notes

Introduction

  1. 1. “Sia questa mia risposta al tuo giurar.”

  2. 2. Ellie Hisama, “John Zorn and the Postmodern Condition,” in Locating East Asia in Western Art Music, ed. Yayoi Uno Everett and Frederick Lau (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 72–84.

  3. 3. See, for instance, the 2018 Washington Post exposé on sexual harassment in classical music. Anne Midgette and Peggy McGlone, “Assaults in dressing rooms. Groping during lessons. Classical musicians reveal a profession rife with harassment,” Washington Post, July 26, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/assaults-in-dressing-rooms-groping-during-lessons-classical-musicians-reveal-a-profession-rife-with-harassment/2018/07/25/f47617d0-36c8-11e8-acd5-35eac230e514_story.html

  4. 4. Data from operabase.com. 2018–2019 is the most recent season not affected by disruptions due to COVID-19.

  5. 5. See Elizabeth Hudson, “Gilda Seduced: A Tale Untold,” Cambridge Opera Journal 4, no. 3 (1992): 229–51, http://www.jstor.org/stable/823693

  6. 6. Axel Englund, Deviant Opera: Sex, Power, and Perversion on Stage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020), 6.

  7. 7. Another common Regietheater trope is the critique of fascism and particularly Nazism, as we will see in chapter 4.

  8. 8. Englund, Deviant Opera, 6.

  9. 9. See, for instance: Catherine Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); Carolyn Abbate, “Opera; or, the Envoicing of Women,” in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth A. Solie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 225–58; Ralph Locke, “What Are These Women Doing in Opera?” in En travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera, ed. Corinne E. Blackmer and Patricia Juliana Smith (New York: Page 152 →Columbia University Press, 1995), 59–98; Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Mary Ann Smart, ed., Siren Songs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Melanie Unseld, “Man töte dieses Weib!”: Weiblichkeit und Tod in der Musik der Jahrhundertwende (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001); Joseph Kerman, “Verdi and the Undoing of Women,” Cambridge Opera Journal 18, no. 1 (2006): 21–31, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954586706002072

  10. 10. A panel discussion at the 2016 annual meeting of the American Musicological Society called “Sexual Violence on Stage” resulted in the 2018 colloquy on sexual violence in opera published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. The six essays of the JAMS colloquy “build on earlier scholarship to suggest ways in which scholars and opera professionals can begin to resist the tradition of rape culture embedded in Western opera by making ever more deliberate choices about our own performative acts of interpretation—be it as producers, stage directors, performers, composers, or scholar-teachers.” Three essays in the JAMS colloquy, by Micaela Baranello, Ellie Hisama, and Richard Will, discuss production and performance issues. Suzanne G. Cusick and Monica Hershberger, “Introduction,” in “Colloquy: Sexual Violence in Opera: Scholarship, Pedagogy, and Production as Resistance,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 71, no. 1 (2018): 217–18, https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2018.71.1.213

  11. 11. Naomi André, Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 26.

  12. 12. Roger Parker, “Reading the livrets, or the Chimera of ‘Authentic’ Staging,” in Leonora’s Last Act: Essays in Verdian Discourse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 128.

  13. 13. I am indebted to Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, who have broken ground on the topic of opera in production with so much of their work, and to David Levin, Clemens Risi, and Axel Englund for their monographs analyzing opera productions and the ways that the meaning of operas shift in performance. Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, “Adaptation and Opera,” in The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, ed. Thomas Leitch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 305–23; Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, “Opera: Forever and Always Multimodal,” in New Perspectives on Narrative and Multimodality, ed. Ruth Page (London: Routledge, 2009), 65–77; David Levin, Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Clemens Risi, Oper in Performance: Analysen zur Aufführungsdimension von Operninszenierungen (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2017); Englund, Deviant Opera.

  14. 14. Levin, Unsettling Opera, 3. See also Nina Penner, Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020), 4–5.

  15. 15. Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Fontana Press, 1977), 157.

  16. 16. Barthes, “From Work to Text,” 159–60.

  17. 17. Levin, Unsettling Opera, 11.

  18. Page 153 →18. Dylan Robinson suggests the value of fostering an awareness of the “primary audience” imagined by arts organizations and recognizing the relationship between this imagined audience and an individual audience member who may identify with the values of the primary audience or may feel alienated from it. Similarly, in her theorization of the oppositional gaze, bell hooks argues that Black female spectators actively refuse to identify with a film’s imagined spectator. Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 125; bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992; repr., New York: Routledge, 2015), 115–32.

  19. 19. Considering alternate or peripheral perspectives as sources of knowledge is a feature of the feminist epistemology of standpoint theory, originally formulated by Marxist feminists Sandra Harding and Nancy Hartsock and expanded by Black feminists including Patricia Hill Collins. Nancy Hartsock, “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism,” in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, ed. Sandra Harding (New York: Routledge, 2004), 35–54; Patricia Hill Collins, “The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought,” SIGNS: A Journal of Women in History and Culture 14, no. 4, Common Grounds and Crossroads: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in Women’s Lives (Summer 1989): 745–73, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3174683

  20. 20. Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women.

  21. 21. For a few high-profile examples, see: Eleni Hagen, “Don Giovanni,” “Resources for Educators,” Kennedy Center website (Washington, 2019), https://www.kennedy-center.org/education/resources-for-educators/classroom-resources/media-and-interactives/media/opera/don-giovanni/; Heidi Waleson, “Ladies’ Man,” Wall Street Journal, Oct. 20, 2011, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204346104576636932497242112; “Mozart’s ‘Don Giovanni’ from Houston Grand Opera,” NPR Music, Nov. 2, 2007, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15828636

  22. 22. Catharine Woodward, “Shock Factor,” blog post on Opera Div, June 30, 2015, https://operacat.tumblr.com/post/122857938113/shock-factor

  23. https://slippedisc.com/2015/07/exclusive-an-open-letter-from-kasper-holten-on-william-tell

  24. 24. Jonathan Owen, “The Violence Epidemic: Half of Women in Britain Admit They Have Been Physically or Sexually Assaulted According to Shocking New Figures,” Independent, March 5, 2014, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-violence-epidemic-half-of-women-in-britain-admit-they-have-been-physically-or-sexually-assaulted-according-to-shocking-new-figures-9169143.html. The statistics in the article come from the Violence Against Women report by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights.

  25. 25. Kasper Holten, letter quoted in Woodward, “Shock Factor.” It is significant that staging sexual violence is so popular as a strategy to make audiences uncomfortablePage 154 → in Regietheater productions. In chapter 4, I consider rape’s status as a metaphor for representing other forms of violence.

  26. 26. Holten, “Exclusive: An Open Letter.”

  27. 27. Bessel A. van der Kolk and Jose Saporta, “The Biological Response to Psychic Trauma: Mechanisms and Treatment of Intrusion and Numbing,” Anxiety Research 4 (1991): 199, https://doi.org/10.1080/08917779108248774

  28. 28. While Gilligan’s book is commonly cited as the progenitor of care ethics, Patricia Hill Collins has argued that it might be better understood as an African American phenomenon. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990). See also Katie G. Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics (Atlanta: Scholar’s Press, 1988).

  29. 29. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).

  30. 30. Critics include: Lawrence Kohlberg, “The Current Formulation of the Theory,” in Essays on Moral Development (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984), 2:229; Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 179–81; Bill Puka, “The Liberation of Caring; A Different Voice for Gilligan’s ‘Different Voice,’” Hypatia 55, no. 1 (1990): 59, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.1990.tb00390.x

  31. 31. Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York: Routledge, 1993), 96.

  32. 32. Tronto, Moral Boundaries, 105.

  33. 33. James Thompson, “Towards an Aesthetics of Care,” in Performing Care: New Perspectives on Socially Engaged Performance, ed. Amanda Stuart Fisher and James Thompson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 430–41.

  34. 34. Thompson, “Towards an Aesthetics of Care,” 439.

  35. 35. The Rape of Lucretia is a story from ancient Roman history of the rape and suicide of a noblewoman that precipitated a rebellion against the Roman Kingdom. It has been treated by artists throughout the Western tradition including Ovid and Shakespeare. Susannah is an adaptation of the Apocryphal story of Susannah and the Elders. In Floyd’s opera, Susannah is raped by one of the priests who unjustly accused her of improper conduct.

Chapter 1

  1. 1. Feminist philosopher Kate Manne proposes shifting our conceptualization of misogyny from the point of view of the accused to the point of view of its targets. In the fictional realm of Don Giovanni, I propose a similar shift by focusing not on whether Giovanni truly hates women or loves women but on the impact his actions have on the women around him. Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 59–61.

  2. 2. Zambello’s production premiered at the Royal Opera House in 2002 and was remounted in 2003, 2007, and 2008. The analysis in this chapter is based on the DVD recording of the 2008 production with Simon Keenlyside in the title role.

  3. Page 155 →3. Extensive studies have been done measuring rape myth acceptance in various groups beginning with Martha R. Burt, “Cultural Myths and Supports for Rape,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 38, no. 2 (1980): 217–30, https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0022-3514.38.2.217. The results have generally suggested that rape myth acceptance significantly influences the perceptions of jurors in rape cases. Jennifer Temkin, “‘And Always Keep A-Hold of Nurse, for Fear of Finding Something Worse’: Challenging Rape Myths in the Courtroom,” New Criminal Law Review 13, no. 4 (2010): 710–34, https://doi.org/10.1525/nclr.2010.13.4.710. Russell Norton and Tim Grant have suggested “rape stereotype” would be more accurate. Russell Norton and Tim Grant, “Rape Myth in True and False Rape Allegations,” Psychology, Crime & Law 14, no. 4 (2008): 275–85, https://doi.org/10.1080/10683160701770286

  4. 4. Rosalind Gill, Gender and the Media (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 140.

  5. 5. Ronald C. Kessler et al., “Trauma and PTSD in the WHO World Mental Health Surveys,” European Journal of Psychotraumatology 8, no. 5 (2017), section 3.3, https://doi.org/10.1080/20008198.2017.1353383

  6. 6. Bieito’s production is the only one of the six discussed here that does not stage a fight in this scene. His interpretation is discussed in detail below.

  7. 7. Temkin, “‘And Always Keep A-Hold of Nurse,’” 715.

  8. 8. Staging sexual violence against anonymous women as a tactic to establish a gritty setting or inform audience opinion about the abuser is a trope that recurs throughout many productions in this book. The risks and drawbacks of victimizing unnamed, unsinging women characters to these ends will be discussed in chapter 3.

  9. 9. This production, like all productions at the English National Opera, is sung in English. The translation of Don Giovanni used in this production was written by Jeremy Sams.

  10. 10. The Giovannis in Kent’s, Sivadier’s, and Zambello’s productions all wear half-masks over the top portions of their faces. Norris’s Giovanni does not wear a mask, but it is dark and he changes clothes after the rape. Anna does not appear to recognize him when they next meet. Suspension of disbelief is already necessary to accommodate Anna’s failure to recognize Giovanni in this scene.

  11. 11. Large-scale studies of European countries, Canada, and the United States have found that between half and 75% of rapes are committed by assailants the victim knows. On American college campuses, a study found this number may be as high as 84%. Of these, a significant percentage of assailants are current or former intimate partners. United States Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Crime Victimization Survey, 2010–2016 (2017); Jan van Dijk, John van Kesteren, and Paul Smit, “Criminal Victimisation In International Perspective: Key Findings From the 2004–2005 ICVS and EU ICS,” Netherlands Research and Documentation Centre in Cooperation with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (2007); Jo Lovett and Liz Kelly, “Different Systems, Similar Outcomes Tracking Attrition in Reported Rape Cases Across Europe,” Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit, London Metropolitan University, funded by the European Commission (2009).

  12. Page 156 →12. Gill, Gender and the Media, 145.

  13. 13. Ann Wolbert Burgess and Lynda Lytle Holmstrom, “Coping Behavior of the Rape Victim,” American Journal of Psychiatry 133, no. 4 (1976): 413–18, https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.133.4.413

  14. 14. Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Bantam, 1976), 346–47.

  15. 15. Richard Will, “Don Giovanni and the Resilience of Rape Culture,” in Cusick et al., “Colloquy: Sexual Violence in Opera,” 222.

  16. 16. “Tacito a me s’appressa, e mi vuole abbracciar: sciogliermi cerco, ei più mi stringe; grido: non viene alcun. Con una mano cerca d’impedire la voce, e coll’altra m’afferra stretta così, che già mi credo vinta.”

  17. 17. For instance, while Allanbrook sees Donna Anna’s heroic style as necessarily undercut dramatically by its buffa context, Hunter argues that in eighteenth-century opera buffa, the high style could be used seriously or as parody. Wye Jamison Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 228–29; Mary Hunter, “Some Representations of Opera Seria in Opera Buffa,” Cambridge Opera Journal 3, no. 2 (1991): 107, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954586700003426

  18. 18. Kristi Brown-Montesano, Understanding the Women of Mozart’s Operas (Berkeley: University of California, 2007), 2. Brown-Montesano surveys leading interpretations of Donna Anna from early Don Juan stories to the present in her chapter “Feminine Vengeance I: The Assailed/Assailant.”

  19. 19. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s reading of the opera has been highly influential on this point. Hoffmann represents Anna and Giovanni as star-crossed lovers, whose paths tragically cross too late. E.T.A. Hoffmann, “Don Juan: A Fabulous Incident which Befell a Travelling Enthusiast,” in E. T. A. Hoffmann and Music, ed. and trans. R. Murray Schafer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), 63–73.

  20. 20. Candida L. Saunders, “The Truth, the Half-Truth, and Nothing Like the Truth: Reconceptualizing False Allegations of Rape,” British Journal of Criminology 52, no. 6 (2012): 1152, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azs036. The study Saunders cites was done with a police department in the UK, but similar disparities are widespread and well documented. A survey of other sources from the 1990s to 2010 can be found in Saunders’s introduction.

  21. 21. Brent E. Turvey, False Allegations: Investigative and Forensic Issues in Fraudulent Reports of Crime (London: Academic Press, 2018), 192.

  22. 22. Gill, Gender and the Media, 142.

  23. 23. Saunders differentiates between “false complaints,” in which rape allegations are completely fabricated, and “false accounts,” in which an allegation of rape contains falsehoods. False complaints, like the one Anna makes here, are considered rare, even among police and prosecutors. Saunders, “The Truth, the Half-Truth, and Nothing Like the Truth,” 1167.

  24. 24. Lori Haskell and Melanie Randall, “How Trauma Affects Memory and Recall,” in The Impact of Trauma on Adult Sexual Assault Victims, submitted to Research and Statistics Division, Justice Canada (2019), https://www.justice.gc.caPage 157 →/eng/rp-pr/jr/trauma/p4.html. This research paper published on Justice Canada’s website summarizes the findings of a great deal of recent research from neuroscientists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and legal scholars.

  25. 25. Haskell and Randall, “How Trauma Affects Memory and Recall.”

  26. 26. Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 153.

  27. 27. Erin O’Callaghan, Veronica Shepp, Sarah E. Ullman, and Anne Kirkner, “Navigating Sex and Sexuality after Sexual Assault: A Qualitative Study of Survivors and Informal Support Providers,” Journal of Sex Research 56, no. 8 (2019): 1045–57, https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2018.1506731; Willy van Berlo and Bernardine Ensink, “Problems with Sexuality after Sexual Assault,” Annual Review of Sex Research 11, no. 1 (2000): 235–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10532528.2000.10559789

  28. 28. See Brown-Montesano, Understanding the Women of Mozart’s Operas, chapter 1.

  29. 29. Kristen N. Jozkowski et al., “Gender Difference in Heterosexual College Students’ Conceptualizations and Indicators of Sexual Consent: Implications for Contemporary Sexual Assault Prevention Education,” Journal of Sex Research 51, no. 8 (2014): 909–10, 913, https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2013.792326. See also Terry Humphreys, “Perceptions of Sexual Consent: The Impact of Relationship History and Gender,” Journal of Sex Research 44, no. 4 (2007): 313–14, https://doi.org/10.1080/00224490701586706

  30. 30. “Io so, che rado colle donne voi altri cavalieri siete onesti e sinceri.”

  31. 31. Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Rape: On Coercion and Consent,” in Applications of Feminist Legal Theory, ed. D. Kelly Weisberg (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 474.

  32. 32. Scott A. Anderson, “Conceptualizing Rape as Coerced Sex,” Ethics: An International Journal of Social, Political, and Legal Philosophy 127, no. 1 (2016): 50–87, https://doi.org/10.1086/687332

  33. 33. Anderson, “Conceptualizing Rape as Coerced Sex,” 75.

  34. 34. Anderson, “Conceptualizing Rape as Coerced Sex,” 79.

  35. 35. A helpful survey of many of such studies can be found in Claire R. Gravelin, Monica Biernat, and Caroline E. Bucher, “Blaming the Victim of Acquaintance Rape: Individual, Situational, and Sociocultural Factors,” Frontiers in Psychology 9 (2019): 2422–50, http://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02422

  36. 36. Giovanni says he cannot bear to see Zerlina’s beauty “mistreated” by Masetto. The Italian verb, “strapazzare,” is translated in the subtitles of Bieito’s production as “abused.”

  37. 37. Judith Herman. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 1.

  38. 38. “La burla mi dà gusto.”

  39. 39. Sex by deception is not strictly defined as rape under the law in Canada or the United States, though common law practices tend to criminalize deceptive sexual relations. Amit Pundik, “Coercion and Deception in Sexual Relations,” Page 158 →Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 28, no. 1 (2015): 97–127, https://doi.org/10.1017/cjlj.2015.19; Jed Rubenfeld, “The Riddle of Rape-by-Deception and the Myth of Sexual Autonomy,” Yale Law Journal 122, no. 6 (2012–2013): 1372–669, http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.13051/4879

  40. 40. For the impact this rape myth has on legal blame attribution, see Emily Finch and Vanessa E. Munro, “Juror Stereotypes and Blame Attribution in Rape Cases Involving Intoxicants: The Findings of a Pilot Study,” British Journal of Criminology 45, no. 1 (2005): 25–38, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azh055

  41. 41. Marc LeBeau and Ashraf Mozayani, Drug-Facilitated Sexual Assault: A Forensic Handbook (London: Academic Press, 2001).

  42. 42. An influential 2001 study found that approximately half of all sexual assault cases in America involve alcohol consumption by the perpetrator, victim, or both. Antonia Abbey et al., “Alcohol and Sexual Assault,” Alcohol Research & Health 25, no. 1 (2001): 43–51.

  43. 43. Allanbrook argues that in Elvira’s introduction in the opera, Mozart’s music undercuts and mocks her character, making her impossible to take seriously. Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart, 238–40.

  44. 44. Though it does not appear in any of the productions in this chapter, one trope I have noticed in some modern productions of Don Giovanni is making Elvira pregnant. Even if it is never addressed in the opera’s text, a visibly pregnant Elvira can be much more sympathetic to an audience as she continues to pursue Don Giovanni in spite of continued mistreatment.

  45. 45. The productions by Bieito and Pynkoski do not include “Mi tradì,” which Mozart added to Don Giovanni for its 1788 Vienna premiere.

  46. 46. Wye Allanbrook, Mary Hunter, and Gretchen Wheelock, “Staging Mozart’s Women,” in Siren Songs, ed. Mary Ann Smart (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 58.

  47. 47. Allanbrook, Hunter, and Wheelock, “Staging Mozart’s Women,” 58.

  48. 48. This production swaps “Mi tradì” with Donna Anna’s aria “Non mi dir” so that the former occurs in between the graveyard scene and the dinner scene. I discuss the dramatic significance of this change later.

  49. 49. Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 34.

  50. 50. Laura S. Brown, “Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma,” in Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 102.

  51. 51. Allanbrook notes that the character archetypes in Giovanni are particularly rigid. She writes that in the world of Don Giovanni, the “human inhabitants are necessarily diminished in complexity by the overshadowing presence of the superhuman and daemonic.” Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart, 199.

  52. 52. “Introducing . . . Don Giovanni!” Glyndebourne.com, https://www.glyndebourne.com/festival/introducing-don-giovanni

  53. 53. Pynkoski presents this choice as one of accuracy and not of preference. The cover of the program booklet features an enlarged photograph of Mozart’s catalogue of works with the words “opera Buffa in 2 Atti” circled in red.

  54. 54. Marshall Pynkoski, “Director’s Notes,” program for Don Giovanni (Toronto: Opera Atelier, 2019), 22.

  55. Page 159 →55. In his notes on the production, Sivadier explains that we know from the first bars of the overture that Don Giovanni is going to die. Given his inevitable and endless death, “Don Giovanni has nothing else to do but theater” (“Don Giovanni n’a rien d’autre à faire que du théâtre”). Jean-François Sivadier, “Le rire et l’effroi: Entretien aven Jean-François Sivadier, metteur en scène,” program for Don Giovanni (Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, 2017), 19.

  56. 56. “. . . un espace exposé, une arène, un ring, une piste de cirque, la scène d’un théâtre . . .” Sivadier, “Le rire et l’effroi,” 20.

  57. 57. Sivadier argues that the confluence of different genres and different archetypes results in the characters becoming “not images but human beings: attractive, foolish, abject, fallible, capable of reasonable or irrational acts” (“Ce ne sont pas des images mais des êtres humains, séduisants, fous, abjects, faillibles, capables d’actes raisonnables ou irrationnels).” Sivadier, “Le rire et l’effroi,” 21.

  58. 58. Richard Will argues that in the 2000s and 2010s, “graphic and gritty have become the new normal for Mozart.” Will, “Don Giovanni and the Resilience of Rape Culture,” in Cusick et al, “Colloquy: Sexual Violence in Opera,” 220.

  59. 59. John Terauds, “Is Don Giovanni a #MeToo Monster or an Honest Seducer? Opera Atelier Weighs In,” interview with Marshall Pynkoski, Toronto Star, October 28, 2019.

  60. 60. Pynkoski, “Is Don Giovanni a #MeToo Monster or an Honest Seducer?”

  61. 61. Laura Attridge, interview with the author, 18 September 2019.

  62. 62. Statistics from Operabase.com

Chapter 2

  1. 1. Oscar Wilde, Salomé, in The Plays of Oscar Wilde (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), 118.

  2. 2. Wilde, Salomé, 117.

  3. 3. Mary Simonson, “Choreographing Salome: Re-creating the Female Body,” in Body Knowledge: Performance, Intermediality, and American Entertainment at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Davinia Caddy, “Variations on the Dance of the Seven Veils,” Cambridge Opera Journal 17, no. 1 (2005): 37–58, https://doi.org/10.1017/S095458670500193X. The phenomenon was known as “Salomania.”

  4. 4. Susan Anita Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

  5. 5. Arnold Schoenberg, for instance, referred to the power Expressionism has to represent the artist’s inner processes. Jelena Hahl-Koch, ed., Arnold Schoenberg/Wassily Kandinsky: Letters, Pictures and Documents (New York: Faber, 1984), 98.

  6. 6. Gary Schmidgall, “Richard Strauss: Salome,” in Literature as Opera (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 251.

  7. 7. Lawrence Kramer, “One Coughs, the Other Dances: Freud, Strauss, and the Perversity of Modern Life,” Muzikološki Zbornik 45, no. 2 (2009): 33–44, https://doi.org/10.4312/mz.45.2.33-44

  8. Page 160 →8. Sander L. Gilman, Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 168.

  9. 9. In a 1999 interview, Egoyan attributes his artistic fixation on father-daughter incest to a young woman he loved in his youth who was abused by her father. Brian D. Johnson, “Atom’s Journey: Canada’s Celebrated Director Reveals the Rite of Passage behind His Cinematic Obsessions,” Maclean’s, September 13, 1999.

  10. 10. The reason for this asymmetry, they argue, is that in mother-son incest, the son is challenging the father’s ownership of his wife, whereas in father-daughter incest, there is no challenge of ownership. Judith Herman and Lisa Hirschman, “Father-Daughter Incest,” Signs 2, no. 4 (Summer 1977): 735–56.

  11. 11. For a more thorough discussion of 1980s and 1990s feminist incest narratives and The Sweet Hereafter, see Melanie Boyd, “To Blame Her Sadness: Representing Incest in Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter,” in Image and Territory: Essays on Atom Egoyan, ed. Monique Tschofen and Jennifer Burwell (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007), 275–93.

  12. 12. Atom Egoyan, “Staying Open,” interview by Cindy Fuchs, Philadelphia City Paper, December 25, 1997–January 1, 1998.

  13. 13. Atom Egoyan, interview with the author, 6 March 2019. In Wilde’s play, the page of Herodias is male, and in love with Narraboth (the young Syrian). In Strauss’s setting, the role of the page is written for contralto, and is most often sung by a woman. Some productions of the opera, including Egoyan’s, make the character of the page female instead of treating it as a pants role.

  14. 14. David Levin, “Operatic School for Scandal,” in Operatic Migrations: Transforming Works and Crossing Boundaries, ed. Roberta Montemorra Marvin and Downing A. Thomas (Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), 243.

  15. 15. Atom Egoyan, interview with Stephen Weir, “Atom Egoyan on Canadian Opera Company Toronto Salome,” YouTube video, 4:55, posted by “Canada Art Channel,” April 20, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96WsfJ8FziY. Video archived at: https://archive.org/details/egoyan-coc-interview

  16. 16. Atom Egoyan, “Director’s Notes,” program for Salome (Toronto: Canadian Opera Company, 2013), 2.

  17. 17. Kay Armatage notes the power and penetration suggested by Herodes’s flashlight at this moment in the Dance sequence. She writes, “if he doesn’t look directly upon Salome’s body, Herodes at least demonstrates that he has the luminous weapon that would allow him to do so.” Kay Armatage and Caryl Clark, “Seeing and Hearing Atom Egoyan’s Salome,” in Image and Territory: Essays on Atom Egoyan, ed. Monique Tschofen and Jennifer Burwell (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2007), 322.

  18. 18. Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 4. Emphasis in original.

  19. 19. Egoyan, interview with the author.

  20. 20. “Ich habe deinen Mund geküsst, Jochanaan.” For quotations from the libretto, I will use Wilde’s English in text.

  21. 21. While Herodes literally weaponizes the blindfold, Egoyan weaponizes the very idea of invisibility—the capacity of an individual to control access to what Page 161 →is and is not seen. Egoyan wields a kind of blindfold against his audience in the Dance of the Seven Veils: he covers the proscenium with a cloth to block the stimulating visual spectacle we expect and makes us watch a brutal and unexpected rape instead.

  22. 22. The earlier version of Egoyan’s production did not make as much of the blindfold prop. In 2002, Herodes strangled Salome with his bare hands, the blindfold not having figured into the final scene as much.

  23. 23. Melanie Boyd faces a similar conundrum in her analysis of the incest storyline in The Sweet Hereafter. On Egoyan’s choice to depict the relationship between Nicole and her father as quasi-consensual, Boyd asks, “How should politically concerned viewers judge the revision? Do we condemn its failure to represent an innocent victim, or celebrate its ability to represent an empowered one?” Boyd, “To Blame Her Sadness,” 277.

  24. 24. Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, “‘Here’s Lookin’ at You, Kid:’ The Empowering Gaze in ‘Salome,’” Profession (1998): 11–22, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25595633; Lawrence Kramer, Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and Strauss (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Kramer argues that Salome ultimately loses the power she seizes in the Dance, while Hutcheon and Hutcheon believe that Salome is empowered by being gazed at throughout the opera.

  25. 25. Simonson, “Choreographing Salome,” 47.

  26. 26. Salome is one of those opera heroines, like Juliette and Cio-Cio San, who is a young teenager in the story but tends to be perceived as older by virtue of being portrayed by adult women and sung with immense vocal authority.

  27. 27. Salome’s infantile regression prompted one reviewer to note that when Salome turns into her own baby doll, “she says ‘I want the head of Jochanaan’ with the sound of ‘Titti wants an ice cream.’” Markus Schwering, “Oper Bonn: Matrosenmädel im Kaffeehaus,” Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, Feb. 2, 2015.

  28. 28. Sunnegårdh sang Salome in 2013. The role was performed by Ljuba Kazarnovskaya in 1996, and by Helen Field in 2002.

  29. 29. McVicar’s production was remounted in 2012 and 2018.

  30. 30. Michael sang Salome in the 2008 production. Several other sopranos have also taken the role in McVicar’s production over the course of its life at the ROH.

  31. 31. Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991), 2. Emphasis in original.

  32. 32. The fun of diagnosing one Straussian heroine with recourse to another is not lost on me.

  33. 33. Negrin’s production was remounted in 2018 at the Asociación Bilbaína de Amigos de la Ópera in Bilbao, Spain, and had been scheduled for a 2020 revival at the Houston Grand Opera before cancelation due to COVID-19.

  34. 34. Francisco Negrin quoted in Federico Simón, “Mujeres trágicas tras el telón,” Ediciones El País, June 2, 2010.

  35. 35. She asks for the head eight times before Herodes agrees and goes through the gamut of German verbs to request: “ich möchte . . . will ich . . . ich verlange von dir . . . ich fordre . . . gib mir . . . den Kopf des Jochanaan.”

  36. 36. Castellucci’s Salome is not necessarily a victim of sexual assault, but this is Page 162 →one interpretation of the staging. She is costumed in a white dress with a large red spot on the back at the height of her buttocks. The spot appears to be blood, but this could be a sign of menstruation, speaking to Salome’s womanhood and fertility—this connects with the significance of the full moon in the libretto—or the blood could indicate violent sexual penetration, likely from an abuse. There is no violence in the Dance of the Seven Veils, but Salome lies motionless on a stone, evoking images of the ritual sacrifice of young women.

  37. 37. Castellucci’s Salome is also not killed at the opera’s conclusion, but she is not given a revenge arc like the Salomes in this section are.

  38. 38. Levin, “Operatic School for Scandal,” 248. Levin also writes that he finds Strauss’s opera deeply problematic and appreciates that Egoyan’s production begins to suggest how and why.

  39. 39. Caryl Clark, “The Dirt on Salome,” in Performing Salome, Revealing Stories, ed. Clair Rowden (Farnham, UK: Ashgate), 170.

  40. 40. The historical Salome and Herod Antipas were actually related by blood, but that element of their family history is not included in the text of Wilde’s Salomé. The Herodian Dynasty was quite incestuous: Herod Antipas was the half-brother of Salome’s father, the half-uncle of her mother, and the first cousin of her grandmother.

  41. 41. Lena Dominelli, “Betrayal of Trust: A Feminist Analysis of Power Relationships in Incest Abuse and its Relevance for Social Work Practice,” British Journal of Social Work 19, no. 4 (1989): 297, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.bjsw.a055541

  42. 42. For more on the connections of typical “masculine” sexuality with violence and “feminine” sexuality with pain, see Irina Anderson and Kathy Doherty, Accounting for Rape: Psychology, Feminism and Discourse Analysis in the Study of Sexual Violence (London: Routledge, 2008), 6.

  43. 43. Female painters are relatively well represented among these depictions. See Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes (1610) and Elisabetta Sirani, Judith and Holofernes (mid-seventeenth century).

  44. 44. I direct interested parties to Alexander Serov’s 1863 opera Judith.

  45. 45. Ellie Hisama, “A Feminist Staging of Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia,” in Cusick et al., “Colloquy: Sexual Violence in Opera,” 240.

  46. 46. Levin, “Operatic School for Scandal,” 246–47.

  47. 47. Lucy Nevitt, Theatre & Violence (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 33.

  48. 48. Egoyan, interview with the author.

  49. 49. Egoyan, interview with the author.

  50. 50. Kramer, “One Coughs, the Other Dances,” 41.

  51. 51. Robin Holloway, “‘Salome’: Art or Kitsch?” in Richard Strauss: Salome, ed. Derrick Puffett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 149.

  52. 52. Derrick Puffett, “Postlude: Images of Salome,” in Puffett, Richard Strauss: Salome, 164.

  53. 53. Kramer, “One Coughs, the Other Dances,” 40.

  54. 54. Caddy, “Variations on the Dance of the Seven Veils,” 56. Ultimately, though, Page 163 →Caddy argues that the music in the Dance of the Seven Veils is elastic, and its role in the drama shifts according to the dancer and the historical and narrative context.

  55. 55. Holloway, “‘Salome’: Art or Kitsch?,” in Puffett, Richard Strauss, Salome, 149.

  56. 56. Egoyan, interview with the author.

  57. 57. Egoyan, interview with the author.

  58. 58. Kramer, “One Coughs, the Other Dances,” 41.

  59. 59. Egoyan, interview with the author.

  60. 60. Nevitt, Theatre & Violence, 21–22. Emphasis in original.

  61. 61. Nevitt, Theatre & Violence, 22.

  62. 62. Levin, “Operatic School for Scandal,” 246.

  63. 63. Paul Robinson, “It’s Not Over Until the Soprano Dies,” New York Times Book Review, January 1, 1989, https://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/01/books/it-s-not-over-until-the-soprano-dies.html; Abbate, “Opera; or, the Envoicing of Women.” Both articles are responses to Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women.

  64. 64. Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and the Histories of Art (New York: Routledge, 1988), 218.

  65. 65. Caruth, introduction to “Recapturing the Past,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Emphasis in original.

  66. 66. Gill, Gender and the Media, 139.

  67. 67. Gill, Gender and the Media, 141.

  68. 68. Lisa Fitzpatrick has commented on the prevalence of these two contrary approaches to staging rape in spoken theater: methods focused on the harsh reality of sexual violence and methods that seek to present affective and subjective experiences of rape. Lisa Fitzpatrick, Rape on the Contemporary Stage (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 215.

  69. 69. I find Salome’s violent tendencies particularly cathartic because this subversion of gendered expectations and values takes place in the context of a story drawn from one of the most foundational texts in Western culture (the Bible) told through one of its most elevated art forms (opera).

  70. 70. Petra Dierkes-Thrun has observed two large trends in contemporary interpretations of Wilde’s Salomé: “One is to enlist Wilde in contemporary antihomophobic projects via a sentimentalization and allegorization of his personal struggles; the other is to present Salomé as a feminist icon by focusing on the liberating force of her excessive sexuality.” Dierkes-Thrun, Salome’s Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 161.

  71. 71. In 1977, Lindsay Kemp led an all-male production of Wilde’s play in which he played the title character. During the Dance of the Seven Veils, Kemp stripped away his drag to reveal his own body. More recently, the Lazarus Theatre Company’s decision to cast a male actor as Salomé in their 2019 production at the Greenwich Theatre in London indicates the continuing presence of a queer interpretation of this character. See also: Elaine Showalter, “The Veiled Woman,” in Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Viking, 1990), 167–68.

  72. 72. Reading Salome as a stand-in for Wilde also guided Kate Millett’s 1970 Page 164 →characterization of Salomé as “a drama of homosexual guilt and rejection,” and Patrick Conrad’s 1978 film Mascara which, as Carolyn Abbate writes, “asks us to consider whether Salome is revealed (as the final veil falls) as a man—not literally a biological man, but bearing nonetheless some frightening sign of maleness, symbolizing visually her usurpation of powers conventionally assigned to men.” Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), 153; Abbate, “Opera; or, the Envoicing of Women,” 225.

  73. 73. Review quoted in James H. Johnson, “Antisemitism and Music in Nineteenth-Century France,” Musica Judaica 5, no. 1 (1982–83): 85, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23687595. Ralph Locke includes Salome in his discussion of the trope of the Orientalist woman as desirable and also dangerous. Ralph P. Locke, “Constructing the Oriental ‘Other’: Saint-Saëns’s ‘Samson et Dalila,’” Cambridge Opera Journal 3, no. 3 (1991): 269, http://www.jstor.org/stable/823619

  74. 74. Tamara Bernstein, a music critic for The National Post, accused Egoyan of pumping up the antisemitism in Salome in his production. Besides Bernstein’s review, the reception of the productions in this chapter almost never feature any commentary on the representation of Jewishness in the opera, even though it is a significant concern in the scholarly discourse around Salome. Bernstein, “A Night of Violation, Both Musically and Personally,” National Post, January 23, 2002.

  75. 75. Egoyan, interview with the author.

  76. 76. Nevitt, Theatre & Violence, 23.

  77. 77. Postscript: In February of 2023, after I completed this manuscript, Egoyan’s Salome returned to the Canadian Opera Company. I attended on opening night and was excited to see another change to the Dance of the Seven Veils, continuing the process of abstraction of the representation of Salome’s assault. Notably, Salome danced for much longer, and when the men eventually appeared, the struggle was represented without the physical contact and choreographed fighting of 2013; the focal point of the shadow ballet was Salome alone in the center, struggling, writhing, and clutching at herself amid the looming figures of the men. Clea Minaker worked with revival choreographer Julia Aplin to represent the rape in a way that is emotionally vivid while avoiding the explicit simulation of violence. I find this most recent iteration of the Dance in Egoyan’s production to be the most effective yet at communicating the impact of sexual violence on its subject without the potentially gratuitous distraction of the details of the act itself.

Chapter 3

  1. 1. Larry Wolff, The Singing Turk: Ottoman Power and Operatic Emotions on the European Stage from the Siege of Vienna to the Age of Napoleon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), chapter 5.

  2. 2. Prior to ProstG, German courts repeatedly ruled that prostitution was immoral and so contracts regarding sex work were null and void. ProstG removed most of the morality language from the relevant laws in order to legalize promotion of prostitution (pimping), to recognize contracts between sex workers and their Page 165 →clients as well as sex workers and their employers, and to grant sex workers access to employment benefits including healthcare and social security.

  3. 3. This kind of sentiment is expressed in: Derek Scally, “Sex, Drugs and . . . Opera,” Irish Times, July 3, 2004, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/sex-drugs-and-opera-1.1147637; Jochen Breiholz, “Die Entführung aus dem Serail,” Opera News, June 29, 2004, Metropolitan Opera Guild, https://www.operanews.com/operanews/review/review.aspx?id=359&issueID=15; Jane Paulick, “A Violent, Drug-Addled, Hooker-Filled Opera Angers Sponsors,” Deutsche Welle, June 24, 2004, https://www.dw.com/en/a-violent-drug-addled-hooker-filled-opera-angers-sponsors/a-1245750

  4. 4. Evan Baker, From the Score to the Stage: An Illustrated History of Continental Opera Production and Staging (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 378–79. See also Scally, “Sex, Drugs and . . . Opera.”

  5. 5. Breiholz, “Die Entführung aus dem Serail.” Similarly, a critic for the Telegraph troublingly described a scene of dismemberment of a dead sex worker as “S&M.” Michael White, “Hell Is Not under the Stage,” Telegraph, September 21, 2004, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/drama/3624283/Hell-is-not-under-the-stage.html

  6. 6. Scally, “Sex, Drugs and . . . Opera.”

  7. 7. Allanbrook, Hunter, and Wheelock, “Staging Mozart’s Women,” in Smart, Siren Songs, 47–48.

  8. 8. Paulick, “A Violent, Drug-Addled, Hooker-Filled Opera.”

  9. 9. Allanbrook, Hunter, and Wheelock, “Staging Mozart’s Women,” in Smart, Siren Songs, 50–57.

  10. 10. Charlotte Canning, Feminist Theaters in the U.S.A.: Staging Women’s Experience (London: Routledge, 1996), 169–71.

  11. 11. Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, “Model Antipornography Civil-Rights Ordinance,” Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women’s Equality, Appendix D, http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/other/ordinance/newday/AppD.htm

  12. 12. Elizabeth Howe, The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 43–44. Similarly, Jennifer Airey writes: “some plays foreground the physicality of the act of rape in the eroticized spectacle of the actress’s violated form—the titillating promise of sexual situations and naked female flesh could certainly help attract an audience.” Airey, The Politics of Rape: Sexual Atrocity, Propaganda Wars, and the Restoration Stage (Newark: University of Delaware, 2012), 26.

  13. 13. I am using “realism” interchangeably with “naturalism” to refer to a general aesthetic of mimetic representation. In theater studies, these terms have at times distinct and nuanced meanings, which I do not wish to evoke here.

  14. 14. Bieito’s version of Entführung is just under two and a half hours and was performed with no intermission.

  15. 15. Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis (London: Routledge, 1997), xiii.

  16. 16. Elaine Aston, “Feminist Theories of Representation: The Case against Page 166 →Realism,” in An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre (London: Routledge, 1994), 35.

  17. 17. Beethoven’s Fidelio is a notable exception as a rescue opera where the soprano rescues her husband.

  18. 18. Patricia R. Schroeder, The Feminist Possibilities of Dramatic Realism (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996); Kim Solga, Violence Against Women in Early Modern Performance: Invisible Acts (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

  19. 19. Risi, Oper in Performance, 34. My translation.

  20. 20. Micaela Baranello, “Die Entführung aus dem Serail, or, Men Who Hate Women,” Likely Impossibilities, June 2, 2013, http://likelyimpossibilities.com/2013/06/die-entfuhrung-aus-dem-serail-or-men.html

  21. 21. Berta Joncus, “‘Ich bin eine Engländerin, zur Freyheit geboren’: Blonde and the Enlightened Female in Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail,” Opera Quarterly 26, no. 4 (2010): 574, https://doi.org/10.1093/oq/kbq050. See also Matthew Head, Orientalism, Masquerade and Mozart’s Turkish Music (London: Royal Musical Association, 2000).

  22. 22. This aria is one of Risi’s examples as well. Risi, Oper in Performance, 34–35.

  23. 23. In her review, Baranello notes that most of the reviews she has read of this production are written by men and tend to focus on the male gaze in their analysis of “Martern aller Arten.” By contrast, she says that she found herself identifying powerfully with Konstanze in this scene and writes that “the production’s equal (if not greater) weight on the women’s perspectives is one of its most remarkable aspects.” Baranello, “Men Who Hate Women.”

  24. 24. Katherine Pratt Ewing, “Living Islam in the Diaspora: Between Turkey and Germany,” South Atlantic Quarterly 102, no. 2–3 (2003): 405–31, https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-102-2-3-405

  25. 25. For a discussion of the East/West European representational framework of sex trafficking rhetoric, see: Rutvica Andrijasevic, “The Figure of the Trafficked Victim: Gender, Rights and Representation,” in SAGE Handbook of Feminist Theory, ed. Mary Evans et al. (London: SAGE Publications, 2014), 359–73.

  26. 26. Window prostitution involves sex workers dancing or otherwise advertising themselves in small cubicles visible from the street that open onto private rooms in which they work—for instance, in Amsterdam’s red-light district.

  27. 27. The production team consulted with Hydra, a Berlin sex workers’ advocacy group, about some of the representations in this production. Originally, bass Jens Larsen says he was going to cut off the sex worker’s ear during “Martern aller Arten,” but the women in Hydra said the nipple would be more realistic. While I applaud the team for consulting with these women, doing so is not an automatic guarantee that the representation will be legible or critically sound. Roger Boyes, “Opera So Lewd It Makes Berlin Blush,” Times, June 26, 2004, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/opera-so-lewd-it-makes-berlin-blush-v9sdntsf9wn; Alan Riding, “Definitely Not Your Mother’s Mozart Opera,” New York Times, July 10, 2004, https://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/10/arts/definitely-not-your-mother-s-mozart-opera.html?smid=url-share

  28. Page 167 →28. See Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Andrea Dworkin, Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War Against Women (New York: Free Press, 1997); Melissa Farley and Vanessa Kelly, “Prostitution: A Critical Review of the Medical and Social Sciences Literature,” Women and Criminal Justice 11, no. 4 (2000): 29–64, https://doi.org/10.1300/J012v11n04_04; Janice G. Raymond, “Ten Reasons for Not Legalizing Prostitution and a Legal Response to the Demand for Prostitution,” Journal of Trauma Practice 2, no. 3–4 (2004): 315–32, https://doi.org/10.1300/J189v02n03_17; Kathleen Barry, The Prostitution of Sexuality (New York: New York University Press, 1995); Sheila Jeffreys, The Idea of Prostitution (Melbourne: Spinifex, 1997); Donna M. Hughes, The Demand for Victims of Sex Trafficking (Kingston: University of Rhode Island, 2005).

  29. 29. Carol Wolkowitz, Bodies at Work (London: SAGE Publications, 2006).

  30. 30. Wajdi Mouawad, “Director’s Notes,” Die Entführung aus dem Serail, program for Winter 2018 (Toronto: Canadian Opera Company, 2018), 28.

  31. 31. Stephanie’s libretto does not specify the length of captivity.

  32. 32. Wajdi Mouawad, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, 2016. “Was gab es bei mir Zuhaus so wichtiges, um so zu hetzen? Dort wie hier stand ich bei einem Herrn in Diensten, dort wie hier nannte man mich Diener, aber dort schien die Sonne, wenn es hier regnet.” For dialogue quotations, I will use the English translation as projected in the surtitles at the COC in 2018.

  33. 33. “Ob hier oder dort, dort oder hier, ob du oder er, er oder du, der eine taugt nicht mehr als der andere!”

  34. 34. “Und trotz der Grausamkeit seiner Worte wusste ich, dass er gut war.”

  35. 35. “Dieses Vergnügen wirst du nicht finden. Der Tod geht hierzulande, mit Martern aller Arten, langsame und schmerzhafte Wege.”

  36. 36. Alexander Neef, “A Message from General Director Alexander Neef,” program for Winter 2018 (Toronto: Canadian Opera Company, 2018), 5.

  37. 37. Neef, “A Message from General Director Alexander Neef,” 5.

  38. 38. Jane Archibald quoted in Catherine Kustanczy, “‘An Actual Human Being’: Jane Archibald Talks about Konstanze and Working with Wajdi Mouawad,” program for Winter 2018, 39.

  39. 39. “Nie hätte ich geahnt, dass mein Herz einmal so zerrissen wäre. Eure Gesichter fließen ineinander. Du bist mächtig, brillant, großzügig wie kein anderer Mann, während seines geprägt ist von Unschuld, von Jugend, und wenn du mich erzittern lässt, so lässt er mein Herz höher schlagen.”

  40. 40. “Aber ich könnte es nicht ertragen mitanzusehen, wie du dich einem anderen zuwendest. Das nicht! Welcher Mann sagte das nicht über die Frau, nach der er verrückt ist?”

  41. 41. “Meinst du, deine Welt wäre besser als die meine?”

  42. 42. “Warum kriege ich immer die Kindsköpfe ab, die immer nur am Klagen sind!”

  43. Page 168 →die zitternd deinen Befehlen gehorcht? Solchen Phantasien gibt man sich bei mir nicht hin, bei mir benimmt man sich anders.”

  44. 44. “Zärtlichkeit und Schmeicheln! Wir sind in der Türkei! Ich bin dein Herr und du bist meine Sklavin: ich befehle, du gehorchst!”

  45. 45. “In Europa läuft das genauso!”

  46. 46. “Sei bloß still oder ich mache dir den Türken!”

  47. 47. “Ich habe mehrfach das Exil erlebt. Das Land zu wechseln und die Sprache, macht man sich mit der Zeit zu einem Gewinn, zu einer Identität.”

  48. 48. “Wer könnte mich besser verstehen als du, und ich, als dich? Wir waren Herrin und Dienerin, jetzt sind wir zwei Frauen, Seite an Seite.”

  49. 49. “Liebe deine Blonde über alles und lass sie gehen.”

  50. 50. “BLONDE. Ihr wolltet uns gerne retten, unter der Bedingung, dass wir euch treu geblieben sind . . . KONSTANZE. Was wäre passiert, wenn wir es nicht gewesen wären? Wärt ihr wieder losgesegelt, auf eurem Schiff? Untreue Frauen wollen wir nicht? BLONDE. Am unerträglichsten war, dass ihr uns gezwungen habt, euch anzulügen, um unser Leben zu retten.”

  51. 51. “Zwei Jahre lang im Hause eines Mannes zu schlafen, der mich unentwegt zu verführen versucht, mich zu erobern, der mir ein Geschenk nach dem andern macht, mich zu seiner Königin bestimmt, zur Königin seines Lebens, was soll ich denn machen?”

  52. 52. “Großmütiger Mann! O daß ich es könnte, daß ich’s erwidern könnte.”

  53. 53. Edward Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (1981; repr., New York: Vintage, 1997).

  54. 54. The supernumerary women in Mouawad’s production were costumed in floor-length red dresses. In 2018 in Toronto, promotional posters for Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale adorned bus shelters right outside the theater. The accidental visual similarity did not help matters.

  55. 55. Consider Sara Ahmed’s words: “Becoming a feminist was about becoming audible, feminism as screaming in order to be heard; screaming as making violence visible; feminism as acquiring a voice.” Sarah Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 73.

  56. 56. I am reminded of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s analysis of hegemonic Western feminism and the silence of its subaltern subjects. In the context of my production analysis, my subjects are not actual Eastern European or Arabic women but rather the representations of such women constructed by the production teams and especially the directors of these operas. Feminine agency looks different in different cultural contexts and the intersections of gender with race, ethnicity, nationality, and religion are rich and complex. But I find these complexities generally absent from the representations of “Turkish” women in these productions of Entführung. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–316; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Rani of Sirmu,” in Europe and Its Others, ed. Francis Barker (Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1985), 146–58.

  57. Page 169 →57. Mary von Aue, “A Radical Redo for ‘Madama Butterfly’—to Save It?” New York Times, May 19, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/arts/music/a-radical-redo-for-madama-butterfly-to-save-it.html

  58. 58. The Boston Lyric Opera canceled a planned production of Madama Butterfly in 2020 and instead began “The Butterfly Process,” a series of conversations with artists and community members about the history and legacy of Butterfly in the context of a period of heightened racism against Asian American communities.

  59. 59. Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver, “Introduction: Rereading Rape,” in Rape and Representation, ed. Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 4.

  60. 60. Magnus Tessing Schneider identifies a similar “ethical turn” in American opera scholarship in the last quarter century. Magnus Tessing Schneider, The Original Portrayal of Mozart’s Don Giovanni (London: Routledge, 2022), 213.

  61. 61. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), chapter 5.

Chapter 4

  1. 1. British music critic Hugo Shirley has similarly remarked that grand opera “tended to favour history and its battles for the scenic opportunities they afforded rather than for the lessons they taught.” Hugo Shirley, “Mariinsky’s Les Troyens—A Bad Night for Berlioz and Edinburgh,” Spectator, September 6, 2014.

  2. 2. Knabe’s Turandot was remounted in 2015 and 2018.

  3. 3. The Third Geneva Convention “relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War,” adopted in 1929, specifies that POWs are to be humanely treated and protected from violence, but acts of sexual violence are not specifically named.

  4. 4. Alexandra Stiglmayer, “The Rapes in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” in Mass Rape, ed. Alexandra Stiglmayer (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 84.

  5. 5. Ann J. Cahill, Rethinking Rape (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 27.

  6. 6. The ballet movement has been subject to significant cuts in this ROH production, including cutting the choral numbers entirely. It is common practice to make cuts to the long dance movements of French grand opera in contemporary performance. Even with the cuts, this orchestral interlude is over five minutes long.

  7. 7. Eileen L. Zurbriggen, “Rape, War, and the Socialization of Masculinity: Why Our Refusal to Give Up Wars Ensures that Rape Cannot Be Eradicated,” Psychology of Women Quarterly 34, no. 4 (2010): 542, 544, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-6402.2010.01603.x

  8. 8. Sexual violence and military violence correspond not only in combat zones in which enemy women are raped, but off the battlefield as well. Researchers have established significant correlation between military service and domestic violence perpetration for both active-duty service members and veterans. This correlation is mediated by the role of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder among veterans, but it is worth noting that we see similarly inflated rates of domestic violence perpetration in domestic police forces. Resul Cesur and Joseph J. Sabia, “When War Page 170 →Comes Home: The Effect of Combat Service on Domestic Violence,” Review of Economics and Statistics 98, no. 2 (2016): 209–25, https://doi.org/10.1162/REST_a_00541; Jennifer M. Gierisch, et al., “Intimate Partner Violence: Prevalence Among U.S. Military Veterans and Active Duty Servicemembers and a Review of Intervention Approaches,” Evidence-Based Synthesis Program Center, report prepared for the Department of Veterans Affairs (Durham, NC: Durham Veterans Affairs Healthcare System, 2013); Holly G. Prigerson, Paul K. Maciejewski, and Robert A. Rosenheck, “Population Attributable Fractions of Psychiatric Disorders and Behavioral Outcomes Associated with Combat Exposure Among US Men,” American Journal of Public Health 92, no. 1 (2002): 59–63; Leanor Boulin Johnson, “On the Front Lines: Police Stress and Family Well-Being. Hearing Before the Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families House of Representatives,” 102 Congress First Session, May 20 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1991), 32–48; Peter H. Neidig, Harold E. Russell, and Albert F. Seng, “Interspousal Aggression in Law Enforcement Families: A Preliminary Investigation,” Police Studies 15, no. 1 (1991): 30–38.

  9. 9. Amnesty International’s fact sheet about violence against women in armed conflict reads that women “experience armed conflicts as sexual objects, as presumed emblems of national and ethnic identity, and as female members of ethnic, racial, religious, or national groups.” “Violence Against Women in Armed Conflict: A Fact Sheet,” Amnesty International (25 August 2015), https://docgo.net/vaw-in-armed-conflict-fact-sheet

  10. 10. Brownmiller argues that rape is a part of a conscious effort to destroy the enemy and mark the men as impotent when they can no longer do their masculine duty to protect “their” women. Brownmiller, Against Our Will, 31. For an excellent gloss of Brownmiller’s larger argument on war rape, see Cahill, Rethinking Rape, 18–19.

  11. 11. This production uses the Swedish character names from Verdi’s original version of the opera. I have included the character names from the more familiar later version, set in Boston, in parentheses.

  12. 12. Inger Skjelsbæk, The Political Psychology of War Rape: Studies from Bosnia and Herzegovina (New York: Routledge, 2012), 140.

  13. 13. Brownmiller, Against Our Will, 285.

  14. 14. Cahill problematizes Brownmiller’s claim that rape is not a sexual act in Rethinking Rape, though she also fails to consider sexual violence against trans people.

  15. 15. Cahill, Rethinking Rape, 13.

  16. 16. Brownmiller, Against Our Will, 31.

  17. 17. Tilman Knabe, “Ein Gespräch mit dem Produktionsteam,” 9. “Vielleicht findet Kalaf Turandot attraktiv, vielleicht nicht. Sicher ist: Sie ist wichtig für ihn, weil sie das verkörpert, was er braucht. . . . Kalaf fist kein Dummkopf und schmachtender Liebhaber, ganz im Gegenteil: Er ist ein raffinierter, hochstrategischer Politiker.” All translations are mine.

  18. 18. “Non profanarmi!,” “mai nessun m’avrà!,” “Non mi toccar, straniero!” The Page 171 →Italian word “straniero” literally translates to “stranger” or “foreigner,” and it has connotations of “enemy.”

  19. 19. “Onta su me!” I discuss the cut in more detail later.

  20. 20. Tilman Knabe and Stefan Soltesz, “Ein Gespräch mit dem Produktionsteam,” 7, 11. Knabe: “Liebe ist immer nur ein Vehikel für etwas. Wenn Liebe gesagt wird, ist immer Überleben oder Politik und Macht gemeint.” Soltesz: “Sie sind nur Vehikel, damit Kalaf an die Macht kommen kann.”

  21. 21. Siobhán K. Fisher, “Occupation of the Womb: Forced Impregnation as Genocide,” Duke Law Journal 46, no. 1 (1996): 92, https://doi.org/10.2307/1372967

  22. 22. Cahill, Rethinking Rape, 9.

  23. 23. Brownmiller, Against Our Will, 5.

  24. 24. This element of group sexual assault exists outside of war as well. One real-world example is the 2019 case of two men who filmed themselves high fiving after raping a woman in a London nightclub. Samuel Osborne, “Men Who Filmed Themselves Raping Woman in Nightclub then Ran Off High-Fiving Each Other Both Jailed for 7 Years,” Independent, November 22, 2019.

  25. 25. This production is of the original 1862 version of Forza rather than the popular 1869 revision. For the purposes of my analysis, the differences are not significant; the order of events is different in Act 3 scene 3, but the content is largely unchanged.

  26. 26. “Viva, viva la pazzia che qui sola ha da regnar!”

  27. 27. Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Turning Rape into Pornography: Postmodern Genocide,” in Stiglmayer, Mass Rape, 78–79.

  28. 28. Reviews of Michieletto’s Tell frequently identified the setting as the Balkan Conflict, despite the ambiguous pan-military uniforms the soldiers wear. The publicity of the rape camps in Bosnia and Herzegovina led to important and overdue reforms in the way we think about wartime rape, but it has also resulted in a tendency among the general population to think that war rape, and especially systemic rape as a weapon of war, are unique to the Serbian occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

  29. 29. Risi, Oper in Performance, 34.

  30. 30. Jürgen Kühnel, “Regietheater. Konzeption und Praxis am Beispiel Mozarts. Versuch einter Typologie,” in Regietheater. Konzeption und Praxis am Beispiel der Bühnenwerke Mozarts, essays from the Salzburg Symposion 2005 by Jürgen Kühnel, Ulrich Müller, and Oswald Panagl (Salzburg: Verlag Mueller-Speiser, 2007), 23.

  31. 31. Joy Calico, Brecht at the Opera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 140–63.

  32. 32. Calico, Brecht at the Opera, 142.

  33. 33. Brecht writes that in epic theater, “the object of this ‘effect’ is to allow the spectator to criticize constructively from a social point of view.” It constitutes a “changeover from representation to commentary.” Berthold Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 125–26.

  34. Page 172 →34. “Le gloriose ferite col trionfo il destin coronò. . . . La vittoria più rifulge de’ figli al valor!” The text of this scene, including the “Rataplan” chorus, comes from Schiller’s Wallensteins Lager and was added to Forza’s libretto to introduce more comedy to the generally somber opera. Kratzer’s production does not benefit from this infusion of comedy; he reimagines this scene as a display of vicious cruelty.

  35. 35. In the written text of Turandot, the chorus addresses the old Chinese emperor. In Knabe’s staging, they address Calaf, the foreign prince who seeks the throne.

  36. 36. The chorus in these productions evoke ideas about the crowd formulated by Gustave Le Bon in 1895. He argues that crowds are violent, ferocious, and suggestible. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd (1895; repr. London: Routledge, 1995).

  37. 37. In the program notes for Turandot, Knabe argues that he already hears fascism in the opera, especially in the crowd scenes. Tilman Knabe, “Ein Gespräch mit dem Produktionsteam,” in program for Puccini’s Turandot (Essen: Aalto-Musiktheater, 2007), 7.

  38. 38. Knabe, “Ein Gespräch mit dem Produktionsteam,” 7.

  39. 39. The sopranos in 2007 and 2018 both wear long blond wigs, whereas the tenors wear their natural hair: one is bald and one has dark curly hair. My interpretation of this is that Turandot’s hair matters to the production whereas Calaf’s does not necessarily.

  40. 40. Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie, Abolition. Feminism. Now. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022), especially 96, 110.

  41. 41. Alexandra Coghlan, “The Gang Rape Was the Least Offensive Thing about Royal Opera’s New William Tell,” Spectator, June 29, 2015, https://www.spectator.com.au/2015/07/the-gang-rape-was-the-least-offensive-thing-about-royal-operas-new-william-tell

  42. 42. Rupert Christiansen, “Guillaume Tell, Royal Opera House, Review: ‘Lame and Pretentious,’” Telegraph, June 30, 2015, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/opera/11708131/Guillaume-Tell-Royal-Opera-House-review-lame-and-pretentious.html

  43. 43. Mark Valencia, “Guillaume Tell (Royal Opera House),” WhatsOnStage, 30 June 2015, https://www.whatsonstage.com/london-theatre/reviews/guillaume-tell-royal-opera-house_38171.html

  44. 44. Friedrich Schiller, Wilhelm Tell, trans. William F. Mainland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 9.

  45. 45. This production is explicitly critical of the heroic narrative of William Tell the legendary figure. One of the defining features of this production is the presence of an actor representing an idealized comic-book image of Tell, who highlights the contrast between the real Tell and the legend, between the reality of war and the fantasy.

  46. 46. Kasper Holten, “Small Adjustments Made to Production of Guillaume Tell,” Royal Opera House News, July 5, 2015; archived at Wayback Machine, capture dated 5 September 2015, https://web.archive.org/web/20150905204706/roh.org.uk/news/small-adjustments-made-to-production-of-guillaume-tell

  47. Page 173 →47. “Trascinata da un uomo, come te, come te, straniero, là nella notte atroce, dove si spense la sua fresca voce!”

  48. 48. The synopsis in the program for Knabe’s Turandot reads, “she wants to escape the fate of her ancestor Lo-u-Ling, who was raped and murdered.” “Handlung,” in program for Puccini’s Turandot, 2. Similar language appears in many synopses of Turandot online.

  49. 49. “Dell’ava lo strazio non si rinnoverà!”

  50. 50. The music for this scene was composed by Franco Alfano after Puccini’s death.

  51. 51. Roger Parker, Remaking the Song: Operatic Visions and Revisions from Handel to Berio (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 98.

  52. 52. Englund sees this directorial approach as fulfilling what Catherine Clément asks for when she imagines a staging of The Magic Flute in which Sarastro’s priests perform the violence against Pamina and the Queen that is implied by their misogynistic worldview. Englund, Deviant Opera, 37; Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, 75–76.

  53. 53. Englund, Deviant Opera, 41.

  54. 54. Englund, Deviant Opera, 42.

  55. 55. Micaela Baranello, “Staging Opera Ballet,” in Cusick et al., “Colloquy: Sexual Violence in Opera,” 226.

  56. 56. I suspect the fact that the music lost to this cut was composed by Franco Alfano and not Puccini made it an easier sell. Music director Stefan Soltesz explains that they play the Toscanini version with an additional cut, “because we think Puccini wanted to get to the end quickly” (“da Puccini unserer Ansicht nach zügig zum Ende finden wollte”). Soltesz, “Ein Gespräch mit dem Produktionsteam,” 10.

  57. 57. “Il suo nome è Amor!”

  58. 58. “Violence Against Women in Armed Conflict: A Fact Sheet,” Amnesty International, 25 August 2015, https://docgo.net/vaw-in-armed-conflict-fact-sheet

  59. 59. Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, ratified by the General Assembly of the United Nations 12 January 1951.

  60. 60. Rhonda Copelon, “Surfacing Gender: Reconceptualizing Crimes Against Women in Times of War,” in Stiglmayer, Mass Rape, 208.

  61. 61. Kate Manne argues that the status of women as interchangeable and representative of a certain type of woman (if not all women) is an element of misogyny. Manne, Down Girl, 58. See also Martha Nussbaum, “Objectification,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 24, no. 4 (1995): 257, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2961930; Rae Langton, Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 226.

  62. 62. Airey, The Politics of Rape, 12.

  63. 63. Airey, The Politics of Rape, 26.

  64. 64. Fitzpatrick, Rape on the Contemporary Stage, 138.

  65. 65. Sabine Sielke, Reading Rape: The Rhetoric of Sexual Violence in American Literature and Culture, 1790–1990 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 183. Page 174 →Similarly, Anikó Imre traces feminist analyses of post-colonial texts that problematize the use of the violation of women as a metaphor for the suffering of the nation. Imre, “Hungarian Poetic Nationalism or National Pornography? Eastern Europe and Feminism—With a Difference,” in Violence and the Body: Race, Gender, and the State, ed. Arturo J. Aldama (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 43–44.

  66. 66. Jean-Charles is writing here about the 1968 novella by Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Amour, colère, folie. Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2014), 60.

  67. 67. Catharine Woodward, “A Follow-Up,” blog post on Opera Div, July 1, 2015, https://operacat.tumblr.com/post/122933791828/a-follow-up; emphasis in the original.

  68. 68. Cahill, Rethinking Rape, 143.

  69. 69. “Die Männerphantasie, welche der Komponist und seine Autoren in dem Stück verwirklichen, ist schon starker Tobak. Da sind drei Machos am Werk, die die einzigen Frauen in der Oper auf brutalste Weise vernichten: Die eine bringt sich um und die andere wird missbraucht. Zynisch formuliert: Es lebe das Patriarchat.” Knabe, “Ein Gespräch mit dem Produktionsteam,” 11.

Conclusion

  1. 1. On the Met’s decision to stop using blackface makeup in productions of Otello in 2015: Michael Cooper, “An ‘Otello’ without Blackface Highlights an Enduring Tradition in Opera,” New York Times, September 17, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/20/arts/music/an-otello-without-the-blackface-nods-to-modern-tastes.html. On the Paris Opera’s efforts to deal with racial stereotypes: Alex Marshall, “Paris Opera to Act on Racist Stereotypes in Ballet,” New York Times, February 8, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/08/arts/dance/paris-ballet-diversity.html. See also André, Black Opera, especially 2, 13–14.

  2. 2. Dylan Robinson, “Decolonial Regietheater,” on the panel “On ‘Music Colonialism’: Intersectional and Interdisciplinary Methodologies in New Critical Studies of Western Art Musics” (paper, Joint Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, the Society for Ethnomusicology, and the Society for Music Theory, New Orleans, LA, November 11, 2022).

  3. 3. Steve Paulson, “Critical Intimacy: An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,” LA Review of Books, July 29, 2016, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/critical-intimacy-interview-gayatri-chakravorty-spivak

  4. 4. Susan McClary argues that Regietheater gives audience members an “arch way of relating to our shared cultural legacy, reveling in the guilty pleasures of favorite arias while maintaining ironic distance.” Susan McClary, The Passions of Peter Sellars: Staging the Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019).

  5. 5. Carolyn Abbate, Richard Taruskin, and James Hepokoski have all pointed out a tendency among musicologists to perceive a moral urgency or ethical debt owed to anthropomorphized works. Carolyn Abbate, “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?”Page 175 → Critical Inquiry 30, no. 3 (2004), 517, https://doi.org/10.1086/421160; Richard Taruskin, Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 24; James Hepokoski, “Operatic Stagings: Positions and Paradoxes: Response to David J. Levin,” in Verdi 2001: Proceedings of the International Conference, Parma, New York, New Haven, ed. Fabrizio Della Seta, Roberta Montemorra Marvin, Marco Marica (Florence: L.S. Olschki, 2003), 2:479.

  6. 6. In 2016, Tonia Sina, Siobhan Richardson, and Alicia Rodis founded Intimacy Directors International, based in part on Sina’s 2006 Master’s thesis. Tonia Sina Campanella, “Intimate Encounters; Staging Intimacy and Sensuality” (Master’s thesis, Virginia Commonwealth University, 2006).

  7. 7. Tonia Sina, Siobhan Richardson, and Alicia Rodis, “Pillars of Safe Intimacy: Rehearsal and Performance Practice,” Intimacy Directors International, teamidi.org, https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/924101_1620d7333f6a4809a2765257e750e255.pdf

  8. 8. William Cheng, Loving Music Till It Hurts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 5.

. In May 2018, I was in the audience of director Stephen Lawless’s production of Donizetti’s Anna Bolena at the Canadian Opera Company. Originally staged at the Met, Lawless’s production was simple and effective, and it highlighted the stunning performance of Sondra Radvanovsky as the titular queen. The action takes place while Anna (Anne Boleyn) is married to Enrico (Henry VIII) but preoccupied with the memory of her first love, Riccardo (Henry Percy). In the third scene of Act 1, Riccardo finds Anna in her chambers and tells her he still loves her. Anna tells him to leave and asks that he not come to see her again. At this moment in the libretto, Riccardo draws his sword and attempts to kill himself. But in Lawless’s production, after Riccardo sings “Let this be my answer to your oath,” he pins Anna to her bed by her wrists and attempts to rape her until her screams alert a page who had been hiding nearby.1 I was alarmed by this unexpected twist in the production, though there was no noticeable reaction from the audience en masse. I found myself suddenly perceiving Riccardo and his relationship with Anna completely differently. Would Lawless continue to explore this dark side of Riccardo’s obsession throughout the rest of the opera? Would Anna’s continuing love for Riccardo be represented differently in light of this attack? But there was no clear follow-through of this story line. This moment stood alone. Perhaps, I was left thinking, we were simply meant to excuse the attempted rape as a sign of Riccardo’s uncontrollable desire for Anna.

. When I address the latent (and not so latent) sexual violence and misogyny present in the libretti of many beloved operas, I walk on well-tread ground. There is a rich history of scholarship on violence against women in opera extending back to Catherine Clément’s landmark book, Opera, or the Undoing of Women.9 And recent years have seen the expansion of this work specifically in regards to sexual violence in opera.10 I continue this work here, taking up the project of resistance by critiquing the way operatic sexual violence is staged in the twenty-first century and the influence these representations have on our understandings of canonic operas and of sexual violence in our own culture. Naomi André calls this kind of approach, which is sensitive to the present-day relevance of historical works, an “engaged musicology.”11

. The Wildean Salome exerts an incredible amount of agency over the events of the story. She uses her body and her sexuality in a calculated and intentional way to force the hand of a powerful man. Although Salome uses her power to do harm, that power in itself is thrilling. Hers is a monstrous but also a revolutionary sexuality. Since the opera’s premiere, the Dance of the Seven Veils has frequently been appropriated as a showcase for erotic feminine power. When Salome had its first American performance at the Metropolitan Opera in 1907, it was banned after opening night and the remainder of the performances were canceled, but the Dance of the Seven Veils lived on in American vaudeville, dance, film, and burlesque.3 Indeed, Susan Glenn has argued that in the twentieth century, Salome was “an important resource for women performers and audiences, a vehicle for self-expression and sexualized assertiveness.”4

. The Wildean Salome exerts an incredible amount of agency over the events of the story. She uses her body and her sexuality in a calculated and intentional way to force the hand of a powerful man. Although Salome uses her power to do harm, that power in itself is thrilling. Hers is a monstrous but also a revolutionary sexuality. Since the opera’s premiere, the Dance of the Seven Veils has frequently been appropriated as a showcase for erotic feminine power. When Salome had its first American performance at the Metropolitan Opera in 1907, it was banned after opening night and the remainder of the performances were canceled, but the Dance of the Seven Veils lived on in American vaudeville, dance, film, and burlesque.3 Indeed, Susan Glenn has argued that in the twentieth century, Salome was “an important resource for women performers and audiences, a vehicle for self-expression and sexualized assertiveness.”4

. Atom Egoyan’s 1996 Salome explores themes of trauma, sexuality, and scopophilia, which are common in much of his film work. Like all of the productions in this chapter, Salome’s sexual assault is the locus of her trauma and of the main action of the opera. Salome’s relationship with her stepfather links this production with Egoyan’s film oeuvre, in which the theme of father-daughter incest is common. Richard Bradshaw, the COC’s General Director, approached Egoyan about creating a new Salome production after seeing the director’s latest film, Exotica (1994), in which a father loses his young daughter and becomes obsessed with a stripper with a school-girl persona. And a year after Egoyan’s Salome debuted at the COC, he released his next film, The Sweet Hereafter, in which a fifteen-year-old girl is sexually abused by her father.9

. Incest was also an important theme for second-wave feminism. In a 1977 article, Judith Herman and Lisa Hirschman situate incest in the context of patriarchal societies and argue that in such societies, including our own, the incest taboo is asymmetrical; although incest is prohibited between mothers and sons and between fathers and daughters, the latter prohibition is considered to be less serious and it is violated more frequently.11 Egoyan said of this revision, “There was no way I could depict the incest the way it was in the book because it has become a cliché.”12

. When I address the latent (and not so latent) sexual violence and misogyny present in the libretti of many beloved operas, I walk on well-tread ground. There is a rich history of scholarship on violence against women in opera extending back to Catherine Clément’s landmark book, Opera, or the Undoing of Women.9 And recent years have seen the expansion of this work specifically in regards to sexual violence in opera.10 I continue this work here, taking up the project of resistance by critiquing the way operatic sexual violence is staged in the twenty-first century and the influence these representations have on our understandings of canonic operas and of sexual violence in our own culture. Naomi André calls this kind of approach, which is sensitive to the present-day relevance of historical works, an “engaged musicology.”11

. The guiding logic of Egoyan’s Salome is the politics of looking. At the center of his production is the idea of the frustrated gaze. Egoyan describes the plot of the opera thusly: “The page is infatuated with Narraboth, who does not return her gaze, and Narraboth is totally consumed with Salome, who does not return his gaze, and Salome of course is completely consumed with Jochanaan, who does not return her gaze.”13 This frustrated gazing all takes place within a culture of surveillance in which the guards carry handheld video cameras in 1996 and 2002, and camera phones in 2013. So, Salome is being watched all the time, not only by Narraboth and the other men onstage who desire her, but also by Herodes’s cameras. Egoyan describes his setting as a kind of panopticon, achieved not by architecture as in Jeremy Bentham’s formulation, but by video technology. Video clips are projected on the upstage wall of the set, and we see Salome on video before we see her in person. According to David Levin, “Egoyan derives not just a theatrical effect from this gambit, but a dramaturgical focus. . . . By introducing us to a Salome beyond the space and medium of her stage presence, Egoyan prepares us for the possibility that her pathology originates in some offstage space and medium as well.”14

. The guiding logic of Egoyan’s Salome is the politics of looking. At the center of his production is the idea of the frustrated gaze. Egoyan describes the plot of the opera thusly: “The page is infatuated with Narraboth, who does not return her gaze, and Narraboth is totally consumed with Salome, who does not return his gaze, and Salome of course is completely consumed with Jochanaan, who does not return her gaze.”13 This frustrated gazing all takes place within a culture of surveillance in which the guards carry handheld video cameras in 1996 and 2002, and camera phones in 2013. So, Salome is being watched all the time, not only by Narraboth and the other men onstage who desire her, but also by Herodes’s cameras. Egoyan describes his setting as a kind of panopticon, achieved not by architecture as in Jeremy Bentham’s formulation, but by video technology. Video clips are projected on the upstage wall of the set, and we see Salome on video before we see her in person. According to David Levin, “Egoyan derives not just a theatrical effect from this gambit, but a dramaturgical focus. . . . By introducing us to a Salome beyond the space and medium of her stage presence, Egoyan prepares us for the possibility that her pathology originates in some offstage space and medium as well.”14

. Salome’s present-day psychological malady is implicitly attributed to childhood trauma as revealed, albeit vaguely, in the Dance of the Seven Veils. The gang rape we witness appears to take place in real time in the world of the opera. When dancer-Salome’s shadow appears, she seems to be the present-day Salome we had been watching before the screen went up. She begins to dance, but she is interrupted and raped while the music plays. When the scrim drops at the end of the dance, Salome and the men are all positioned where the shadows had been projected a few moments before. Time is continuousPage 54 → here even as the visual mode shifts from shadow ballet back to opera. Although the rape we see takes place in the present, the remainder of the Dance of the Seven Veils sequence makes it clear that for Salome, this experience is inextricable from her childhood. Herodes’s presence in the foreground as the child-Salome wanders blindfolded through the dark forest implies not only surveillance but violation, and indicates that Salome understands her rape as an extension of her experiences with her stepfather in childhood.17 The emphasis on Salome’s childhood and Herodes’s violation is so great in this production that I misremembered the dance after my live attendance in 2013 and attributed the rape to Herodes with the assistance of the other men until viewing archival footage years later.

. Within the framework of sexual violence and trauma, Egoyan still traces a kind of development toward agency for Salome, though not the one his audience is accustomed to seeing. His Salome begins to come to terms with her trauma through acts of blindfolding to see and unsee her world as she chooses. In the Dance of the Seven Veils, the blindfold is a metaphor for self-knowledge and Salome’s ability to understand her trauma. The child-Salome wandering through the woods ties a blindfold over her eyes to begin her walk and removes it at the end just as dancer-Salome’s shadow appears on the screen. The blindfold in this instance is a symbol of the unknowability of Salome’s trauma. Trauma theorist Cathy Caruth defines the experience of trauma in a structure of belatedness: “Trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature—the way it was precisely not known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on.”18 Salome is unable to comprehend the memory of her trauma in full. She dons the blindfold herself in a gesture of self-preservation. Then, when child-Salome removes her blindfold, there is a moment in the crossfade to the shadow-play when it feels as if she can see dancer-Salome. The act of unblindfolding implies a new sense of clarity, even an act of recovered memory. As the two Salomes briefly glimpse one another, Egoyan dramatizes a revelation for Salome about her own history—a glimpse of a truth in her past that she had been unwilling or unable to see until now.

. Amid the surveillance and the power of the gaze that rules Egoyan’s stage, blindfolding is also a tool of rebellion in this production. Jochanaan is blindfolded when Narraboth first leads him onto the stage to speak with Salome. The prisoner removes the blindfold but averts his eyes from Salome throughout their long exchange. Upon uttering his final rejection, he ties the blindfold back over his own eyes. As Herodes’s prisoner, Jochanaan cannot Page 55 →control what happens to him. He is shackled and imprisoned, his movements are strictly controlled, and he is executed at a mere word from his captor. He cannot stop Salome from gazing at him, but he can choose not to return her gaze. His refusal to meet her eyes and his ultimate act of self-blinding at the end of their exchange disempower the spectacular Salome. Her power over the other men in the opera comes from her awareness and manipulation of their gaze, but she cannot exert this power over Jochanaan. This dynamic is already at play in the opera’s libretto and is made explicit in Egoyan’s production. Ultimately, though, Salome appropriates the power of Jochanaan’s blindfold for herself. When she is delivered Jochanaan’s still-blindfolded head, she uncovers its eyes and dons the blindfold herself in what Egoyan describes as “a moment of communion” with Jochanaan.19 She kisses the head while she wears his blindfold in an act of defiance against the rules of the surveillance society in which she lives. With this kiss, she chooses to possess Jochanaan not by gazing on him, as she has been gazed upon, but on her own terms: blind. When she removes the blindfold, she holds it over her head victoriously for her final ecstatic “I have kissed thy mouth, Jochanaan” over the crashing orchestral climax.20 Of course, Salome’s command over how and what she sees at this moment cannot go unpunished in Herodes’s world of surveillance and control. Herodes snatches the blindfold from her hands and strangles her with it.21 In one sense, Salome is only ever a victim of the gaze and of her own beauty. The power she wins at the conclusion of the opera cannot alter this. What she claims is a different kind of power. It is a power over her own perception, allied with her newfound understanding of the truth of her past trauma. Although she cannot be allowed to survive to the end of the opera, Salome dies victorious in at least this one way. She dies with her eyes uncovered, having truly seen Herodes and what he has done to her.22

. Amid the surveillance and the power of the gaze that rules Egoyan’s stage, blindfolding is also a tool of rebellion in this production. Jochanaan is blindfolded when Narraboth first leads him onto the stage to speak with Salome. The prisoner removes the blindfold but averts his eyes from Salome throughout their long exchange. Upon uttering his final rejection, he ties the blindfold back over his own eyes. As Herodes’s prisoner, Jochanaan cannot Page 55 →control what happens to him. He is shackled and imprisoned, his movements are strictly controlled, and he is executed at a mere word from his captor. He cannot stop Salome from gazing at him, but he can choose not to return her gaze. His refusal to meet her eyes and his ultimate act of self-blinding at the end of their exchange disempower the spectacular Salome. Her power over the other men in the opera comes from her awareness and manipulation of their gaze, but she cannot exert this power over Jochanaan. This dynamic is already at play in the opera’s libretto and is made explicit in Egoyan’s production. Ultimately, though, Salome appropriates the power of Jochanaan’s blindfold for herself. When she is delivered Jochanaan’s still-blindfolded head, she uncovers its eyes and dons the blindfold herself in what Egoyan describes as “a moment of communion” with Jochanaan.19 She kisses the head while she wears his blindfold in an act of defiance against the rules of the surveillance society in which she lives. With this kiss, she chooses to possess Jochanaan not by gazing on him, as she has been gazed upon, but on her own terms: blind. When she removes the blindfold, she holds it over her head victoriously for her final ecstatic “I have kissed thy mouth, Jochanaan” over the crashing orchestral climax.20 Of course, Salome’s command over how and what she sees at this moment cannot go unpunished in Herodes’s world of surveillance and control. Herodes snatches the blindfold from her hands and strangles her with it.21 In one sense, Salome is only ever a victim of the gaze and of her own beauty. The power she wins at the conclusion of the opera cannot alter this. What she claims is a different kind of power. It is a power over her own perception, allied with her newfound understanding of the truth of her past trauma. Although she cannot be allowed to survive to the end of the opera, Salome dies victorious in at least this one way. She dies with her eyes uncovered, having truly seen Herodes and what he has done to her.22

. Amid the surveillance and the power of the gaze that rules Egoyan’s stage, blindfolding is also a tool of rebellion in this production. Jochanaan is blindfolded when Narraboth first leads him onto the stage to speak with Salome. The prisoner removes the blindfold but averts his eyes from Salome throughout their long exchange. Upon uttering his final rejection, he ties the blindfold back over his own eyes. As Herodes’s prisoner, Jochanaan cannot Page 55 →control what happens to him. He is shackled and imprisoned, his movements are strictly controlled, and he is executed at a mere word from his captor. He cannot stop Salome from gazing at him, but he can choose not to return her gaze. His refusal to meet her eyes and his ultimate act of self-blinding at the end of their exchange disempower the spectacular Salome. Her power over the other men in the opera comes from her awareness and manipulation of their gaze, but she cannot exert this power over Jochanaan. This dynamic is already at play in the opera’s libretto and is made explicit in Egoyan’s production. Ultimately, though, Salome appropriates the power of Jochanaan’s blindfold for herself. When she is delivered Jochanaan’s still-blindfolded head, she uncovers its eyes and dons the blindfold herself in what Egoyan describes as “a moment of communion” with Jochanaan.19 She kisses the head while she wears his blindfold in an act of defiance against the rules of the surveillance society in which she lives. With this kiss, she chooses to possess Jochanaan not by gazing on him, as she has been gazed upon, but on her own terms: blind. When she removes the blindfold, she holds it over her head victoriously for her final ecstatic “I have kissed thy mouth, Jochanaan” over the crashing orchestral climax.20 Of course, Salome’s command over how and what she sees at this moment cannot go unpunished in Herodes’s world of surveillance and control. Herodes snatches the blindfold from her hands and strangles her with it.21 In one sense, Salome is only ever a victim of the gaze and of her own beauty. The power she wins at the conclusion of the opera cannot alter this. What she claims is a different kind of power. It is a power over her own perception, allied with her newfound understanding of the truth of her past trauma. Although she cannot be allowed to survive to the end of the opera, Salome dies victorious in at least this one way. She dies with her eyes uncovered, having truly seen Herodes and what he has done to her.22

. Amid the surveillance and the power of the gaze that rules Egoyan’s stage, blindfolding is also a tool of rebellion in this production. Jochanaan is blindfolded when Narraboth first leads him onto the stage to speak with Salome. The prisoner removes the blindfold but averts his eyes from Salome throughout their long exchange. Upon uttering his final rejection, he ties the blindfold back over his own eyes. As Herodes’s prisoner, Jochanaan cannot Page 55 →control what happens to him. He is shackled and imprisoned, his movements are strictly controlled, and he is executed at a mere word from his captor. He cannot stop Salome from gazing at him, but he can choose not to return her gaze. His refusal to meet her eyes and his ultimate act of self-blinding at the end of their exchange disempower the spectacular Salome. Her power over the other men in the opera comes from her awareness and manipulation of their gaze, but she cannot exert this power over Jochanaan. This dynamic is already at play in the opera’s libretto and is made explicit in Egoyan’s production. Ultimately, though, Salome appropriates the power of Jochanaan’s blindfold for herself. When she is delivered Jochanaan’s still-blindfolded head, she uncovers its eyes and dons the blindfold herself in what Egoyan describes as “a moment of communion” with Jochanaan.19 She kisses the head while she wears his blindfold in an act of defiance against the rules of the surveillance society in which she lives. With this kiss, she chooses to possess Jochanaan not by gazing on him, as she has been gazed upon, but on her own terms: blind. When she removes the blindfold, she holds it over her head victoriously for her final ecstatic “I have kissed thy mouth, Jochanaan” over the crashing orchestral climax.20 Of course, Salome’s command over how and what she sees at this moment cannot go unpunished in Herodes’s world of surveillance and control. Herodes snatches the blindfold from her hands and strangles her with it.21 In one sense, Salome is only ever a victim of the gaze and of her own beauty. The power she wins at the conclusion of the opera cannot alter this. What she claims is a different kind of power. It is a power over her own perception, allied with her newfound understanding of the truth of her past trauma. Although she cannot be allowed to survive to the end of the opera, Salome dies victorious in at least this one way. She dies with her eyes uncovered, having truly seen Herodes and what he has done to her.22

. Salome’s Regression (Salome via Freud): Freud’s influence on these interpretations of Salome is conspicuous. The generating logic for this staging concept seems to be the psychoanalytic premise that dysfunction, and especially sexual dysfunction, originates in traumatic experiences in childhood. Freud’s concept of regression is of particular importance in several productions. Regression refers to a defense mechanism by which the ego responds to trauma by reverting to an earlier stage of development. On the stage, evidence of this type of psychoanalytic interpretation can be seen in productions in which Salome displays childlike mannerisms or appears in juvenile costumes that do not align with our perception of the character’s age.26 The following productions fit into this pattern and represent Salome’s trauma either through a specifically psychoanalytic lens of regression or marked with childlike physicality more generally.

. Alexandra Szemerédy and Magdolna Parditka’s Salome for Theater Bonn in 2015 makes its psychoanalytic framework particularly clear. Set in the early twentieth century, this production resonates with Freud both in its time period and its pervading dream-logic. Like Egoyan, Szemerédy and Parditka conceive of the Dance of the Seven Veils as a moment of psychic dislocation for Salome. While in the world of the opera Salome performs a dance for Herodes, we in the audience are made privy to her internal experience of trauma stirred up by that dance. This production makes the split between Salome’s physical and psychological selves visible by using a dance-double who looks just like Salome. The double performs a ballroom dance with a tuxedoed partner for Herodes’s delight. Soprano Nicola Beller Carbone plays the other Salome in this scene—the inner Salome. She replicates the double’s choreography before peeling off and sitting downstage apart from the dancing. She grows more and more visibly distraught and writhes in pain. She removes her evening gown, dons a blue-and-white sailor dress, and puts a bow in her hair. Her clothes now match those of a badly tattered baby doll that she carries around with a large red stain between its legs. The dance then gives way to what feels like a scene from Salome’s dreams. She is surrounded by banquet guests and her family who present her with a large birthday cake. The chandelier above drips blood onto the white frosting. The nightmare escalates into Salome single-handedly massacring everyone present with a shard of glass. After the dance sequence, back Page 58 →in reality, Salome demands the head of the Baptist, but is delivered Jochanaan’s decapitated body instead. In the final image of the opera, Salome, Herodes, and Herodias sit around the table with Jochanaan’s headless corpse on the ground as a waiter serves the trio three heads on silver platters—their own. The lines between reality and fantasy in the action following the dance are blurred. It is unclear whether Salome’s fantasy about killing everyone was more than a fantasy, and thus unclear who, if anyone, is left alive at the end of the opera. What is clear, however, is the Freudian approach we are encouraged to take to interpret dream-images concocted by a developmentally stunted victim of childhood abuse.27

. Three more Salome productions also rest on our shared cultural understanding of Freudian regression and trauma. In Matthias Kaiser’s 2010 production at the Theater Ulm in Germany, Salome changes into a pleated pink overall skirt and ties her hair into pigtails with pink ribbons as Herodes dons a surgical coat and rubber gloves to stage the Dance of the Seven Veils as a perverted game of “doctor.” Mariame Clément staged a Salome in 2018 at the Aalto Theater in Essen in which Salome performs the Dance of the Seven Veils wearing a pink tutu given to her by Herodes. In Clément’s production, there is an implication that Herodes actively feeds Salome’s regressive tendencies by treating her as a child even as she grows up, gifting her a new pink tutu every birthday. David McVicar also evokes a childlike image of Salome in his 2008 production for London’s Royal Opera House, though somewhat more subtly.29 Soprano Nadja Michael plays the part of Salome’s childhood self in a series of flashbacks in place of the Dance of the Seven Veils.30 Then in the present-day events that follow, she continues to display childlike body language, seizing Jochanaan’s head from the executioner and wrapping her whole body around it on the floor.

. Three more Salome productions also rest on our shared cultural understanding of Freudian regression and trauma. In Matthias Kaiser’s 2010 production at the Theater Ulm in Germany, Salome changes into a pleated pink overall skirt and ties her hair into pigtails with pink ribbons as Herodes dons a surgical coat and rubber gloves to stage the Dance of the Seven Veils as a perverted game of “doctor.” Mariame Clément staged a Salome in 2018 at the Aalto Theater in Essen in which Salome performs the Dance of the Seven Veils wearing a pink tutu given to her by Herodes. In Clément’s production, there is an implication that Herodes actively feeds Salome’s regressive tendencies by treating her as a child even as she grows up, gifting her a new pink tutu every birthday. David McVicar also evokes a childlike image of Salome in his 2008 production for London’s Royal Opera House, though somewhat more subtly.29 Soprano Nadja Michael plays the part of Salome’s childhood self in a series of flashbacks in place of the Dance of the Seven Veils.30 Then in the present-day events that follow, she continues to display childlike body language, seizing Jochanaan’s head from the executioner and wrapping her whole body around it on the floor.

. In these productions, encumbering Salome with an explicit childhood sexual trauma serves to compromise the agency with which she desires Jochanaan and manipulates Herodes. Some of these Salomes do not seem to be making choices at all; their actions are presented as strictly symptoms of their trauma. Film theorist Mary Ann Doane describes the femme fatale as “an ambivalent figure because she is not the subject of power but its carrier Page 60 →(the connotations of disease are appropriate here).”31 Similarly, in these productions, Salome’s power in the opera is no longer something she consciously wields, but something she is burdened with. These Salomes are still powerful in the way they influence the action, but within these structures of trauma and pathology they cannot understand that power or wield it with real agency. Their power and their trauma are diseases caught and carried, whose effects on the world of the opera are enormous but essentially involuntary.

. Salome’s Electra Complex (Salome via Jung): Classic psychoanalytical readings of Salome in these productions do not end with Freud. Several among these directors draw parallels between Salome’s perception of Jochanaan, the object of her lust, and Herodes, her father figure. Carl Jung’s Electra complex is a gender inversion of Freud’s Oedipus complex: it refers to a girl’s psychosexual competition with her mother for possession of her father.32 To be clear, none of these productions explicitly represent Salome as being sexually attracted to Herodes. And as her stepfather, it is uncertain whether Salome’s psyche would recognize Herodes as a father on whom to be fixated. We do not know how old the historical daughter of Herodias was when her mother married Herod Antipas, and there are no details in any of these productions about the particular circumstances of Herod and Herodias’s union. But although Salome might not be a candidate for an Electra complex reading on any Neo-Jungian psychoanalyst’s couch in the real world, we can still recognize implications of psychosexual regression and fixation in the choice of some directors to equate Jochanaan with Herodes in their productions.

. 33 Negrin has said that he dispensed with the delivery of the head simply because he interpreted Salome’s demand as an expression meaning she wants him killed.35 Romeo Castellucci’s abstract, symbolic staging for the 2018 Salzburg Festival ends in similar disappointment.36 This Salome is delivered the head of a horse, which had symbolized the Baptist earlier in the production, and then later, Jochanaan’s headless body. Salome is clearly disappointed by these deliveries; she holds the horse’s head over the neck of the corpse, and later, she holds her hands over the severed neck, mimes the shape of an invisible head, and kisses an invisible mouth. Although Jochanaan is still executed in these three productions, Salome is not granted precisely what she asks for. In Negrin’s and Castellucci’s productions, there is some sense that Herodes or other powerful figures in the court are humoring Salome. The specifics of her request are not taken seriously and so the power of her words is diminished.

. The worst thing that the Salome-as-rape-victim trope does is sanitize Salome’s radical femininity. Traditionally, Salome’s social power comes from her adherence to a stereotypically masculine constellation of sexuality, power, and violence.42 Her predatory sexuality is abnormal and frightening in part because she is a woman. By making Salome a victim of rape, these productions place her firmly back on the feminine side in the patriarchal order. She is made to be the receptor of sexualized violence first, so that her later forays into a violent sexuality can be explained by means of this instigating trauma. But there is a potential antidote to the tragic victimization of Salome in these productions in the revenge-fantasy trope. Many of this subgroup of productions revel in their violence in a way that reminds me of those Renaissance paintings of Judith beheading Holofernes that emphasize the brutality of the act and the power of the woman.43 At its best, introducing a storyline about sexual violence to this opera motivates Salome into an ultimate act of triumphant, revolutionary female rage. And in the absence of a canonical opera about Judith, Salome does seem a good candidate for such directorial treatment.44 Huffman’s revenge Salome stands out: a grotesque exploration of deviant sexuality this production is not, but Huffman’s Salome claims agency in different ways. Not only does she kill Jochanaan herself, she plots to free all the other women onstage and leads them in a massacre of the men. Huffman invokes sexual violence in his Salome to tell a story about radical female agency, but he tells it through the mode of violence more than the mode of sex. His Salome still manipulates Herodes during the Dance of the Seven Veils but only as a precursor to staging a bloody revolution.

. The worst thing that the Salome-as-rape-victim trope does is sanitize Salome’s radical femininity. Traditionally, Salome’s social power comes from her adherence to a stereotypically masculine constellation of sexuality, power, and violence.42 Her predatory sexuality is abnormal and frightening in part because she is a woman. By making Salome a victim of rape, these productions place her firmly back on the feminine side in the patriarchal order. She is made to be the receptor of sexualized violence first, so that her later forays into a violent sexuality can be explained by means of this instigating trauma. But there is a potential antidote to the tragic victimization of Salome in these productions in the revenge-fantasy trope. Many of this subgroup of productions revel in their violence in a way that reminds me of those Renaissance paintings of Judith beheading Holofernes that emphasize the brutality of the act and the power of the woman.43 At its best, introducing a storyline about sexual violence to this opera motivates Salome into an ultimate act of triumphant, revolutionary female rage. And in the absence of a canonical opera about Judith, Salome does seem a good candidate for such directorial treatment.44 Huffman’s revenge Salome stands out: a grotesque exploration of deviant sexuality this production is not, but Huffman’s Salome claims agency in different ways. Not only does she kill Jochanaan herself, she plots to free all the other women onstage and leads them in a massacre of the men. Huffman invokes sexual violence in his Salome to tell a story about radical female agency, but he tells it through the mode of violence more than the mode of sex. His Salome still manipulates Herodes during the Dance of the Seven Veils but only as a precursor to staging a bloody revolution.

. The worst thing that the Salome-as-rape-victim trope does is sanitize Salome’s radical femininity. Traditionally, Salome’s social power comes from her adherence to a stereotypically masculine constellation of sexuality, power, and violence.42 Her predatory sexuality is abnormal and frightening in part because she is a woman. By making Salome a victim of rape, these productions place her firmly back on the feminine side in the patriarchal order. She is made to be the receptor of sexualized violence first, so that her later forays into a violent sexuality can be explained by means of this instigating trauma. But there is a potential antidote to the tragic victimization of Salome in these productions in the revenge-fantasy trope. Many of this subgroup of productions revel in their violence in a way that reminds me of those Renaissance paintings of Judith beheading Holofernes that emphasize the brutality of the act and the power of the woman.43 At its best, introducing a storyline about sexual violence to this opera motivates Salome into an ultimate act of triumphant, revolutionary female rage. And in the absence of a canonical opera about Judith, Salome does seem a good candidate for such directorial treatment.44 Huffman’s revenge Salome stands out: a grotesque exploration of deviant sexuality this production is not, but Huffman’s Salome claims agency in different ways. Not only does she kill Jochanaan herself, she plots to free all the other women onstage and leads them in a massacre of the men. Huffman invokes sexual violence in his Salome to tell a story about radical female agency, but he tells it through the mode of violence more than the mode of sex. His Salome still manipulates Herodes during the Dance of the Seven Veils but only as a precursor to staging a bloody revolution.

. Few of the productions above stage a sexual assault in view of the audience as a part of their revelations during the Dance of the Seven Veils. There are several assaults that occur offstage or otherwise out of sight during the Dance, though. In Clément’s production, Herodes forces Salome under the banquet table with him, and she emerges looking disheveled and distraught. Negrin’s Herodes similarly interrupts Salome’s dance by dragging her into an adjacent room offstage. When they reemerge, he is fastening his clothing and she is clearly in pain. McVicar’s Salome also follows Herodes back out onto the stage after the Dance, doubled over and wringing her hands, leaving us to guess what took place as the music played. There are many reasons for not staging a rape in these and the other productions that subscribe to the trope of Salome-as-raped. Locating the act offstage avoids a great number of practical problems that arise from performing rape, including risk to performers and audience members. It cordons off sexual assault as an unspeakable horror that can be alluded to but never made clear. But directors who do not stage the rape must sacrifice some of their control over how it will be understood. In her analysis of Mary Birnbaum’s 2015 staging of The Rape of Lucretia for Juilliard Opera, Ellie Hisama applauds the production for leaving “no doubt as to the sincerity of Lucretia’s vigorous resistance.”45 This kind of clarity is important. The tension between Wilde’s sexually predatory Salome and the sexually traumatized Salomes of these productions means there is a real risk of implying Salome’s culpability in her own abuse. When directors tell stories with sexual violence at their center, making strong, thoughtful choices about how to represent that violence allows them to push back against problematic social ideas and conventions.

. Those productions that do stage acts of sexual violence are able to exert control over these representations, yet the context of performance and spectacle in this scene has troubling implications. The role of the gaze is central to Wilde’s and to Strauss’s Salomé/e. Salome is an object of constant visual fascination and scrutiny by the other characters and by the audience. In this context, the choice to make her rape visible—to make it a spectacle—is a fraught one. Egoyan’s production thematizes surveillance and centers the politics of looking, and representing Salome’s rape as an act of performance Page 69 →for spectators is a part of this larger project. By thematizing the gaze of the other, Egoyan makes us aware of our own voyeuristic role in the drama. Like Herodes, we peer at things we are not meant to see, looking in on Salome at her most vulnerable. But this critical awareness of our own gaze is not the only way an audience might interact with Egoyan’s Dance scene. What we see is not the dance that Salome performs for Herodes in the action of the opera, but it is, in part, still a dance. The shadow-play depicting Salome’s gang rape is danced throughout; the violence is precisely choreographed and highly stylized. Levin notes, “the aestheticization acts as a kind of fulcrum, allowing the horror to teeter between a mimetic performance (Salome’s dance as rape) and a performative mimesis (Salome’s rape as dance).”46 But by aligning Salome’s rape with erotic dance in the context of the story and then staging the rape itself as a dance, Egoyan’s Dance of the Seven Veils may be seen as a beautiful spectacle for entertainment, even within Egoyan’s larger critique of the gaze.

. While Egoyan and Minaker’s reinterpretation of the rape in 2013 is certainly less shocking than the earlier version, I worry that this emotional distance and aesthetic softening might serve to glamorize and fetishize the violence being depicted. In the context of a performance of Salome, this relationship between the content and form of violent representations is further complicated by the music. The music of Strauss’s Dance of the Seven Veils has been widely lambasted as kitschy, Orientalist, and uninspired. But, perhaps due to Strauss’s generally high standing as a composer among musicologists, a number of scholars have searched for ways to understand these qualities of the music as an intentional dramatic choice. Lawrence Kramer has remarked that “the famous ‘badness’ of [the music] seems meant to guarantee both a certain power and a certain sleaziness.”50 Similarly, Robin Holloway remarks that “we all know how strangely potent cheap music can be.”51 There are a couple of dominant theories about why Strauss may have wanted this music to be “cheap” and “sleazy,” and they come down to the question: Which character’s point of view does this music represent?

. While Egoyan and Minaker’s reinterpretation of the rape in 2013 is certainly less shocking than the earlier version, I worry that this emotional distance and aesthetic softening might serve to glamorize and fetishize the violence being depicted. In the context of a performance of Salome, this relationship between the content and form of violent representations is further complicated by the music. The music of Strauss’s Dance of the Seven Veils has been widely lambasted as kitschy, Orientalist, and uninspired. But, perhaps due to Strauss’s generally high standing as a composer among musicologists, a number of scholars have searched for ways to understand these qualities of the music as an intentional dramatic choice. Lawrence Kramer has remarked that “the famous ‘badness’ of [the music] seems meant to guarantee both a certain power and a certain sleaziness.”50 Similarly, Robin Holloway remarks that “we all know how strangely potent cheap music can be.”51 There are a couple of dominant theories about why Strauss may have wanted this music to be “cheap” and “sleazy,” and they come down to the question: Which character’s point of view does this music represent?

. Egoyan described the music of the Dance to me as a “very perverse soundtrack to a whole series of possible imaginings.”56 He also said: “[Herodes’s] ability to extract a performative element [from Salome’s] own sexuality was something that I found quite disturbing and I wanted to give us a glimpse into how that relationship might have worked.”57 So to Egoyan’s understanding, the music belongs both to Salome and to Herodes. It is a self-consciously performative rendering of Salome’s sexuality, endowed with layers of repressed trauma from her past sexual abuse. It speaks to both the darkness in Salome’s past and the cheap sexuality demanded by her abuser. In one sense, the “flagrant . . . bump-and-grind exoticism” of the dance music is a deeply troubling accompaniment to Salome’s rape.58 But even in its softened, aestheticized 2013 form, the rape itself is still too horrifying to be rendered sexually arousing by the music. Instead, the music takes on the violence of the action. Egoyan is aware that representing violence in an aesthetic medium carries the risk that viewers may find such imagery titillating. When I asked him about his approach to this fine line between stylization and fetishization, he stopped himself mid-sentence and said, “I was going to say you have to be cautious, but you don’t have to be cautious at all. I think you have to be bold, and you have to test what those balances are, and sometimes you’re going to go too far.”59

. Egoyan described the music of the Dance to me as a “very perverse soundtrack to a whole series of possible imaginings.”56 He also said: “[Herodes’s] ability to extract a performative element [from Salome’s] own sexuality was something that I found quite disturbing and I wanted to give us a glimpse into how that relationship might have worked.”57 So to Egoyan’s understanding, the music belongs both to Salome and to Herodes. It is a self-consciously performative rendering of Salome’s sexuality, endowed with layers of repressed trauma from her past sexual abuse. It speaks to both the darkness in Salome’s past and the cheap sexuality demanded by her abuser. In one sense, the “flagrant . . . bump-and-grind exoticism” of the dance music is a deeply troubling accompaniment to Salome’s rape.58 But even in its softened, aestheticized 2013 form, the rape itself is still too horrifying to be rendered sexually arousing by the music. Instead, the music takes on the violence of the action. Egoyan is aware that representing violence in an aesthetic medium carries the risk that viewers may find such imagery titillating. When I asked him about his approach to this fine line between stylization and fetishization, he stopped himself mid-sentence and said, “I was going to say you have to be cautious, but you don’t have to be cautious at all. I think you have to be bold, and you have to test what those balances are, and sometimes you’re going to go too far.”59

. Egoyan described the music of the Dance to me as a “very perverse soundtrack to a whole series of possible imaginings.”56 He also said: “[Herodes’s] ability to extract a performative element [from Salome’s] own sexuality was something that I found quite disturbing and I wanted to give us a glimpse into how that relationship might have worked.”57 So to Egoyan’s understanding, the music belongs both to Salome and to Herodes. It is a self-consciously performative rendering of Salome’s sexuality, endowed with layers of repressed trauma from her past sexual abuse. It speaks to both the darkness in Salome’s past and the cheap sexuality demanded by her abuser. In one sense, the “flagrant . . . bump-and-grind exoticism” of the dance music is a deeply troubling accompaniment to Salome’s rape.58 But even in its softened, aestheticized 2013 form, the rape itself is still too horrifying to be rendered sexually arousing by the music. Instead, the music takes on the violence of the action. Egoyan is aware that representing violence in an aesthetic medium carries the risk that viewers may find such imagery titillating. When I asked him about his approach to this fine line between stylization and fetishization, he stopped himself mid-sentence and said, “I was going to say you have to be cautious, but you don’t have to be cautious at all. I think you have to be bold, and you have to test what those balances are, and sometimes you’re going to go too far.”59

. Egoyan described the music of the Dance to me as a “very perverse soundtrack to a whole series of possible imaginings.”56 He also said: “[Herodes’s] ability to extract a performative element [from Salome’s] own sexuality was something that I found quite disturbing and I wanted to give us a glimpse into how that relationship might have worked.”57 So to Egoyan’s understanding, the music belongs both to Salome and to Herodes. It is a self-consciously performative rendering of Salome’s sexuality, endowed with layers of repressed trauma from her past sexual abuse. It speaks to both the darkness in Salome’s past and the cheap sexuality demanded by her abuser. In one sense, the “flagrant . . . bump-and-grind exoticism” of the dance music is a deeply troubling accompaniment to Salome’s rape.58 But even in its softened, aestheticized 2013 form, the rape itself is still too horrifying to be rendered sexually arousing by the music. Instead, the music takes on the violence of the action. Egoyan is aware that representing violence in an aesthetic medium carries the risk that viewers may find such imagery titillating. When I asked him about his approach to this fine line between stylization and fetishization, he stopped himself mid-sentence and said, “I was going to say you have to be cautious, but you don’t have to be cautious at all. I think you have to be bold, and you have to test what those balances are, and sometimes you’re going to go too far.”59

. I appreciate that in Egoyan’s staging the rape is not pornographic—Salome’s flesh is hidden from us and the sex acts we see are not performed for realism. Yet the presence of the gaze is felt powerfully in the opera and amplified further in Egoyan’s staging. And the music that underscores the images of Salome as a child and Salome being raped is music intended for and associated with a striptease. The music sexualizes the child-Salome and turns her trauma and loss of innocence into spectacle. Lucy Nevitt uses the example of Peter Brook’s famous 1955 staging of Titus Andronicus at Stratford’s Shakespeare Memorial Theatre to explore the issue of stylized violence. Lavinia appeared with highly stylized wounds symbolized by scarlet streamers coming from her wrists and mouth. Nevitt argues that the beauty of the imagery “foregrounds the spectator’s sympathy for Lavinia’s plight. She is an innocent victim, and the spectator is guided to contemplate her sufferingPage 72 → without being asked to imagine too precisely its actual manifestation on her body. . . . Brook’s choice was to communicate suffering. The image communicates very little about brutal violence and rape.”60 In this instance, Nevitt sees the veiling of the harsh realities of Lavinia’s injuries as a tactic to keep the audience trained on Lavinia’s pain—to make them cry rather than to make them sick.61 I agree that a beautiful representation of violence can evoke pity where a graphic representation would trigger some amount of spectatorial revulsion or even perverse pleasure. Yet making Lavinia’s injuries beautiful also poeticizes them, and by locating her suffering in the realm of art it becomes a spectacle to be looked at. Suffering loses its immediacy; audience members are not bystanders of a horrible event but spectators of a tragic artwork. This kind of aestheticization mitigates outrage—but maybe we should be outraged.

. I appreciate that in Egoyan’s staging the rape is not pornographic—Salome’s flesh is hidden from us and the sex acts we see are not performed for realism. Yet the presence of the gaze is felt powerfully in the opera and amplified further in Egoyan’s staging. And the music that underscores the images of Salome as a child and Salome being raped is music intended for and associated with a striptease. The music sexualizes the child-Salome and turns her trauma and loss of innocence into spectacle. Lucy Nevitt uses the example of Peter Brook’s famous 1955 staging of Titus Andronicus at Stratford’s Shakespeare Memorial Theatre to explore the issue of stylized violence. Lavinia appeared with highly stylized wounds symbolized by scarlet streamers coming from her wrists and mouth. Nevitt argues that the beauty of the imagery “foregrounds the spectator’s sympathy for Lavinia’s plight. She is an innocent victim, and the spectator is guided to contemplate her sufferingPage 72 → without being asked to imagine too precisely its actual manifestation on her body. . . . Brook’s choice was to communicate suffering. The image communicates very little about brutal violence and rape.”60 In this instance, Nevitt sees the veiling of the harsh realities of Lavinia’s injuries as a tactic to keep the audience trained on Lavinia’s pain—to make them cry rather than to make them sick.61 I agree that a beautiful representation of violence can evoke pity where a graphic representation would trigger some amount of spectatorial revulsion or even perverse pleasure. Yet making Lavinia’s injuries beautiful also poeticizes them, and by locating her suffering in the realm of art it becomes a spectacle to be looked at. Suffering loses its immediacy; audience members are not bystanders of a horrible event but spectators of a tragic artwork. This kind of aestheticization mitigates outrage—but maybe we should be outraged.

. Serge Bennathan’s choreography for the rape ballet in Egoyan’s 2013 Dance of the Seven Veils is beautiful but does not exclude violence. Levin says of the dance choreography, “[Salome] is whirled about overhead, and in the process, her figure remonstrates with the frantic melodramatic gestures of early twentieth-century modernist dance-theater.”62 The movement is all highly stylized, but within that framework we see dancer-Salome kicking and writhing as she is violated. Still, the beauty of this ballet gives me pause. While this kind of veiled half-seeing of the rape may prevent fetishized looking at realist depictions of nudity, blood, and sweat, I worry about the stylization itself being an act of fetishization. The projection screen separates the shadow-image of Salome’s dancing feminine shape from the body of Salome we have seen onstage to this point. Singer-Salome is objectified by the gaze of the soldiers, the audience, Herodes, and his surveillance, but she is also deeply embodied. Paul Robinson and Carolyn Abbate have argued that the incredible acoustic power of women’s voices in opera prevents their characters from being experienced simply as passive victims.63 Salome’s embodied power is also typically expressed through the Dance of the Seven Veils when we get to see her dance. At this moment in Egoyan’s production, when we come to understand Salome as a victim, she is without her voice and her dancing body is flattened into silhouette. Griselda Pollock has argued that throughout art history, men’s representations of women are typified by bodily presence and vocal absence.64 The shift from the embodied singer-Salome to the disembodied silhouette of dancer-Salome encourages us to perceive the depiction of the assault at a distance—that is, fetishistically. And as per the performance convention of this opera, the separation between Salome’s body and her shadow is amplified by the knowledge that the singer and dancer are different performers.

. Serge Bennathan’s choreography for the rape ballet in Egoyan’s 2013 Dance of the Seven Veils is beautiful but does not exclude violence. Levin says of the dance choreography, “[Salome] is whirled about overhead, and in the process, her figure remonstrates with the frantic melodramatic gestures of early twentieth-century modernist dance-theater.”62 The movement is all highly stylized, but within that framework we see dancer-Salome kicking and writhing as she is violated. Still, the beauty of this ballet gives me pause. While this kind of veiled half-seeing of the rape may prevent fetishized looking at realist depictions of nudity, blood, and sweat, I worry about the stylization itself being an act of fetishization. The projection screen separates the shadow-image of Salome’s dancing feminine shape from the body of Salome we have seen onstage to this point. Singer-Salome is objectified by the gaze of the soldiers, the audience, Herodes, and his surveillance, but she is also deeply embodied. Paul Robinson and Carolyn Abbate have argued that the incredible acoustic power of women’s voices in opera prevents their characters from being experienced simply as passive victims.63 Salome’s embodied power is also typically expressed through the Dance of the Seven Veils when we get to see her dance. At this moment in Egoyan’s production, when we come to understand Salome as a victim, she is without her voice and her dancing body is flattened into silhouette. Griselda Pollock has argued that throughout art history, men’s representations of women are typified by bodily presence and vocal absence.64 The shift from the embodied singer-Salome to the disembodied silhouette of dancer-Salome encourages us to perceive the depiction of the assault at a distance—that is, fetishistically. And as per the performance convention of this opera, the separation between Salome’s body and her shadow is amplified by the knowledge that the singer and dancer are different performers.

. Serge Bennathan’s choreography for the rape ballet in Egoyan’s 2013 Dance of the Seven Veils is beautiful but does not exclude violence. Levin says of the dance choreography, “[Salome] is whirled about overhead, and in the process, her figure remonstrates with the frantic melodramatic gestures of early twentieth-century modernist dance-theater.”62 The movement is all highly stylized, but within that framework we see dancer-Salome kicking and writhing as she is violated. Still, the beauty of this ballet gives me pause. While this kind of veiled half-seeing of the rape may prevent fetishized looking at realist depictions of nudity, blood, and sweat, I worry about the stylization itself being an act of fetishization. The projection screen separates the shadow-image of Salome’s dancing feminine shape from the body of Salome we have seen onstage to this point. Singer-Salome is objectified by the gaze of the soldiers, the audience, Herodes, and his surveillance, but she is also deeply embodied. Paul Robinson and Carolyn Abbate have argued that the incredible acoustic power of women’s voices in opera prevents their characters from being experienced simply as passive victims.63 Salome’s embodied power is also typically expressed through the Dance of the Seven Veils when we get to see her dance. At this moment in Egoyan’s production, when we come to understand Salome as a victim, she is without her voice and her dancing body is flattened into silhouette. Griselda Pollock has argued that throughout art history, men’s representations of women are typified by bodily presence and vocal absence.64 The shift from the embodied singer-Salome to the disembodied silhouette of dancer-Salome encourages us to perceive the depiction of the assault at a distance—that is, fetishistically. And as per the performance convention of this opera, the separation between Salome’s body and her shadow is amplified by the knowledge that the singer and dancer are different performers.

. Page 73 →The scrim on which we see Salome’s disembodied form, as shadow and as video, also serves to block some elements of the rape from view. As we have seen, themes of veiling and specifically of selectively blocking what is seen are part of Egoyan’s overarching approach to this opera. The scrim as a veil acts in part as a demarcation of past from present. The images and events presented on the screen are removed in time from the rest of the opera. Memory preserves events imperfectly and subjectively, and the images we see projected onto the scrim are likewise blurred—emotionally evocative rather than dispassionately precise. The projections during the Dance also mark this scene as a representation and highlight its constructedness. The events and ideas we see are mediated not just through Salome’s memory, but through Egoyan’s, Minaker’s, and Bennathan’s art. The artfulness of the Dance of the Seven Veils is marked in contrast to the rest of the opera. This movement in particular requires an act of interpretation by its audience. Subjective and in some senses unknowable, this mode of representation might be seen in the context of ideas from trauma studies about the nature of trauma and memory. Cathy Caruth writes that the history a traumatic flashback tells is “a history that literally has no place, neither in the past, in which it was not fully experienced, nor in the present, in which its precise images and enactments are not fully understood.”65 The drastic shift in Egoyan’s style for the entire flashback sequence of the Dance of the Seven Veils establishes that the images we see have a different relationship to reality than the rest of the opera. We appear to be in Salome’s mind as she remembers her own childhood in a series of flashes and metaphors. The home-video footage of the child on the swing stands in stark contrast to the blindfolded girl wandering alone through the endless forest. The camera failed to capture the dark truth of Salome’s childhood. Egoyan’s Dance of the Seven Veils dramatizes Salome opening her eyes to the trauma in her past, but the way she comes to perceive that trauma is necessarily irrational. The artfulness of the Dance represents the impossibility for Salome to precisely report what happened to her, even within her own mind.

. Put briefly, the context of performance in Egoyan’s rape scene is complicated. The stylized depiction of sexual violence evokes sympathy, and it can be understood as a compelling representation of traumatic memory. But it also places Salome’s striptease in troubling proximity to her rape. This representational closeness might encourage voyeuristic consumption of Salome’s rape as an erotic spectacle, and it also risks equating these two events causally within the world of the opera. The choreography for the shadow ballet in both versions of this scene begins with Salome performing her striptease before she is interrupted by the men, and her movements shift from dancing qua dancing Page 74 →to stylized resistance to her attackers. Two rape myths identified by Rosalind Gill are pertinent to this scene: “One of the most pervasive and established beliefs about rape is that victims in some way provoke it—by their dress or conduct,”66 and another is that “the male attacker is assumed to be full of pent-up sexual feelings, and is driven beyond normal self-control by the lust engendered by a particular woman.”67 By including Salome’s performance of an erotic dance in the same shadow-play as the rape, Egoyan encourages us—intentionally or not—to understand the two events in tandem. And doing so plays into pervasive myths about rape familiar to audiences from the real world. As much as the depiction of the rape itself is unquestionably violent and nonconsensual, its proximity to Salome’s striptease sets up a narrative wherein, even if we do not blame her for what happened, we can say that Salome got raped because . . .

. Put briefly, the context of performance in Egoyan’s rape scene is complicated. The stylized depiction of sexual violence evokes sympathy, and it can be understood as a compelling representation of traumatic memory. But it also places Salome’s striptease in troubling proximity to her rape. This representational closeness might encourage voyeuristic consumption of Salome’s rape as an erotic spectacle, and it also risks equating these two events causally within the world of the opera. The choreography for the shadow ballet in both versions of this scene begins with Salome performing her striptease before she is interrupted by the men, and her movements shift from dancing qua dancing Page 74 →to stylized resistance to her attackers. Two rape myths identified by Rosalind Gill are pertinent to this scene: “One of the most pervasive and established beliefs about rape is that victims in some way provoke it—by their dress or conduct,”66 and another is that “the male attacker is assumed to be full of pent-up sexual feelings, and is driven beyond normal self-control by the lust engendered by a particular woman.”67 By including Salome’s performance of an erotic dance in the same shadow-play as the rape, Egoyan encourages us—intentionally or not—to understand the two events in tandem. And doing so plays into pervasive myths about rape familiar to audiences from the real world. As much as the depiction of the rape itself is unquestionably violent and nonconsensual, its proximity to Salome’s striptease sets up a narrative wherein, even if we do not blame her for what happened, we can say that Salome got raped because . . .

. The only other production I have uncovered from this period of practice that both participates in the Salome-as-raped trope and stages an explicit act of sexual violence during the Dance of the Seven Veils is Silvana Schröder’s 2011 Salome for Kiel Opera. It provides an interesting counterpoint to Egoyan’s production because its approach to staging the sexual violence in this Page 75 →scene eschews stylization in favor of stark realism.68 In Schröder’s production, the Dance culminates in Herodes forcing Salome to perform oral sex on him onstage while a video projection shows a great dark hand pulling back seven blankets from a child-Salome’s sleeping figure. Here, the sevenfold unveiling of Salome’s body is transferred from the context of an exotic striptease to that of the sexualization and abuse of an unconscious child. The onstage assault is starkly realist. The placement of Salome’s body between Herodes’s legs means there is no need for onstage nudity, but the implication is unambiguous. It is jarring to watch an explicit real-time assault while listening to the exaggerated performance of Orientalist eroticism in Strauss’s score. This discomfort can be valuable for a representation of abuse. This scene certainly lays bare the humiliating, terrifying, and painful realities of sexual violence. But depicting a sexual act so realistically also has a troubling pornographic potential, especially when allied with overtly erotic dance music as it is here.

. Wilde’s and Strauss’s Salomé/e have richly ambiguous written texts that can support a plurality of meanings. Salome can be understood in terms of feminist empowerment, as she was by so many exotic dancers in New York in the early twentieth century. To be clear, I am not suggesting that objectifying and executing men is feminist, only that as a fictional woman, Salome critiques and counterbalances traditional narratives that cast women as innocent victims and sexual objects.70 Some productions of Wilde’s play have toyed with the idea that beneath her veils, Salome conceals a masculinity and specifically a queer masculinity.71 Indeed, queer readings of Wilde’s Salomé have often suggested that the antiheroine is a stand-in for Wilde himself.72 But in addition to these potential empowering readings, both play and opera can also be understood in terms of an old antisemitic trope. Consider Page 76 →an 1892 review of Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila that characterized Dalila as “the Jewish woman who sells her body for the good of her country or the vengeance of her God” and compared her with Salammbo and Judith who he claims are “the same woman,” three seductresses that use their sexuality to destroy men.73 Salome trades her body to Herodes, in a sense, for vengeance, but it is her own vengeance and desire that she serves with this act.

. Wilde’s and Strauss’s Salomé/e have richly ambiguous written texts that can support a plurality of meanings. Salome can be understood in terms of feminist empowerment, as she was by so many exotic dancers in New York in the early twentieth century. To be clear, I am not suggesting that objectifying and executing men is feminist, only that as a fictional woman, Salome critiques and counterbalances traditional narratives that cast women as innocent victims and sexual objects.70 Some productions of Wilde’s play have toyed with the idea that beneath her veils, Salome conceals a masculinity and specifically a queer masculinity.71 Indeed, queer readings of Wilde’s Salomé have often suggested that the antiheroine is a stand-in for Wilde himself.72 But in addition to these potential empowering readings, both play and opera can also be understood in terms of an old antisemitic trope. Consider Page 76 →an 1892 review of Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila that characterized Dalila as “the Jewish woman who sells her body for the good of her country or the vengeance of her God” and compared her with Salammbo and Judith who he claims are “the same woman,” three seductresses that use their sexuality to destroy men.73 Salome trades her body to Herodes, in a sense, for vengeance, but it is her own vengeance and desire that she serves with this act.

. In general, serious consideration of operatic production and staging lags behind score-based studies of opera. Roger Parker has noted that “the musicological establishment has tended to be indifferent or even hostile to the visual aspect of musical drama.”16 Levin distinguishes what he calls the “opera text,” comprising the score, libretto, and stage directions, from the “performance text.”17 I prefer “written text” to “opera text” because I believe that the category “opera” exists in performance just as much (indeed, more) than it exists on the page.

. Wilde’s and Strauss’s Salomé/e have richly ambiguous written texts that can support a plurality of meanings. Salome can be understood in terms of feminist empowerment, as she was by so many exotic dancers in New York in the early twentieth century. To be clear, I am not suggesting that objectifying and executing men is feminist, only that as a fictional woman, Salome critiques and counterbalances traditional narratives that cast women as innocent victims and sexual objects.70 Some productions of Wilde’s play have toyed with the idea that beneath her veils, Salome conceals a masculinity and specifically a queer masculinity.71 Indeed, queer readings of Wilde’s Salomé have often suggested that the antiheroine is a stand-in for Wilde himself.72 But in addition to these potential empowering readings, both play and opera can also be understood in terms of an old antisemitic trope. Consider Page 76 →an 1892 review of Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila that characterized Dalila as “the Jewish woman who sells her body for the good of her country or the vengeance of her God” and compared her with Salammbo and Judith who he claims are “the same woman,” three seductresses that use their sexuality to destroy men.73 Salome trades her body to Herodes, in a sense, for vengeance, but it is her own vengeance and desire that she serves with this act.

. Productions of Strauss’s opera can heighten or resist the different possible interpretations of Salome. I find this to be one of the most exciting things about this written text; speculating about Salome’s character and motivations allows for so many different possible stories. Egoyan’s reading of Salome as a story about the profound effects of sexual violence on a developing sexual subject is an interesting and worthwhile contribution. The story is recast and rendered unexpectedly tragic by the choice to imagine Salome not in terms of her monstrosity but in terms of her pain. But it is a problem to take this interpretation as the truth of the matter, or even as the most convincing reading. The productions in this chapter all represent Salomes defined by the trauma of sexual violence and they do so in general to the exclusion of queer themes and critical reflection on the opera’s representation of Jewishness.74 Despite the Orientalist music of the opera’s written text, the Salomes in this chapter are conspicuously white overall. The whitewashing of exotic stories when white directors want to tell stories about sexual violence is a recurring theme in this book that I will discuss in the conclusion. For now, suffice it to say that the prevalence of these productions of Salome as a story about the consequences of childhood sexual abuse, and the tendency of the productions to tell that story through a white racial frame, minimizes our perception of other interpretations of this story.

. What I did in 1996 was a response and a dialogue I was trying to create with that more traditional production that people had seen. Now, over twenty years later, a new generation is removed from that production, and it does give me pause to think, what if someone is seeing my production of Salome for the first time and it’s their first exposure to the piece? Is that responsible? And that’s a good question.75

. It is among my aims with this book to expand this question of responsibility. I believe that the stakes of introducing sexual violence to a work and putting Page 77 →it onstage are greater than those relating to spectators misapprehending a work’s original or intended meanings. In Theatre & Violence, Nevitt writes “production decisions about how violence and its effects will be represented offer a judgment about that violence. . . . It makes a difference whether the image is beautiful or ugly. Those choices are both aesthetic and political.”76 I have demonstrated in this chapter some of the larger ramifications the abused-Salome trope can have. These directors have the power to reinforce or challenge toxic cultural ideas about female victimization, victim-blaming, and rape culture, and so it is vital for us as audience members and critics to think through the implications of their choices.

. I advocate for a mode of criticism for opera production whose scope stretches beyond judgments about perceived authenticity and allegiance to the score to ask instead what kinds of stories we want to tell with the canon now. I do not believe that a production in which Salome is raped by Herodes, Page 78 →past or present, is an accurate interpretation of what Wilde and Strauss have written, but that is not the only valuable question to ask of this interpretation. I have asked instead how this reading works in practice: How does it affect the story and its characters? How does it influence our understanding of the work? Despite my disbelief that Strauss or Wilde intended a backstory about Salome being raped, Egoyan told me a coherent story in his production in partnership with Wilde’s text and Strauss’s music. I left the theater that night in 2013 troubled by the rape scene and its implications on the story in large part because Egoyan had made it work. But the power that a directorial concept can have to help us see new truths in the works we love is threatened if that concept itself becomes canon. I would be greatly saddened to see the rape-victim reading of Salome become the principal way that directors and audiences interact with the story, because more often than not the introduction of the rape storyline operates at the expense of what I have found to be the most compelling, revolutionary aspects of Salome’s character—her unapologetically non-normative sexual desire and her absolute objectification of Jochanaan, which is still today a powerfully subversive position for a woman to take.77

. It is not controversial to suggest that over time exposure to violent imagery can lead to desensitization. The more we watch, the more we are comfortable watching. There is a culture of one-upmanship in Regietheater productions that attempts to overcome desensitization. Shocking audiences to jolt them out of their comfortable opera-watching reveries is a common goal in this art form, so for audiences who see a lot of Regietheater the shock value of the productions must logically continue to increase or at least modulate. There seems to be a certain kind of desensitization to the violence of Regie at work in reviewers of Bieito’s Entführung who casually brush off the graphic violence of this production to the tune of “there goes Calixto, up to his tricks again.”4 A reviewer for the Metropolitan Opera Guild expresses concern about the brutalization of sex workers in this production, but he connects it with his concerns about Belmonte’s cross-dressing and a scene of homoerotic contact between women—as if rape might be effectively understood as an expression of queer sexuality.5 A review for the Irish Times includes a quote from a spectator at the theater who said, “I don’t know what all the fuss is about, if they knew anything about Mozart, they’d know that there’s loads of this sort of thing in his letters.”6 I assume this audience member was referring to Mozart’s well-documented appreciation for scatological humor. This too denies any real difference in kind between representing rape and torture and representing nudity and urination. It implies that any objection to this staging must be based merely in prudishness.

. The production analyses in this book center a critical feminist spectator—namely me—who may not be the intended addressee of many of these productions.18 Mine is an alternative perspective on opera as much because of my feminist political alignment as my gender identity as a woman.19 While neither of these traits are uncommon among opera scholars or the opera-going public, neither are well accounted for in the ways we discuss, produce, and respond to opera overall. Clément famously shared such a feminist, women-centered perspective by criticizing opera’s reliance on the suffering and death of women.20 Though her book made waves in the opera world, the general tone with which we continue to teach and promote operas about the murder and abuse of women indicates that this perspective is still not accounted for. When I see sexual violence onstage at the opera, more often than not, I feel consciously that I am reacting incorrectly—more specifically, that I do not feel the way the production wants me to feel. In some cases, amid signals that what is happening onstage is funny or romantic, I feel alienated in my sense of revulsion at what I recognize as sexual violence. In other cases, where rape is presented explicitly, what I suspect is meant to trigger somber reflection on the harsh realities of our world instead makes me feel unsafe in my skin.

. It is not controversial to suggest that over time exposure to violent imagery can lead to desensitization. The more we watch, the more we are comfortable watching. There is a culture of one-upmanship in Regietheater productions that attempts to overcome desensitization. Shocking audiences to jolt them out of their comfortable opera-watching reveries is a common goal in this art form, so for audiences who see a lot of Regietheater the shock value of the productions must logically continue to increase or at least modulate. There seems to be a certain kind of desensitization to the violence of Regie at work in reviewers of Bieito’s Entführung who casually brush off the graphic violence of this production to the tune of “there goes Calixto, up to his tricks again.”4 A reviewer for the Metropolitan Opera Guild expresses concern about the brutalization of sex workers in this production, but he connects it with his concerns about Belmonte’s cross-dressing and a scene of homoerotic contact between women—as if rape might be effectively understood as an expression of queer sexuality.5 A review for the Irish Times includes a quote from a spectator at the theater who said, “I don’t know what all the fuss is about, if they knew anything about Mozart, they’d know that there’s loads of this sort of thing in his letters.”6 I assume this audience member was referring to Mozart’s well-documented appreciation for scatological humor. This too denies any real difference in kind between representing rape and torture and representing nudity and urination. It implies that any objection to this staging must be based merely in prudishness.

. Although Konstanze and Blonde are the only named women in the opera, Bieito populates his stage with a number of sex workers engaged at the brothel. These sex workers serve as elements of the mise-en-scène and props for the main characters. Throughout the opera, the sex workers have no agency and are consistently dehumanized. They are tools for Osmin to use Page 88 →against his enemies and to satisfy his own desires; they are effigies on whom Selim can inflict damage in order to hurt Konstanze; they are collateral damage, serving in their deaths to expose Belmonte and Pedrillo’s true colors; and throughout all of this, they are scene dressing. After they are murdered, the bodies of these women remain onstage as props for Osmin to interact with through the opera’s conclusion. Their deaths constitute a progression between two states of objectification—from sex toys to corpses. Bieito only shows us these sex workers in a large undifferentiated group. The production denies them their individuality and reduces them to their work and to their relationship with Osmin and the brothel. Even Blonde is at risk of deindividuation in this production as a sex worker herself. One early reviewer of this production actually failed to differentiate Blonde from the supernumerary sex workers, identifying her at one point not by name but as “a peroxide-blonde prostitute.”8

. Finally, there is the scene that seems largely responsible for the infamy of this production, “Martern aller Arten.” In Konstanze’s second aria, she is punished for the retaliatory violence she inflicts on Selim by being forced to watch Osmin violate and murder a sex worker. In the aria’s written text, Konstanze defiantly tells Selim that she will willingly face any torment before she betrays her love, but ultimately, she requests Selim’s mercy. As Konstanze sings, Osmin emerges with a sex worker in tow, and the two engage in apparently consensual sexual activity. After some kissing and foreplay, Osmin throws the woman onto her back on the ground at Konstanze’s feet, and the woman laughs and beckons him to come closer. Osmin straddles the woman on his knees, and she performs fellatio on him. Selim holds Konstanze by her hair, making her watch. Osmin pulls a knife, which he shows to Konstanze. He pushes the woman’s shoulders down onto the stage and stuffs a cloth into her mouth. When she sees the knife, the woman panics and struggles to get away, but Osmin’s weight holds her in place. He systematically makes long cuts on her face, both her forearms, her back, her chest, and finally across her Page 91 →throat. After she has ceased moving, Osmin cuts off her nipple and presents it to Konstanze as she sings the climactic ending of her aria. This is the first death of a sex worker in this production, and it is excruciating to watch. Osmin’s relaxed approach to the deed highlights the arbitrariness of this murder—the sex worker he chooses here is a stand-in for Konstanze to show her what will follow if she continues to resist Selim. The power of Konstanze’s resistance, which Wheelock recognizes in this aria, is obliterated.9 Konstanze’s words invite Selim’s torture and anticipate the freedom that will come from death, but there is no salvation in the death she is made to witness, and we will sense no salvation in her eventual suicide.

. One of the dangers of putting sexual violence onstage is the potential eroticization of the violated female body. Theater scholar Charlotte Canning links staged sexual violence with pornography and outlines a number of alternativePage 93 → feminist modes of representation that focus on a stylization of the idea of rape rather than the physical act in an effort to eschew the pornographic potential of exposed women’s bodies.10 Canning’s citation of pornography is interesting. In 1983, anti-pornography lobbyists Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon drafted a set of ordinances that proposed treating pornography as a violation of women’s civil rights in the United States. The ordinances were ultimately deemed unconstitutional on the grounds of freedom of speech protections, but the definitions of pornography in the proposed ordinances have been influential on continuing anti-porn campaigns in the US and Canada. Dworkin and MacKinnon proposed a list of conditions that when combined with “the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words” constitute pornography. The conditions relevant here are:

. a. Women are presented as dehumanized sexual objects, things or commodities; or . . . d. women are presented as sexual objects tied up or cut or mutilated or bruised or physically hurt; or e. women are presented in postures of sexual submission, servility, or display; or . . . h. women are presented in scenarios of degradation, injury, abasement, torture, shown as filthy or inferior, bleeding, bruised, or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual.11

. The production analyses in this book center a critical feminist spectator—namely me—who may not be the intended addressee of many of these productions.18 Mine is an alternative perspective on opera as much because of my feminist political alignment as my gender identity as a woman.19 While neither of these traits are uncommon among opera scholars or the opera-going public, neither are well accounted for in the ways we discuss, produce, and respond to opera overall. Clément famously shared such a feminist, women-centered perspective by criticizing opera’s reliance on the suffering and death of women.20 Though her book made waves in the opera world, the general tone with which we continue to teach and promote operas about the murder and abuse of women indicates that this perspective is still not accounted for. When I see sexual violence onstage at the opera, more often than not, I feel consciously that I am reacting incorrectly—more specifically, that I do not feel the way the production wants me to feel. In some cases, amid signals that what is happening onstage is funny or romantic, I feel alienated in my sense of revulsion at what I recognize as sexual violence. In other cases, where rape is presented explicitly, what I suspect is meant to trigger somber reflection on the harsh realities of our world instead makes me feel unsafe in my skin.

. Other feminist scholars of theater and literature have defended realism as an aesthetic not necessarily opposed to a feminist project. Patricia Schroeder and Kim Solga have both made cases for the feminist and even radical potential of theatrical realism.18 These arguments hang on the enduring popularity of realist depictions among spectators and the intense identification with fictional characters and situations that realist depictions make possible. Throughout Bieito’s production, Konstanze and Blonde have brutally realistic responses to the violence done to them. Their trauma plays out in different but recognizable ways: Blonde abuses pills and alcohol, and Konstanze becomes totally dependent on Belmonte after witnessing the sex worker’s murder and eventually dies by suicide. In a sense, these characters can be more easily identified with because they behave more like real people than do their Mozartean archetypes—the feisty maid and the sentimental heroine. But despite Bieito’s more realistic characterization, the caricatures persist and this dichotomy is jarring. Konstanze and Blonde, while their reactions to trauma are informed by a more realistic approach to the opera’s plot, are still a far stretch from complex, responsible depictions of sexual assault survivors. Bieito’s new dialogue is tilted toward the men in the opera. Most of the little that the women have to say and sing in this production was written for them by Stephanie and not Bieito, so it enforces their archetypal roles and does not respond to the violence done to them in between their words. Yet while Bieito does not give the women much to say, his use of the opera’s music, especially in his staging of Konstanze’s arias, goes some distance to generating empathy and encouraging audience identification with her experience.

. The interaction of Bieito’s stage business and setting with Mozart’s music has fueled a good deal of the controversy in the popular press. Reviewers report cries of “poor Mozart” from the house at the public dress rehearsal and on opening night. Though this tendency to frame criticism of Regie productions of canonic operas as a defense of the composer’s presumed intentions or wishes is common, it is rarely a very interesting way to evaluate a production in my view. In Bieito’s Entführung, the argument that “that’s not what Mozart Page 96 →wrote” is especially shallow because Bieito’s staging is actually highly sensitive to details in Mozart’s score. Despite the vast difference in tone between this and a more conservative production of Entführung, Bieito’s dramaturgical style throughout is surprisingly well integrated with Mozart’s music. Bieito recontextualizes the music in a variety of ways throughout his drama and harnesses it for his own dramatic project. Clemens Risi uses this production as one of his prime examples to demonstrate a technique in opera production in which a director “uses musical structures to legitimate his scenic choices.”19

. My point of departure for this book is the discomfort I felt sitting in the audience of Anna Bolena and so many other opera stagings throughout my experience as a singer, researcher, and lover of the opera canon. Ellie Hisama has suggested the value that can come from approaching music analysis from a place of repulsion as opposed to the more common entry point of enjoyment. Her critical-affective analysis of the music of John Zorn engages her feelings of being objectified, devalued, and disrespected by his representations of Asian women.2 My own analytical approach to the staged productions in this book builds outward from my experiences of unease with the way sexual violence is treated (or, in many cases, not treated) in performances of canonic operas. Over the years, I have spoken to many women and genderqueer friends who have shared my feeling of being alienated by productions of and discourse about opera when it comes to sexual violence. I hope that one of the results of sharing my critical perspective on the works in this book is that some readers may see some of their own experiences of discomfort reflected in mine. I invite all readers, and especially those with perspectives that have been historically unrecognized and unaccounted for in opera criticism and production, to reflect on and take seriously their own experiences with this art form.

. The production analyses in this book center a critical feminist spectator—namely me—who may not be the intended addressee of many of these productions.18 Mine is an alternative perspective on opera as much because of my feminist political alignment as my gender identity as a woman.19 While neither of these traits are uncommon among opera scholars or the opera-going public, neither are well accounted for in the ways we discuss, produce, and respond to opera overall. Clément famously shared such a feminist, women-centered perspective by criticizing opera’s reliance on the suffering and death of women.20 Though her book made waves in the opera world, the general tone with which we continue to teach and promote operas about the murder and abuse of women indicates that this perspective is still not accounted for. When I see sexual violence onstage at the opera, more often than not, I feel consciously that I am reacting incorrectly—more specifically, that I do not feel the way the production wants me to feel. In some cases, amid signals that what is happening onstage is funny or romantic, I feel alienated in my sense of revulsion at what I recognize as sexual violence. In other cases, where rape is presented explicitly, what I suspect is meant to trigger somber reflection on the harsh realities of our world instead makes me feel unsafe in my skin.

. Bieito’s production is clearly critical of European brothels, but its representation of the seraglio as a brothel is confusing and inconsistent from the perspective of the German sex trade in the early 2000s. Within the walls of Bieito’s brothel, everything about the action seems to refer to an illegal underground operation. Selim and Osmin are dressed as and behave like gangsters, and for the most part criminal gangs run the illegal tier of the sex trade in Germany. Belmonte and Pedrillo’s massacre of the prostitutes, patrons, and pimps in Selim’s brothel may be seen to evoke the violence that goes on between rival gangs in Germany’s red-light districts. And yet other elements of this production suggest this is a legal brothel, including types of advertisement typical to German brothels at the time. Bieito’s set contains scrolling signs listing services offered by the sex workers inside and the glass boxes evoke window prostitution, which occurs in several German red-light districts.26 The supernumerary sex workers, when their employers are not subjecting them to violence, go about their work relatively cheerfully. Their stage business is characterized by sassiness and humor. In short, their behavior easily leads a spectator to believe they are working by choice. This stands in stark contrast to the behavior of Konstanze and Blonde, who we know have been kidnapped and are being held against their will. It is hard to reconcile all the disparate elements of Bieito’s brothel. This is a brothel that advertises, and so is presumably a legal one, but it is also a brothel in which uncooperative trafficking victims are leashed and held in cages, and in which any woman might be spontaneously murdered as a show of power.27

. Bieito’s production is clearly critical of European brothels, but its representation of the seraglio as a brothel is confusing and inconsistent from the perspective of the German sex trade in the early 2000s. Within the walls of Bieito’s brothel, everything about the action seems to refer to an illegal underground operation. Selim and Osmin are dressed as and behave like gangsters, and for the most part criminal gangs run the illegal tier of the sex trade in Germany. Belmonte and Pedrillo’s massacre of the prostitutes, patrons, and pimps in Selim’s brothel may be seen to evoke the violence that goes on between rival gangs in Germany’s red-light districts. And yet other elements of this production suggest this is a legal brothel, including types of advertisement typical to German brothels at the time. Bieito’s set contains scrolling signs listing services offered by the sex workers inside and the glass boxes evoke window prostitution, which occurs in several German red-light districts.26 The supernumerary sex workers, when their employers are not subjecting them to violence, go about their work relatively cheerfully. Their stage business is characterized by sassiness and humor. In short, their behavior easily leads a spectator to believe they are working by choice. This stands in stark contrast to the behavior of Konstanze and Blonde, who we know have been kidnapped and are being held against their will. It is hard to reconcile all the disparate elements of Bieito’s brothel. This is a brothel that advertises, and so is presumably a legal one, but it is also a brothel in which uncooperative trafficking victims are leashed and held in cages, and in which any woman might be spontaneously murdered as a show of power.27

. The lovers communally tell the story of the events of the opera with an interest in sharing their different perspectives. Konstanze and Blonde want to show Belmonte and Pedrillo that their captors were not as bad as they have been made out to be, while Belmonte and Pedrillo vilify the Muslim characters and hold them up for scorn. Over the course of the opera, Mouawad reveals that although Konstanze remained chaste, she has fallen in love with the Pasha. Meanwhile, Blonde had been in a consensual sexual relationship with Osmin, resulting in a pregnancy. Mouawad specifies in the prologue to his production that the women had been in captivity for two years.31 It gradually comes out that Pedrillo also has mixed feelings about his captivity. In one of the new dialogue scenes, he expresses to Blonde that “there [in Turkey], like here [in Europe], I was in a master’s service, they call me servant there, like here” and recalls wondering, “what’s there at home to return to in such a rush?”32 These explicit equivalences pervade Mouawad’s new dialogue. Blonde and Konstanze both remark on the similarity between being a slave in the seraglio in Turkey and being a woman in patriarchal eighteenth-century Europe. Blonde tells Pedrillo that he, her fiancé, is exactly the same as Osmin, her slave master: “Here or there, there or here, you or he, he or you, neither is better than the other.”33

. The lovers communally tell the story of the events of the opera with an interest in sharing their different perspectives. Konstanze and Blonde want to show Belmonte and Pedrillo that their captors were not as bad as they have been made out to be, while Belmonte and Pedrillo vilify the Muslim characters and hold them up for scorn. Over the course of the opera, Mouawad reveals that although Konstanze remained chaste, she has fallen in love with the Pasha. Meanwhile, Blonde had been in a consensual sexual relationship with Osmin, resulting in a pregnancy. Mouawad specifies in the prologue to his production that the women had been in captivity for two years.31 It gradually comes out that Pedrillo also has mixed feelings about his captivity. In one of the new dialogue scenes, he expresses to Blonde that “there [in Turkey], like here [in Europe], I was in a master’s service, they call me servant there, like here” and recalls wondering, “what’s there at home to return to in such a rush?”32 These explicit equivalences pervade Mouawad’s new dialogue. Blonde and Konstanze both remark on the similarity between being a slave in the seraglio in Turkey and being a woman in patriarchal eighteenth-century Europe. Blonde tells Pedrillo that he, her fiancé, is exactly the same as Osmin, her slave master: “Here or there, there or here, you or he, he or you, neither is better than the other.”33

. The lovers communally tell the story of the events of the opera with an interest in sharing their different perspectives. Konstanze and Blonde want to show Belmonte and Pedrillo that their captors were not as bad as they have been made out to be, while Belmonte and Pedrillo vilify the Muslim characters and hold them up for scorn. Over the course of the opera, Mouawad reveals that although Konstanze remained chaste, she has fallen in love with the Pasha. Meanwhile, Blonde had been in a consensual sexual relationship with Osmin, resulting in a pregnancy. Mouawad specifies in the prologue to his production that the women had been in captivity for two years.31 It gradually comes out that Pedrillo also has mixed feelings about his captivity. In one of the new dialogue scenes, he expresses to Blonde that “there [in Turkey], like here [in Europe], I was in a master’s service, they call me servant there, like here” and recalls wondering, “what’s there at home to return to in such a rush?”32 These explicit equivalences pervade Mouawad’s new dialogue. Blonde and Konstanze both remark on the similarity between being a slave in the seraglio in Turkey and being a woman in patriarchal eighteenth-century Europe. Blonde tells Pedrillo that he, her fiancé, is exactly the same as Osmin, her slave master: “Here or there, there or here, you or he, he or you, neither is better than the other.”33

. Selim and Konstanze’s first scene together, built around her aria “Ach, ich liebte,” bears little resemblance to the same scene in Bieito’s production. Mouawad’s Selim is soft spoken and gentle. He pleads with Konstanze to share the source of her unhappiness with him and when she resists, he assures her that he loves her. Raphael Weinstock’s performance encourages us to believe him. Konstanze sings about missing Belmonte, but her affections are obviously split; Selim rests his head in her lap, and she strokes his hair for a time before abruptly stopping herself and standing up. She tells him in the following dialogue, “I never dreamed my heart would be so torn. Your two faces meld into one another. You are powerful, brilliant, and generous as no other man. He exudes innocence and youth. You make me tremble, while he makes my heart beat faster.”39 Mouawad allows a glimmer of Selim’s domineering side to come through in this scene, but it is tempered with an insistence that his behavior is not entirely unreasonable. He tells Konstanze, “I couldn’t bear seeing you turn to another. Not that. What man wouldn’t say that about the woman he loves madly?”40 Even when Selim explicitly threatens her with forced marriage (and its implied consummation), the larger context of Mouawad’s new dialogue seems to ask, what man wouldn’t? At one point when Konstanze resists Selim’s advances, he suddenly asks her, “Do you think your world is better than mine?”41 Konstanze’s struggle against his attempt at forced marriage and rape is thus reframed as a question of East versus West. Mouawad recasts Konstanze’s interest in protecting her bodily autonomy from her captor as a colonialist disdain for Eastern cultures. Mouawad’s goal is to humanize the Muslim men in this opera, but a side effect of that humanization is to quietly excuse the misogyny that fuels these men’s speech. Again and again, the new dialogue encourages us to sympathize with Selim even as he threatens to torture and rape Konstanze.

. Selim and Konstanze’s first scene together, built around her aria “Ach, ich liebte,” bears little resemblance to the same scene in Bieito’s production. Mouawad’s Selim is soft spoken and gentle. He pleads with Konstanze to share the source of her unhappiness with him and when she resists, he assures her that he loves her. Raphael Weinstock’s performance encourages us to believe him. Konstanze sings about missing Belmonte, but her affections are obviously split; Selim rests his head in her lap, and she strokes his hair for a time before abruptly stopping herself and standing up. She tells him in the following dialogue, “I never dreamed my heart would be so torn. Your two faces meld into one another. You are powerful, brilliant, and generous as no other man. He exudes innocence and youth. You make me tremble, while he makes my heart beat faster.”39 Mouawad allows a glimmer of Selim’s domineering side to come through in this scene, but it is tempered with an insistence that his behavior is not entirely unreasonable. He tells Konstanze, “I couldn’t bear seeing you turn to another. Not that. What man wouldn’t say that about the woman he loves madly?”40 Even when Selim explicitly threatens her with forced marriage (and its implied consummation), the larger context of Mouawad’s new dialogue seems to ask, what man wouldn’t? At one point when Konstanze resists Selim’s advances, he suddenly asks her, “Do you think your world is better than mine?”41 Konstanze’s struggle against his attempt at forced marriage and rape is thus reframed as a question of East versus West. Mouawad recasts Konstanze’s interest in protecting her bodily autonomy from her captor as a colonialist disdain for Eastern cultures. Mouawad’s goal is to humanize the Muslim men in this opera, but a side effect of that humanization is to quietly excuse the misogyny that fuels these men’s speech. Again and again, the new dialogue encourages us to sympathize with Selim even as he threatens to torture and rape Konstanze.

. Selim and Konstanze’s first scene together, built around her aria “Ach, ich liebte,” bears little resemblance to the same scene in Bieito’s production. Mouawad’s Selim is soft spoken and gentle. He pleads with Konstanze to share the source of her unhappiness with him and when she resists, he assures her that he loves her. Raphael Weinstock’s performance encourages us to believe him. Konstanze sings about missing Belmonte, but her affections are obviously split; Selim rests his head in her lap, and she strokes his hair for a time before abruptly stopping herself and standing up. She tells him in the following dialogue, “I never dreamed my heart would be so torn. Your two faces meld into one another. You are powerful, brilliant, and generous as no other man. He exudes innocence and youth. You make me tremble, while he makes my heart beat faster.”39 Mouawad allows a glimmer of Selim’s domineering side to come through in this scene, but it is tempered with an insistence that his behavior is not entirely unreasonable. He tells Konstanze, “I couldn’t bear seeing you turn to another. Not that. What man wouldn’t say that about the woman he loves madly?”40 Even when Selim explicitly threatens her with forced marriage (and its implied consummation), the larger context of Mouawad’s new dialogue seems to ask, what man wouldn’t? At one point when Konstanze resists Selim’s advances, he suddenly asks her, “Do you think your world is better than mine?”41 Konstanze’s struggle against his attempt at forced marriage and rape is thus reframed as a question of East versus West. Mouawad recasts Konstanze’s interest in protecting her bodily autonomy from her captor as a colonialist disdain for Eastern cultures. Mouawad’s goal is to humanize the Muslim men in this opera, but a side effect of that humanization is to quietly excuse the misogyny that fuels these men’s speech. Again and again, the new dialogue encourages us to sympathize with Selim even as he threatens to torture and rape Konstanze.

. In Blonde and Osmin’s scenes together, we are encouraged not to take their words at face value in order to humanize and redeem Osmin. Mouawad’s dialogue encourages us to see Blonde’s relationship with her captor as parallel to her relationship with Pedrillo. Before her first aria, “Durch Zärtlichkeit und Schmeicheln,” Blonde wonders, “Why do I always fall for infantile men who never stop complaining?”43 Blonde makes the literal slavery of the seraglio indistinguishable from the figurative slavery of being a woman in misogynistic eighteenth-century Europe. When she finishes her aria about how to properly treat a woman, Osmin scornfully speaks his words from the original libretto: “Tenderness and flattery? We’re in Turkey! I’m the master, you’re my slave. I command, you obey.”44 Mouawad adds an aside from Pedrillo, who is listening in from the present and laughing: “It’s the same in Europe!”45

. In Blonde and Osmin’s scenes together, we are encouraged not to take their words at face value in order to humanize and redeem Osmin. Mouawad’s dialogue encourages us to see Blonde’s relationship with her captor as parallel to her relationship with Pedrillo. Before her first aria, “Durch Zärtlichkeit und Schmeicheln,” Blonde wonders, “Why do I always fall for infantile men who never stop complaining?”43 Blonde makes the literal slavery of the seraglio indistinguishable from the figurative slavery of being a woman in misogynistic eighteenth-century Europe. When she finishes her aria about how to properly treat a woman, Osmin scornfully speaks his words from the original libretto: “Tenderness and flattery? We’re in Turkey! I’m the master, you’re my slave. I command, you obey.”44 Mouawad adds an aside from Pedrillo, who is listening in from the present and laughing: “It’s the same in Europe!”45

. In 2015, the Royal Opera House (ROH) premiered a new production of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell directed by Damiano Michieletto. Before opening night, a number of industry professionals and friends of the company attended the dress rehearsal and were the first to see Michieletto’s staging. During the ballet scene in the third act, a Swiss woman was stripped and sexually assaulted by a group of Austrian soldiers while the audience uncharacteristically shouted and booed. Opera singer Catharine Woodward (Catharine Rogers at the time) was in the audience of the open dress rehearsal, and she submitted a customer service form on the ROH website after the performance. She wrote that she was in “tears of shock” during the ballet scene, which she found to be “the worst kind of gratuitous,” and advised that “at the very least . . . the performance should come with a strong warning, as I have many friends I would love to take to the opera, who have been the victims of sexual violence, I would never forgive myself if I subjected them to what I saw on Friday.”22 ROH General Director Kasper Holten responded to Woodward directly in an email, which she reproduced on her blog. He also wrote an open letter addressing Woodward and others who were upset, which was published on music journalist and provocateur Norman Lebrecht’s classical music gossip blog, Slipped Disc. In his response, Holten defends the production for representing “the reality of warfare,” but he also apologizes “for [the ROH] not issuing a strong and clear enough warning.” He reflects that audience members “should be able to make an informed choice about what they want to see or not, and if an audience member does not want to be exposed to sexual violence, it should be their choice.”23

. The vast majority of the new dialogue written for Konstanze and Blonde in this production serves to defend the characters of the men who hold them captive. One exception to this is in a brief conversation between the two women after Konstanze’s aria “Welcher Wechsel.” They only exchange a few lines, but it is the only scene they have alone together. It is notable that while in the original libretto they daydream about Belmonte and rescue, here they do not talk about the men at all. Still, their relationship is challenging to read in the midst of the contemporary value system of Mouawad’s production, because while the women may behave as friends, Blonde is Konstanze’s servant. In “Durch Zärtlichkeit,” we see Blonde thinking through the figurative slavery of being a woman—and specifically a lower-class woman—in Enlightened Europe by equating her relationships with Pedrillo and Osmin. But she does not direct any of this revolutionary attitude toward her mistress. Page 107 →Instead, Blonde comforts Konstanze, who is having a harder time adjusting to life in the seraglio by telling her, “I’ve often experienced exile. Changing countries and languages becomes an advantage in the long run, an identity.”47 Konstanze expresses envy for Blonde’s courage, and Blonde jokingly suggests that they should change places before telling Konstanze, “Who understands me better than you, and you, better than me? We were mistress and servant, now we’re two women, side by side.”48 This female camaraderie initially has a sheen of empowerment, but it quickly corrupts under scrutiny. This new equality that Blonde feels is possible in the seraglio because the class distance between them has dissolved, but it has dissolved because now they are both slaves. Mouawad romanticizes their captivity, first by having Blonde express gratitude for the learning experience, then by casting it as the catalyst to bring these two women together in a way that would have been impossible while they still had their freedom.

. The vast majority of the new dialogue written for Konstanze and Blonde in this production serves to defend the characters of the men who hold them captive. One exception to this is in a brief conversation between the two women after Konstanze’s aria “Welcher Wechsel.” They only exchange a few lines, but it is the only scene they have alone together. It is notable that while in the original libretto they daydream about Belmonte and rescue, here they do not talk about the men at all. Still, their relationship is challenging to read in the midst of the contemporary value system of Mouawad’s production, because while the women may behave as friends, Blonde is Konstanze’s servant. In “Durch Zärtlichkeit,” we see Blonde thinking through the figurative slavery of being a woman—and specifically a lower-class woman—in Enlightened Europe by equating her relationships with Pedrillo and Osmin. But she does not direct any of this revolutionary attitude toward her mistress. Page 107 →Instead, Blonde comforts Konstanze, who is having a harder time adjusting to life in the seraglio by telling her, “I’ve often experienced exile. Changing countries and languages becomes an advantage in the long run, an identity.”47 Konstanze expresses envy for Blonde’s courage, and Blonde jokingly suggests that they should change places before telling Konstanze, “Who understands me better than you, and you, better than me? We were mistress and servant, now we’re two women, side by side.”48 This female camaraderie initially has a sheen of empowerment, but it quickly corrupts under scrutiny. This new equality that Blonde feels is possible in the seraglio because the class distance between them has dissolved, but it has dissolved because now they are both slaves. Mouawad romanticizes their captivity, first by having Blonde express gratitude for the learning experience, then by casting it as the catalyst to bring these two women together in a way that would have been impossible while they still had their freedom.

. Like Bieito’s Entführung, Mouawad’s also offers a critique of the rescue genre. Bieito accomplishes this goal by revealing the hero to be no different than the villain at the opera’s conclusion when Belmonte takes ownership of the brothel and leaves Konstanze very much un-rescued. Mouawad’s critique is more subtle and hinges on the idea that the women did not necessarily need rescuing in the first place. His representation of Belmonte indicates that the rescue storyline is more about the ego of the hero than the needs of the damsel. During his aria, “Wenn der Freude Thränen fliessen,” Belmonte sings about the joy of being reunited with his lover, but he addresses the entire aria to the audience and fails to interact with or even make eye contact with Konstanze who is onstage with him. In contrast to Belmonte’s self-serving heroism is the behavior of the Muslim men. Mouawad gives the final line of dialogue in the opera to Selim, who tells Osmin, “Love your Blonde more than anything else and let her go.”49 So, ultimately, it is the Turkish men who prove themselves actually capable of selfless action to benefit the women they love, in contrast to Belmonte and Pedrillo, whose clueless callousness in the prologue is the impetus for the entire action of the opera. Bieito’s rescue critique generates sympathy for the women who have been failed by the false heroics of their lovers, whereas Mouawad’s generates sympathy for the women’s captors, whom he assures us are the real heroes of this story once we get past our Western bias.

. Blonde. The most unbearable part was that we were forced to lie to you to save our own lives!50

. At first, this is a strong criticism of the written text; Konstanze and Blonde point out the false virtue of the men who only want to rescue them from slavery under certain conditions. But Blonde goes on to tell Pedrillo, “Two years sleeping in the same house with a man who did nothing but seduce me and win me over, offering me gift after gift, making me the queen over everything, over his life, what did you want me to do?”51 She is arguing here that she had no choice but to give in to Osmin’s seduction, but Mouawad combines coercion and imprisonment with Blonde’s tender feelings for Osmin. She had sex with him both because she could not effectively resist him any longer as her captor and because he made her happy. I think Mouawad is wrong to try to have this both ways. As a slave, Blonde cannot consent to sex with her master.

. In Entführung’s written text, there are no women in the seraglio besides Konstanze and Blonde, but both Bieito and Mouawad populate their stages with supernumerary women. For Bieito, these women are sex workers or maybe other captives, and for Mouawad they are presumably Turkish women living in the seraglio. None of these women speak or have any meaningful impact on the action—except, for Bieito, when they are the victims of rape and murder—but they are there, visible in the background through Page 111 →much of the opera. Both of these groups of seraglio women move cheerfully through their daily tasks of emotional labor for the men of the seraglio. The sex workers in Bieito’s production pleasure their customers and stroke Osmin’s ego (among other things). The women in Mouawad’s production teach their children and comfort Konstanze when she is struggling with her relationship with Selim.54 Despite extensive additions and alterations to the dialogue scenes in the written text, neither director gives these background women anything to say.55 For Mouawad in particular, these women stand out to me as a potential antidote to the male-dominated politics of cultural representation in this production. Their intersectional identities could have had great power in a reparative retelling of this story. Instead, what we get are the silent figures of women who represent not only a missed opportunity but still another reminder of the ways gendered representation feels like an afterthought in this production.56

. In Entführung’s written text, there are no women in the seraglio besides Konstanze and Blonde, but both Bieito and Mouawad populate their stages with supernumerary women. For Bieito, these women are sex workers or maybe other captives, and for Mouawad they are presumably Turkish women living in the seraglio. None of these women speak or have any meaningful impact on the action—except, for Bieito, when they are the victims of rape and murder—but they are there, visible in the background through Page 111 →much of the opera. Both of these groups of seraglio women move cheerfully through their daily tasks of emotional labor for the men of the seraglio. The sex workers in Bieito’s production pleasure their customers and stroke Osmin’s ego (among other things). The women in Mouawad’s production teach their children and comfort Konstanze when she is struggling with her relationship with Selim.54 Despite extensive additions and alterations to the dialogue scenes in the written text, neither director gives these background women anything to say.55 For Mouawad in particular, these women stand out to me as a potential antidote to the male-dominated politics of cultural representation in this production. Their intersectional identities could have had great power in a reparative retelling of this story. Instead, what we get are the silent figures of women who represent not only a missed opportunity but still another reminder of the ways gendered representation feels like an afterthought in this production.56

. In 2015, the Royal Opera House (ROH) premiered a new production of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell directed by Damiano Michieletto. Before opening night, a number of industry professionals and friends of the company attended the dress rehearsal and were the first to see Michieletto’s staging. During the ballet scene in the third act, a Swiss woman was stripped and sexually assaulted by a group of Austrian soldiers while the audience uncharacteristically shouted and booed. Opera singer Catharine Woodward (Catharine Rogers at the time) was in the audience of the open dress rehearsal, and she submitted a customer service form on the ROH website after the performance. She wrote that she was in “tears of shock” during the ballet scene, which she found to be “the worst kind of gratuitous,” and advised that “at the very least . . . the performance should come with a strong warning, as I have many friends I would love to take to the opera, who have been the victims of sexual violence, I would never forgive myself if I subjected them to what I saw on Friday.”22 ROH General Director Kasper Holten responded to Woodward directly in an email, which she reproduced on her blog. He also wrote an open letter addressing Woodward and others who were upset, which was published on music journalist and provocateur Norman Lebrecht’s classical music gossip blog, Slipped Disc. In his response, Holten defends the production for representing “the reality of warfare,” but he also apologizes “for [the ROH] not issuing a strong and clear enough warning.” He reflects that audience members “should be able to make an informed choice about what they want to see or not, and if an audience member does not want to be exposed to sexual violence, it should be their choice.”23

. In Entführung’s written text, there are no women in the seraglio besides Konstanze and Blonde, but both Bieito and Mouawad populate their stages with supernumerary women. For Bieito, these women are sex workers or maybe other captives, and for Mouawad they are presumably Turkish women living in the seraglio. None of these women speak or have any meaningful impact on the action—except, for Bieito, when they are the victims of rape and murder—but they are there, visible in the background through Page 111 →much of the opera. Both of these groups of seraglio women move cheerfully through their daily tasks of emotional labor for the men of the seraglio. The sex workers in Bieito’s production pleasure their customers and stroke Osmin’s ego (among other things). The women in Mouawad’s production teach their children and comfort Konstanze when she is struggling with her relationship with Selim.54 Despite extensive additions and alterations to the dialogue scenes in the written text, neither director gives these background women anything to say.55 For Mouawad in particular, these women stand out to me as a potential antidote to the male-dominated politics of cultural representation in this production. Their intersectional identities could have had great power in a reparative retelling of this story. Instead, what we get are the silent figures of women who represent not only a missed opportunity but still another reminder of the ways gendered representation feels like an afterthought in this production.56

. In the best cases, inventive reimagining of Orientalist works can illuminate not only the racism within these works but also racism in our contemporary culture. Anne Bogart’s Bessie Award-winning South Pacific in 1984 moves the action to a rehabilitation clinic for veterans with PTSD. Bogart’s approach shares similarities with Mouawad’s in Entführung; while Rodgers and Hammerstein’s numbers appear in order and without alteration, the narrative that connects them casts these numbers in a very different light. More recently, in 2017, New York’s Heartbeat Opera produced a revised and trimmed version of Madama Butterfly called Butterfly. Like Bogart, director Ethan Heard removes the opera from its romantic exotic locale, which allows him to tell the story of a modern Asian woman and to avoid what he calls the fetishistic desire of audiences to witness Butterfly’s ritual suicide.57 GenEnCo’s The Mikado: Reclaimed, produced in Austin in 2016 and directed by kt shorb, uses music from The Mikado to tell a story about Japanese internment. This sampling of productions share a willingness to alter the written text to support their critical projects. This type of work has been largely carried out in smaller opera and musical theater companies. I hope that future years will see an increased willingness of larger companies to entertain productions that make significant intervention at the level of the written text. In the absence of such intervention, I feel it is time for opera companies to take a step back from some of these works.58

. In the best cases, inventive reimagining of Orientalist works can illuminate not only the racism within these works but also racism in our contemporary culture. Anne Bogart’s Bessie Award-winning South Pacific in 1984 moves the action to a rehabilitation clinic for veterans with PTSD. Bogart’s approach shares similarities with Mouawad’s in Entführung; while Rodgers and Hammerstein’s numbers appear in order and without alteration, the narrative that connects them casts these numbers in a very different light. More recently, in 2017, New York’s Heartbeat Opera produced a revised and trimmed version of Madama Butterfly called Butterfly. Like Bogart, director Ethan Heard removes the opera from its romantic exotic locale, which allows him to tell the story of a modern Asian woman and to avoid what he calls the fetishistic desire of audiences to witness Butterfly’s ritual suicide.57 GenEnCo’s The Mikado: Reclaimed, produced in Austin in 2016 and directed by kt shorb, uses music from The Mikado to tell a story about Japanese internment. This sampling of productions share a willingness to alter the written text to support their critical projects. This type of work has been largely carried out in smaller opera and musical theater companies. I hope that future years will see an increased willingness of larger companies to entertain productions that make significant intervention at the level of the written text. In the absence of such intervention, I feel it is time for opera companies to take a step back from some of these works.58

. The act of reading rape . . . requires restoring rape to the literal, to the body: restoring, that is, the violence—the physical, sexual violation. The insistence on taking rape literally often necessitates a conscious critical act of reading the violence and the sexuality back into texts where is has been deflected, either by the text itself or by the critics: where it has been turned into a metaphor or a symbol or represented rhetorically as titillation, persuasion, ravishment, seduction, or desire.59

. Sexual violence and war are inextricable in recorded human history. Raping the women of the enemy has been a mainstay of combat since antiquity and it persists despite increased scrutiny and legislation. It is not surprising that these dual atrocities, linked as they are in reality, often occur together in fictional representations of conflict as well. The opera canon is filled with wartime stories, especially in works from the nineteenth century. Great battles from history and myth offer opportunities for epic tragedies and tales of valor and showcase the pomp and spectacle of grand opera in massive choruses of soldiers and elaborate stage effects. Regietheater also loves wartime settings, but these are frequently stark and dystopian modern-day wars or occupations. It is here that sexual violence often emerges as a stark reminder of the horrific realities of war that might otherwise be lost in grand operatic spectacle. Treating wartime opera stories seriously (in the opinion of many critics, too seriously) points out and problematizes opera’s predominantly aesthetic preoccupation with stories of war and oppression.1 Sexual violence is a popular way for directors to achieve this level of increased seriousness. In many cases, staging sexual violence makes the stakes of a war plot more relevant by placing the focus on the individual suffering of innocents. Amplifying and even inventing violence in productions of canonic operas, especially operas set in wartime, can also function as a criticism of opera’s tendency to dramatize scenarios of human suffering for the sake of entertainment.

. Public perception of the prevalence of wartime sexual violence increased as legal definitions shifted through the late twentieth century. In 1977, an amendment to the Geneva Conventions explicitly outlawed the rape of victims of armed conflicts, but it was only in the 1990s, in response to a number of specific conflicts, that international governing bodies began to recognize the full scope of wartime sexual violence.3 In 1993, instances of widespread gang rape and sexual slavery of Muslim women in Bosnia and Herzegovina were classified as crimes against humanity for the first time. Then in 1998, the United Nations ruled that rape could be an element of genocide, after witnessing how during the Rwandan Genocide Tutsi women were systematically raped in an attempt to destroy their ethnic group. Finally, in 2008, the United Nations adopted language that categorizes rape and sexual violence as war crimes. These landmark decisions have led to gradual acceptance of the idea that sexual violence is not a side-effect or coincidence of war, but a weapon of war employed systematically in military conflicts for purposes up to and including genocide.

. Page 117 →[The soldier] rapes because he wants to engage in violence. He rapes because he wants to demonstrate his power. He rapes because he is the victor. He rapes because the woman is the enemy’s woman, and he wants to humiliate and annihilate the enemy. He rapes because the woman is herself the enemy whom he wishes to humiliate and annihilate. He rapes because he despises women. He rapes to prove his virility. He rapes because the acquisition of the female body means a piece of territory conquered. He rapes to take out on someone else the humiliation he has suffered in the war. He rapes to work off his fears. He rapes because it’s really only some ‘fun’ with the guys. He rapes because war, a man’s business, has awakened his aggressiveness, and he directs it at those who play a subordinate role in the world of war.4

. Woodward focuses her argument on the risks that representations of rape pose to survivors of sexual violence. In her blog post, she cites an article reporting that approximately one in two women in Britain have been physicallyPage 9 → or sexually assaulted.24 In his first response to Woodward’s letter, Holten writes that given the opera’s topic of war and oppression, “it is important that we do not only allow [Rossini’s] opera to become harmless entertainment today.”25 Holten uses the language of harm in a figurative way here—he wants audiences to be made uncomfortable so that they will think critically about the opera’s politics—but Woodward is calling attention to real psychological and physiological harm when she talks about her fear for survivors of sexual assault who will attend this production. Woodward is referring to a kind of retraumatization in which post-traumatic stress reactions can be triggered or exacerbated by stressors that are not necessarily traumatic in and of themselves. These stressors can include reminders of the original traumatic experience like, in this example, a staged representation of a sexual assault. Holten writes in his Slipped Disc letter that although the scene was meant to be upsetting, he had “no intention to disturb people in the way Catharine describes.”26

. Sexual violence attacks and limits the bodily autonomy and the agency of its victims. Feminist philosopher Anne Cahill argues that the act of rape “constructs male sexuality in a particular way such that it constitutes a way of imposing harm, pain and powerlessness” and “constructs female sexuality in terms of passivity, victimhood, and lack of agency.”5 In the real world, women who experience sexual violence do not necessarily lose their agency. There are many ways in which women can resist the powerlessness that their attackers may try to impose. Representations of rape often focus on a powerless victim, though. In an effort to condemn sexual violence, representations of its objects tend to lean into their victimization to show how damaging rape is to the body and the mind. But this leaves us with countless depictions of women who are only noteworthy for their status as victims and who have no opportunity to express their agency.

. Damiano Michieletto’s Guillaume Tell fits into this representational framework with its depiction of an attempted gang rape of a Swiss woman. Michieletto updates Schiller’s story of the fourteenth-century Austrian oppression Page 118 →of the Swiss people to a non-specific twentieth-century occupation by a brutal military force. In the second scene of the third act, the Austrian soldiers are celebrating the hundredth anniversary of their rule in Switzerland. In Michieletto’s production, when the ballet movement begins, a few soldiers select a woman from the chorus of Swiss prisoners and drag her forward.6 They offer her a glass of champagne, and when she refuses it and runs, about half a dozen soldiers surround her and force her to drink while they pour their own champagne over her head. She runs again, and this time is caught by a soldier sitting at a long communal table. He holds her in his lap while others grope her and try to reach up under her dress. Now when she breaks free, it is Rodolphe, the captain of the guard, who catches her and brings her to Governor Gessler. Gessler initially presents a veneer of kindness, touching her shoulder as if to comfort her and moving her wet hair out of her face. He draws his gun and taunts her with it playfully. In the presence of the gun, the terrified woman momentarily stops fighting. Gessler tries to kiss her mouth, and she pushes him. Furious, he gestures for his men to take her away. They force her onto the tabletop and strip her, obscuring her from the audience with their bodies. She stands up and wraps the tablecloth around herself, crying and shaking her head no. The men jump and dance around below her, beating their fists on the table in unison. They seize her, pull her to the ground, and pile on top of her, pulling the cloth away. Suddenly, Tell appears in the fray as if from nowhere and the woman escapes offstage.

. This display of violence communicates to the audience the nature of the Austrian oppression of Switzerland and the role that sexual violence can play in systems of political control. Eileen Zurbriggen posits that war and rape are correlated because they are both supported and justified by what she calls the traditional or hegemonic model of masculinity. One of the dimensions of masculinity that she explores in relation to both war and rape is dominance/power/control.9 In this way, martial rape is an act of terrorism toward the enemy group at large, used to maintain and express control.10

. Calixto Bieito’s production of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera for the Gran Teatre del Liceu in 2000 features the rape of a young man by police in a military state. Though not strictly a war setting, this production is still closely related to the theme insofar as it shows state-sanctioned sexual violence as a tactic to punish civilian disobedience under a military government. We are first introduced to the young man in a large ensemble scene at the home of the witch and fortune teller, Madame Arvidson (Ulrica).11 In this production, Bieito has set this scene in a brothel and made Madame Arvidson its proprietor. The young man appears to be a sex worker. He is costumed provocatively in leather pants and a shiny silver shirt unbuttoned and hanging off his shoulders. Throughout this scene, he is used quite literally as a set piece; various characters physically move him around the stage as they caress his body. At the end of this scene, he gets on his knees in front of King Gustavo (Ricardo) and steals his wallet under the pretense of offering to perform fellatio. During the long orchestral interlude that introduces the next act, the young man from the brothel runs onstage, pursued by four police officers. They catch him, beat him, and strip him naked. Three officers hold the young man down while the fourth lowers his pants and rapes him. Anckarström (Renato), who in this production is the King’s military captain, enters and watches from upstage. After the rape, another of the officers fishes the man’s belt from his clothes and strangles him with it. The officers retrieve the stolen wallet from the dead man’s pants and deliver it to Anckarström as they leave the stage. The naked body is left in the field as a clear message about how little this man’s life is worth to the establishment. The rape and murder may also communicate a direct threat to Madame Arvidson, the young man’s employer, who was in some tension with Gustavo in the previous scene. It is relatively unusual to see a man depicted as the victim of rape on the opera stage, but this character’s representation sexualizes and objectifies him in a way that closely aligns him with the women who are more typically the receptors of operatic sexual violence. Inger Skjelsbæk has argued that war rape must always be understood in terms of the masculinization of the perpetrator and the feminization of the victim. She writes, “the ways in which masculinization and feminization polarize other identities are intimately linked to the overall conflict structure, and it is this mechanism which can make rape a powerful weapon of war.”12

. Calixto Bieito’s production of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera for the Gran Teatre del Liceu in 2000 features the rape of a young man by police in a military state. Though not strictly a war setting, this production is still closely related to the theme insofar as it shows state-sanctioned sexual violence as a tactic to punish civilian disobedience under a military government. We are first introduced to the young man in a large ensemble scene at the home of the witch and fortune teller, Madame Arvidson (Ulrica).11 In this production, Bieito has set this scene in a brothel and made Madame Arvidson its proprietor. The young man appears to be a sex worker. He is costumed provocatively in leather pants and a shiny silver shirt unbuttoned and hanging off his shoulders. Throughout this scene, he is used quite literally as a set piece; various characters physically move him around the stage as they caress his body. At the end of this scene, he gets on his knees in front of King Gustavo (Ricardo) and steals his wallet under the pretense of offering to perform fellatio. During the long orchestral interlude that introduces the next act, the young man from the brothel runs onstage, pursued by four police officers. They catch him, beat him, and strip him naked. Three officers hold the young man down while the fourth lowers his pants and rapes him. Anckarström (Renato), who in this production is the King’s military captain, enters and watches from upstage. After the rape, another of the officers fishes the man’s belt from his clothes and strangles him with it. The officers retrieve the stolen wallet from the dead man’s pants and deliver it to Anckarström as they leave the stage. The naked body is left in the field as a clear message about how little this man’s life is worth to the establishment. The rape and murder may also communicate a direct threat to Madame Arvidson, the young man’s employer, who was in some tension with Gustavo in the previous scene. It is relatively unusual to see a man depicted as the victim of rape on the opera stage, but this character’s representation sexualizes and objectifies him in a way that closely aligns him with the women who are more typically the receptors of operatic sexual violence. Inger Skjelsbæk has argued that war rape must always be understood in terms of the masculinization of the perpetrator and the feminization of the victim. She writes, “the ways in which masculinization and feminization polarize other identities are intimately linked to the overall conflict structure, and it is this mechanism which can make rape a powerful weapon of war.”12

. Woodward focuses her argument on the risks that representations of rape pose to survivors of sexual violence. In her blog post, she cites an article reporting that approximately one in two women in Britain have been physicallyPage 9 → or sexually assaulted.24 In his first response to Woodward’s letter, Holten writes that given the opera’s topic of war and oppression, “it is important that we do not only allow [Rossini’s] opera to become harmless entertainment today.”25 Holten uses the language of harm in a figurative way here—he wants audiences to be made uncomfortable so that they will think critically about the opera’s politics—but Woodward is calling attention to real psychological and physiological harm when she talks about her fear for survivors of sexual assault who will attend this production. Woodward is referring to a kind of retraumatization in which post-traumatic stress reactions can be triggered or exacerbated by stressors that are not necessarily traumatic in and of themselves. These stressors can include reminders of the original traumatic experience like, in this example, a staged representation of a sexual assault. Holten writes in his Slipped Disc letter that although the scene was meant to be upsetting, he had “no intention to disturb people in the way Catharine describes.”26

. Despite Turandot’s relative power and agency in the opera, Calaf dehumanizes and ultimately rapes her in order to achieve his political goals. Knabe’s Turandot is set in a totalitarian state whose aging dictator is near death. Calaf, exiled from a foreign kingdom, wins Turandot’s hand and thereby a seat of political power. Knabe states clearly in the program that Calaf’s desire for Turandot is about the power of her position; Calaf is not a “languishing lover” but “a clever, highly strategic politician.”18 In Knabe’s staging, Calaf throws Turandot down on the bed, kneels between her legs, and rapes her. Whereas the stage directions in the libretto specify that Turandot is transfigured by the stolen kiss, Knabe’s Turandot is broken and resigned through the opera’s conclusion. This production cuts the portion of the ending when Turandot sings about her awakening to love, so she sings only a few short lines after the rape, including “I am ashamed.”19 As the chorus sings a climactic reprisal of the melody of Calaf’s aria “Nessun dorma,” Calaf walks away from Turandot carrying a baby doll smeared with what looks like blood and afterbirth. He holds the child up triumphantly over his head on one side of the stage as the climactic music swells.

. Page 122 →Both Knabe and the musical director Stefan Soltesz refer to Turandot as a vehicle for power in Calaf’s eyes.20 After the kiss, or in this case rape, Turandot tells Calaf that he has won his victory and that now he can leave. She does not understand that the rape itself is not the prize, it is simply politically expedient. It binds Turandot to Calaf and assures he will reign as Emperor in her father’s place, and the resultant child ensures the continuing power of his political dynasty. Calaf wants to conquer Turandot, and he does this not just by outsmarting her, but by impregnating her. During the war in the Balkans, the aggressors “used rape not only as a tool of war, but also to implement a policy of impregnation in order to further the destruction of one people and the proliferation of another—a policy of genocide by forced impregnation.”21 Turandot is a vehicle for power for Calaf, and she is also a vessel for his politically legitimate heirs. Calaf does not treat Turandot like a person with autonomy. To him, she is only her bloodline and her fertile body. Turandot’s dehumanization is especially jarring because she is not only a named character, unlike the rape victims in the other productions, but the opera’s eponymous character. Her immense power and agency from the opera’s start is stripped away after Calaf answers her riddles. In the opera’s final scene, after the rape, Calaf and Turandot pose in their wedding clothes as if for a portrait, before Calaf walks away with the baby to celebrate his victory. Turandot stands motionless in her white dress like a photograph of herself reduced to a single purpose—providing legitimacy to Calaf’s reign.

. Page 122 →Both Knabe and the musical director Stefan Soltesz refer to Turandot as a vehicle for power in Calaf’s eyes.20 After the kiss, or in this case rape, Turandot tells Calaf that he has won his victory and that now he can leave. She does not understand that the rape itself is not the prize, it is simply politically expedient. It binds Turandot to Calaf and assures he will reign as Emperor in her father’s place, and the resultant child ensures the continuing power of his political dynasty. Calaf wants to conquer Turandot, and he does this not just by outsmarting her, but by impregnating her. During the war in the Balkans, the aggressors “used rape not only as a tool of war, but also to implement a policy of impregnation in order to further the destruction of one people and the proliferation of another—a policy of genocide by forced impregnation.”21 Turandot is a vehicle for power for Calaf, and she is also a vessel for his politically legitimate heirs. Calaf does not treat Turandot like a person with autonomy. To him, she is only her bloodline and her fertile body. Turandot’s dehumanization is especially jarring because she is not only a named character, unlike the rape victims in the other productions, but the opera’s eponymous character. Her immense power and agency from the opera’s start is stripped away after Calaf answers her riddles. In the opera’s final scene, after the rape, Calaf and Turandot pose in their wedding clothes as if for a portrait, before Calaf walks away with the baby to celebrate his victory. Turandot stands motionless in her white dress like a photograph of herself reduced to a single purpose—providing legitimacy to Calaf’s reign.

. The acts of sexual violence in these productions are all performed for these operas’ audiences. But while the rapes in Turandot and Ballo happen in private, Michieletto’s Tell and Kratzer’s Forza use rape and the threat of rape as public spectacles to raise the morale of Austrian and American troops, respectively. These productions both present the basic assumption that sexual violence is an effective tool of peer bonding for soldiers. Susan Brownmiller suggests that gang rape may even have been one of the earliest forms of male bonding.23 Though the scenes of sexual violence in Tell and Forza are drastically different in tone, both rely on our recognition that sexual violence, and gang rape in particular, can function to sow solidarity among its perpetrators.24

. The acts of sexual violence in these productions are all performed for these operas’ audiences. But while the rapes in Turandot and Ballo happen in private, Michieletto’s Tell and Kratzer’s Forza use rape and the threat of rape as public spectacles to raise the morale of Austrian and American troops, respectively. These productions both present the basic assumption that sexual violence is an effective tool of peer bonding for soldiers. Susan Brownmiller suggests that gang rape may even have been one of the earliest forms of male bonding.23 Though the scenes of sexual violence in Tell and Forza are drastically different in tone, both rely on our recognition that sexual violence, and gang rape in particular, can function to sow solidarity among its perpetrators.24

. Woodward focuses her argument on the risks that representations of rape pose to survivors of sexual violence. In her blog post, she cites an article reporting that approximately one in two women in Britain have been physicallyPage 9 → or sexually assaulted.24 In his first response to Woodward’s letter, Holten writes that given the opera’s topic of war and oppression, “it is important that we do not only allow [Rossini’s] opera to become harmless entertainment today.”25 Holten uses the language of harm in a figurative way here—he wants audiences to be made uncomfortable so that they will think critically about the opera’s politics—but Woodward is calling attention to real psychological and physiological harm when she talks about her fear for survivors of sexual assault who will attend this production. Woodward is referring to a kind of retraumatization in which post-traumatic stress reactions can be triggered or exacerbated by stressors that are not necessarily traumatic in and of themselves. These stressors can include reminders of the original traumatic experience like, in this example, a staged representation of a sexual assault. Holten writes in his Slipped Disc letter that although the scene was meant to be upsetting, he had “no intention to disturb people in the way Catharine describes.”26

. Where Kratzer’s soldiers bond over a crass representation of rape, Michieletto’s soldiers in Guillaume Tell bond over watching and participating in the real sexual assault of a young woman selected from among their Swiss captives. Catharine MacKinnon describes the sexual violence at the Serbian rape camps in Bosnia and Herzegovina as representing “live pornography”; in addition to filming the rapes, MacKinnon claims that the Serbian forces would invite their fellow officers to come and watch them. One soldier, she writes, compared this experience to going to a movie theater.27 The rape scene in Michieletto’s Tell clearly evokes these real-world stories about the utilization of rape as a spectacle for entertainment.28

. Where Kratzer’s soldiers bond over a crass representation of rape, Michieletto’s soldiers in Guillaume Tell bond over watching and participating in the real sexual assault of a young woman selected from among their Swiss captives. Catharine MacKinnon describes the sexual violence at the Serbian rape camps in Bosnia and Herzegovina as representing “live pornography”; in addition to filming the rapes, MacKinnon claims that the Serbian forces would invite their fellow officers to come and watch them. One soldier, she writes, compared this experience to going to a movie theater.27 The rape scene in Michieletto’s Tell clearly evokes these real-world stories about the utilization of rape as a spectacle for entertainment.28

. Page 126 →Although Michieletto dispenses with a traditional ballet for this scene, his choreography is consistent with the idea that this is functional music played and heard as part of the Austrian soldiers’ celebration. In the written text of Guillaume Tell, this music is already dissonant with the experience of the Swiss people. Michieletto’s performance text accentuates this feature of the written text in the way he choreographs the motions of the Austrian soldiers, whose experience of the scene aligns with the music, versus the Swiss woman, whose experience of the scene is dissonant with the music. When the Swiss woman first interacts with Governor Gessler, we see the way that Gessler’s actions align with the music and the Swiss woman’s do not. The orchestral texture thins, and a short unison scalar passage of descending sixteenth notes in the strings corresponds with Gessler running his fingers down the woman’s arm twice (the first and third bars of Example 1). Michieletto is depending on that same Regietheater technique, discussed in chapter 3, in which staging choices are legitimated by their alignment with musical structures.29 The concordance emphasizes that while this music has an estranging effect on the audience and the Swiss characters, it fluently scores the actions and motivations of the Austrian soldiers.

. All four of these productions contain clear critiques of war and authoritarianism. I have found this to be the case in general for productions that add a wartime setting in production distinct from what is in the written text. There are a couple of directorial short-hands that tend to arise in the service of critiquing war in this context. One of them is the inclusion of scenes of sexual violence, which I will return to shortly. Another is fascist iconography. Regietheater frequently takes aim at jingoism, and in the German context of so much Regietheater, this is often accomplished with reference to Nazi symbols.31 Calico argues that in nonliteral stagings of canonic operas, the experience of estrangement comes from the disruption of expectation, and specifically the “rupture between what is seen and what is heard.”32 The goal of estrangement is not only the disorientation of thwarted expectations, but also the re-cognition that follows. Regietheater, like Brecht’s epic theater, bestows agency on its spectators by asking them to rethink what they have previously taken Page 129 →for granted. This kind of spectating can be pleasurable, but it can also be used to forward a socio-political critique.33

. All four of these productions contain clear critiques of war and authoritarianism. I have found this to be the case in general for productions that add a wartime setting in production distinct from what is in the written text. There are a couple of directorial short-hands that tend to arise in the service of critiquing war in this context. One of them is the inclusion of scenes of sexual violence, which I will return to shortly. Another is fascist iconography. Regietheater frequently takes aim at jingoism, and in the German context of so much Regietheater, this is often accomplished with reference to Nazi symbols.31 Calico argues that in nonliteral stagings of canonic operas, the experience of estrangement comes from the disruption of expectation, and specifically the “rupture between what is seen and what is heard.”32 The goal of estrangement is not only the disorientation of thwarted expectations, but also the re-cognition that follows. Regietheater, like Brecht’s epic theater, bestows agency on its spectators by asking them to rethink what they have previously taken Page 129 →for granted. This kind of spectating can be pleasurable, but it can also be used to forward a socio-political critique.33

. Woodward’s and Holten’s different uses of language of harm in relation to viewing a representation of sexual violence amount to a misunderstanding about the stakes at play. Holten seems initially reluctant to issue a specific warning about the sexual violence in Tell because he believes that the scene should be shocking and should make audience members uncomfortable in service of the director’s commentary on the reality of war and war crimes. Woodward, on the other hand, is not advocating for herself in her discomfort but for sexual violence survivors who may be living with PTSD. Her position echoes a foundational idea of modern psychiatry, that “trauma is qualitatively different from stress and results in lasting biological change.”27 When Woodward asks Holten to warn audiences about the explicit display of sexual violence in this production, she is not worried about discomfort. Rather, she is trying to make space for survivors of sexual violence to make an informed decision about their capacity to engage with this production in a way that does not threaten their psychological and physiological wellbeing.

. Kratzer’s La forza del destino, Michieletto’s Guillaume Tell, Knabe’s Turandot, and Bieito’s Un ballo in maschera all contain clear critiques of fascism. Whereas in Tell, the fascist regime is the enemy Austrian force that subjugates the Swiss protagonists in the written text, Forza, Turandot, and Ballo tease fascist undertones out of the chorus scenes that in the operas’ written texts generally serve as uncritical celebrations of the glory of war or the homeland. In Kratzer’s Forza, the rollicking chorus number “Rataplan” accompanies a group of American soldiers amusing themselves by shooting a revolver loaded with a single bullet at a Vietnamese POW until eventually one of them kills him. The soldiers sing, “your glorious wounds will be rewarded by your triumph. . . . Victory shines brighter for the courageous soldier.”35 These moments of relatively uncritical expressions of musical patriotism and love for one’s leader become, in these stagings, fanatical fascist gestures.36 All three of these chorus scenes, from Forza, Ballo, and Turandot, represent conventional operatic use of the chorus, but Kratzer, Bieito, and Knabe all use their staging to mine a darker message out of these scenes. These symbols alienate us from the beautiful and triumphant music of these choruses by connecting this music to the historical and contemporary reality of fascism.37

. Kratzer’s La forza del destino, Michieletto’s Guillaume Tell, Knabe’s Turandot, and Bieito’s Un ballo in maschera all contain clear critiques of fascism. Whereas in Tell, the fascist regime is the enemy Austrian force that subjugates the Swiss protagonists in the written text, Forza, Turandot, and Ballo tease fascist undertones out of the chorus scenes that in the operas’ written texts generally serve as uncritical celebrations of the glory of war or the homeland. In Kratzer’s Forza, the rollicking chorus number “Rataplan” accompanies a group of American soldiers amusing themselves by shooting a revolver loaded with a single bullet at a Vietnamese POW until eventually one of them kills him. The soldiers sing, “your glorious wounds will be rewarded by your triumph. . . . Victory shines brighter for the courageous soldier.”35 These moments of relatively uncritical expressions of musical patriotism and love for one’s leader become, in these stagings, fanatical fascist gestures.36 All three of these chorus scenes, from Forza, Ballo, and Turandot, represent conventional operatic use of the chorus, but Kratzer, Bieito, and Knabe all use their staging to mine a darker message out of these scenes. These symbols alienate us from the beautiful and triumphant music of these choruses by connecting this music to the historical and contemporary reality of fascism.37

. The visual distinction between Turandot and her father and the people they rule heightens the perception that this is a populace controlled by people who do not represent them. However, Turandot’s whiteness in this production gives me pause. Like Salome, this is another operatic anti-heroine being made white at the same time that she is made a victim of sexual violence. This is a striking coincidence. Cultural discourse around sexual violence frequently focuses on white women to the exclusion of marginalized groups who experience endemic sexual violence—at present, notably, trans women of color and Indigenous women and girls. And the victimhood of white women has a long history of use as a tool of white supremacist oppression.40 I am not suggesting this is why Turandot is white in this production, but this context is present and legible nonetheless. I don’t think the solution is for us to depict more rapes of women of color in opera. However, the overwhelming whiteness of operatic casts and creators in Europe and North America can lead to a myopic white frame in a lot of this work that I hope we can move past by diversifying the voices telling operatic stories.

. The brutal rape in Knabe’s Turandot is supported by more than the character of the libretto. Whereas Michieletto’s Tell plays off the cheery dance music of the ballet to contrast the brutal stage action, Knabe’s rape scene in Turandot is actually well supported by Alfano’s music.50 Roger Parker describes the musical realization of this scene as “brief and violent to the point of brutality. . . . Tristan-like dissonance piles on dissonance and then releases onto a sequence of rhythmically irregular, triple forte bangs on the drum, bassoons, and trombones. If this is a representation of sex, then the act is a barbaric, messy business, overwhelmingly concerned with power.”51 Knabe seems to hear this sequence of rhythmically irregular strikes at the moment of the kiss in essentially the same way that Parker does: in his production, these percussive strikes align with the sharp thrusts of Calaf’s hips (Example 3). There is a long pause notated in the score at this moment during which Knabe’s Calaf stands, refastens his pants, and leaves Turandot lying motionless on the bed. Parker’s reading of the music of this scene, from its violence to its equation of sex and power, comes to life on Knabe’s stage.

. The brutal rape in Knabe’s Turandot is supported by more than the character of the libretto. Whereas Michieletto’s Tell plays off the cheery dance music of the ballet to contrast the brutal stage action, Knabe’s rape scene in Turandot is actually well supported by Alfano’s music.50 Roger Parker describes the musical realization of this scene as “brief and violent to the point of brutality. . . . Tristan-like dissonance piles on dissonance and then releases onto a sequence of rhythmically irregular, triple forte bangs on the drum, bassoons, and trombones. If this is a representation of sex, then the act is a barbaric, messy business, overwhelmingly concerned with power.”51 Knabe seems to hear this sequence of rhythmically irregular strikes at the moment of the kiss in essentially the same way that Parker does: in his production, these percussive strikes align with the sharp thrusts of Calaf’s hips (Example 3). There is a long pause notated in the score at this moment during which Knabe’s Calaf stands, refastens his pants, and leaves Turandot lying motionless on the bed. Parker’s reading of the music of this scene, from its violence to its equation of sex and power, comes to life on Knabe’s stage.

. Knabe and Michieletto take the same kind of approach to their representations of rape and attempted rape in their productions that Bieito did for his Entführung in chapter 3. All three of these productions recognize the sexual violence that is often obscured in production and reception of the operas they adapt, and all three move that violence into the spotlight. Axel Englund calls this strategy a “hyperbolic gambit”: recognizing that male violence is the norm in opera, a hyperbolic onstage representation of that violence resists the norm by making it impossible to ignore.54 This is clearly on display in Catharine Page 135 →Woodward’s criticism of Michieletto’s Tell, which she feels goes too far and poses too great a risk to sexual assault survivors. In Englund’s discussion of the hyperbolic gambit, he identifies Bieito’s Entführung and Michieletto’s Tell as two of the most notorious productions in this mode. Micaela Baranello similarly connects these two productions while considering the blurry line that exists “between exploitation and productive meaning.”55 I think it is actually Knabe who makes the most effective use of this directorial gambit. The act is brutal enough that its inclusion in this opera is shocking and extremely disquieting. However, it happens quickly and unceremoniously. This serves the story Knabe is telling—the rape is simply a means to an end for Calaf—and it also forestalls the potential erotic enjoyment of the spectacle. There is no visible nudity and the rape is not drawn out; it is over almost immediately.

. I have argued that the unnamed, unsinging characters in Bieito’s Un ballo in maschera and Michieletto’s Guillaume Tell are not so much characters with agency as they are symbols of the ravages of war. To borrow Brownmiller’s parlance, they are “ceremonial battlefields”—sites of conflict between warring men. In this formulation, sexual violence is a metaphor for other types of violence and domination. Rape represents war. A metaphorical understanding of rape is discernible even in the ways wartime rape is legislated. In 2005, Amnesty International’s fact sheet about violence against women in armed conflict read that women “experience armed conflicts as sexual objects, as presumed emblems of national and ethnic identity, and as female members of ethnic, racial, religious, or national groups.”60 Their individual domination is a metaphor for the large-scale domination of their homes and people.61

. The Metropolitan Opera’s dismissal of conductor and long-time music director James Levine in 2018 and allegations against opera star Plácido Domingo are only the highest-profile examples of a much greater reckoning with sexual abuse and harassment within the operatic community around this time.3 In the opera industry, singers can be particularly vulnerable to predation and abuse by their superiors and mentors given the stark power differential in rehearsal rooms and teachers’ studios. The present study does not engage with the experience of singers negotiating sexual violence onstage and offstage, but this is a vital area for further inquiry. The absence of the performer’s perspective here serves my focus on the cultural work representations of sexual violence do in the world. Yet engagement with the experiences and points of view of more opera practitioners will no doubt enrich continuing work on the politics of operatic production.

. Care as an ethical framework has been dismissed by some critics as too narrow and personal to be taken seriously as a type of moral thinking on a large scale.30 Care is often relegated to private life, the home, and inter-personal relationships, in part due to its association with women. This need not be the case, though. Joan Tronto argues that although Gilligan conceives of the ethic of care almost entirely in terms of personal relationships, individuals also have connections to larger units such as their communities.31 By Tronto’s account, “caring seems to involve taking the concerns and needs of the other as the basis for action.”32 This expanded notion of care reaches beyond private life and relationships into the social and political spheres. It is this larger, political orientation toward care that Catharine Woodward invokes when she objects to Michieletto’s Guillaume Tell. While she begins with the realm of the private—her friends whom she does not wish to expose to the rape scene—she quickly extends this care framework to her community by citing statistics about the percentage of women in Britain who have been victimized by sexual violence. In her initial message to the ROH, Woodward invites Holten to better understand others by sharing her experience as a woman viewing this production and by exhorting him to imagine, as she has, the needs of women who have survived sexual and physical violence. She is asking him to care insofar as caring, according to Tronto, involves recognizing and attending to the needs of others. Holten accepted this invitation to care by revisiting the staging of the ballet scene. Upon being alerted to the effect this scene had on Woodward (among other audience members who complained), he modified the scene with the needs of the other—specifically women in the ROH audience—in mind.

. The potential harm caused by exposure to depictions of sexual violence does not end with trauma survivors. In Woodward’s response to Holten’s point that it is important to highlight violence against women in war zones, she explains, “it feels like I am having it highlighted at me all the time, often in a way that serves just to make me feel more vulnerable.”67 There are familiar fears that exposure to violent imagery desensitizes spectators to real-world violence, but what Woodward is getting at here is something more like hyper-sensitization. New understandings about what constitutes rape have made the prevalence of sexual violence in our culture increasingly visible in recent years. That visibility is positive insofar as it encourages changes in the ways we think about and legislate sexual violence, which has long been normalized or ignored in our culture. But for women who are socialized under the threat of sexual violence, this visibility may not always feel so progressive. Cahill argues that “the threat of rape is a formative moment in the construction of the distinctly feminine body, such that even bodies of women who have not been raped are likely to carry themselves in such a way as to express the truths and values of a rape culture.”68 While the inclusion of rape in these opera productions critiques nationalist and misogynistic oppression, it does so by reinforcing gender roles ascribed by rape culture: men—soldiers, conquerors, police—have all the power, and there is nothing their victims can do to stop them. Woodward’s description of having rape highlighted at her all the time resonates with my own experiences of deep unease when surprised by an act of sexual violence represented onstage. My fear of sexual violence is never far away, and these reminders do not so much serve to teach me about the horrors of rape as they do reinforce those fears that I already carry.

. The potential harm caused by exposure to depictions of sexual violence does not end with trauma survivors. In Woodward’s response to Holten’s point that it is important to highlight violence against women in war zones, she explains, “it feels like I am having it highlighted at me all the time, often in a way that serves just to make me feel more vulnerable.”67 There are familiar fears that exposure to violent imagery desensitizes spectators to real-world violence, but what Woodward is getting at here is something more like hyper-sensitization. New understandings about what constitutes rape have made the prevalence of sexual violence in our culture increasingly visible in recent years. That visibility is positive insofar as it encourages changes in the ways we think about and legislate sexual violence, which has long been normalized or ignored in our culture. But for women who are socialized under the threat of sexual violence, this visibility may not always feel so progressive. Cahill argues that “the threat of rape is a formative moment in the construction of the distinctly feminine body, such that even bodies of women who have not been raped are likely to carry themselves in such a way as to express the truths and values of a rape culture.”68 While the inclusion of rape in these opera productions critiques nationalist and misogynistic oppression, it does so by reinforcing gender roles ascribed by rape culture: men—soldiers, conquerors, police—have all the power, and there is nothing their victims can do to stop them. Woodward’s description of having rape highlighted at her all the time resonates with my own experiences of deep unease when surprised by an act of sexual violence represented onstage. My fear of sexual violence is never far away, and these reminders do not so much serve to teach me about the horrors of rape as they do reinforce those fears that I already carry.

. While Regietheater has enormous potential to do positive, reparational work within the opera canon, there are obvious and urgent flaws with the Page 143 →current state of affairs. Some tropes of Regie productions, especially in Germany, have become so familiar to audiences and critics that they lose a lot of their impact. And efforts to shock audiences into paying attention and thinking critically can be carried out in incredibly risky ways, as demonstrated in particular in Bieito’s Entführung. Regietheater in current practice is also marked by whiteness. The case studies in this book are glaringly white, even when the operas being produced feature exotic locales and racialized characters. Bieito’s Entführung, Knabe’s Turandot, and the majority of the productions of Salome in chapter 2 move stories about a racialized other into a white, Western context. Casting white singers to play racialized characters is an issue that has been increasingly scrutinized in recent years as debates about the use of blackface and other skin-darkening makeup in opera have been more mainstream.1 But the whitewashing happening in the productions in this book is not only a matter of casting but of costume and setting as well. White men are overrepresented among the directors in this book and also among opera directors in general. I think the whiteness of many of these productions is a default state: in order to place the emphasis of the production on sexual violence, race and ethnicity are overlooked or downplayed. In North American and European cultures, whiteness is frequently perceived as neutral—a lack of race—and so making these characters white can be seen as an attempt to decline to engage with race. I am also sensitive to the focus in these productions on the victimhood of white women, which is a mainstay of white supremacy.

. Regietheater and opera production in general would be served by a greater diversity of creators. I want more voices bringing more perspectives to these works to move beyond Regie’s tired tropes of mobsters and Nazis toward a future where opera production is a creative enterprise more often than it is not. Dylan Robinson has suggested the radical potential of Regietheater as a practice of positionality that acknowledges and foregrounds the relationship between author, performer, and listeners.2 He cites Spivak on deconstruction as critical intimacy to argue that this work can be motivated by a love of the text and the art form.3 I am excited to see the stories that my contemporaries want to tell about and through the works of the canon. The discomfort I have felt as an audience member at the opera that inspired this book is a result of my unwillingness to just leave. I want new ways to engage with these texts that I love but that also trouble me.4 And I want to see the ways that others who feel like I do have dealt with the curious combination of their own discomfort and pleasure.

. Regietheater and opera production in general would be served by a greater diversity of creators. I want more voices bringing more perspectives to these works to move beyond Regie’s tired tropes of mobsters and Nazis toward a future where opera production is a creative enterprise more often than it is not. Dylan Robinson has suggested the radical potential of Regietheater as a practice of positionality that acknowledges and foregrounds the relationship between author, performer, and listeners.2 He cites Spivak on deconstruction as critical intimacy to argue that this work can be motivated by a love of the text and the art form.3 I am excited to see the stories that my contemporaries want to tell about and through the works of the canon. The discomfort I have felt as an audience member at the opera that inspired this book is a result of my unwillingness to just leave. I want new ways to engage with these texts that I love but that also trouble me.4 And I want to see the ways that others who feel like I do have dealt with the curious combination of their own discomfort and pleasure.

. Regietheater and opera production in general would be served by a greater diversity of creators. I want more voices bringing more perspectives to these works to move beyond Regie’s tired tropes of mobsters and Nazis toward a future where opera production is a creative enterprise more often than it is not. Dylan Robinson has suggested the radical potential of Regietheater as a practice of positionality that acknowledges and foregrounds the relationship between author, performer, and listeners.2 He cites Spivak on deconstruction as critical intimacy to argue that this work can be motivated by a love of the text and the art form.3 I am excited to see the stories that my contemporaries want to tell about and through the works of the canon. The discomfort I have felt as an audience member at the opera that inspired this book is a result of my unwillingness to just leave. I want new ways to engage with these texts that I love but that also trouble me.4 And I want to see the ways that others who feel like I do have dealt with the curious combination of their own discomfort and pleasure.

. I think that bringing more voices and more perspectives into opera will improve the art form and support its longevity; but ultimately, I don’t think this is the best motivation for this work. Although I love opera and want to see it survive, the urgency of making operatic representations and practices more ethical comes from the risk to the people who participate in and spectate opera more than from the risk to the genre. Musicologists sometimes espouse a belief in having an ethical responsibility to operatic works themselves.5 I fear that this focus on protecting the legacy of canonic artworks and their long-dead creators can shift our attention away from the responsibility we owe to the living people who interact with these artworks today, especially when those people belong to equity-seeking groups that are not typically represented fairly or at all in the written texts of these operas.

. Care as an ethical framework has been dismissed by some critics as too narrow and personal to be taken seriously as a type of moral thinking on a large scale.30 Care is often relegated to private life, the home, and inter-personal relationships, in part due to its association with women. This need not be the case, though. Joan Tronto argues that although Gilligan conceives of the ethic of care almost entirely in terms of personal relationships, individuals also have connections to larger units such as their communities.31 By Tronto’s account, “caring seems to involve taking the concerns and needs of the other as the basis for action.”32 This expanded notion of care reaches beyond private life and relationships into the social and political spheres. It is this larger, political orientation toward care that Catharine Woodward invokes when she objects to Michieletto’s Guillaume Tell. While she begins with the realm of the private—her friends whom she does not wish to expose to the rape scene—she quickly extends this care framework to her community by citing statistics about the percentage of women in Britain who have been victimized by sexual violence. In her initial message to the ROH, Woodward invites Holten to better understand others by sharing her experience as a woman viewing this production and by exhorting him to imagine, as she has, the needs of women who have survived sexual and physical violence. She is asking him to care insofar as caring, according to Tronto, involves recognizing and attending to the needs of others. Holten accepted this invitation to care by revisiting the staging of the ballet scene. Upon being alerted to the effect this scene had on Woodward (among other audience members who complained), he modified the scene with the needs of the other—specifically women in the ROH audience—in mind.

. Practices of intimacy direction are one concrete way that opera creators can center care for performers as well as for audience members. Intimacy directors, also called intimacy choreographers or coordinators, advocate treating onstage intimacy with the same kind of care and control necessary for onstage violence.6 Intimacy directors choreograph scenes of intimacy or sexual violence precisely, so that the representation communicates what it needs to, and the performers involved know exactly what to expect. They also take responsibility for the performers’ emotional safety, serving as advocates for them when required. There are a number of practical obstacles to the large-scale implementation of the principles of intimacy choreography and the hiring of more intimacy directors, including budgetary concerns and the typically very short rehearsal periods for opera compared with straight theater. But still, some opera companies are beginning to bring in intimacy directors to work on productions featuring scenes of intimate contact felt to be especially risky or delicate.

. Intimacy direction asks some of the same questions of directors and performers that I have asked in this book. For instance, the first of five pillars of Page 146 →safe intimacy in rehearsal and performance, assembled by Intimacy Directors International, is “context”: “All parties must be aware of how the scene of intimacy meets the needs of the story and must also understand the story within the intimacy itself. This not only creates a sense of safety, but also eliminates the unexpected and ensures that the intimacy is always in service of the story.”7 Ideally, adherence to this directive would ensure that conversations like the ones that led to the toning down of the rape scenes in Egoyan’s Salome and Michieletto’s Tell happen in the rehearsal room before a new production becomes public. Moving forward, I hope to see more work done on the connection between ethical onstage representations of sexual violence in opera and approaches to the practice of staging that prioritize safety and consent for the singers and promote critical thinking about the role and intention of representations of intimacy and of violence in operatic storytelling.

. My dual goals of improving the relevance and longevity of opera and of caring for opera’s creators and audiences are frequently aligned, as they are in practices of intimacy direction that improve a story’s cogency and coherence while also protecting the physical and emotional safety of performers. Still, anticipating that these goals of making better operatic art and caring for people may in some cases be set in opposition, I turn to William Cheng’s advice from the introduction to his book Loving Music Till It Hurts. He urges us to “love music, and love people. If ever in doubt—or if forced to choose—choose people.”8 In negotiations with the opera canon in production, I believe choosing people means remembering that the responsibility opera creators owe to living people should outweigh any perceived responsibility to the operas themselves. This often looks like loosening the grip of the composer’s imagined intentions in favor of a contemporary critical awareness of the works of the canon and their impact in the world today.

. Care as an ethical framework has been dismissed by some critics as too narrow and personal to be taken seriously as a type of moral thinking on a large scale.30 Care is often relegated to private life, the home, and inter-personal relationships, in part due to its association with women. This need not be the case, though. Joan Tronto argues that although Gilligan conceives of the ethic of care almost entirely in terms of personal relationships, individuals also have connections to larger units such as their communities.31 By Tronto’s account, “caring seems to involve taking the concerns and needs of the other as the basis for action.”32 This expanded notion of care reaches beyond private life and relationships into the social and political spheres. It is this larger, political orientation toward care that Catharine Woodward invokes when she objects to Michieletto’s Guillaume Tell. While she begins with the realm of the private—her friends whom she does not wish to expose to the rape scene—she quickly extends this care framework to her community by citing statistics about the percentage of women in Britain who have been victimized by sexual violence. In her initial message to the ROH, Woodward invites Holten to better understand others by sharing her experience as a woman viewing this production and by exhorting him to imagine, as she has, the needs of women who have survived sexual and physical violence. She is asking him to care insofar as caring, according to Tronto, involves recognizing and attending to the needs of others. Holten accepted this invitation to care by revisiting the staging of the ballet scene. Upon being alerted to the effect this scene had on Woodward (among other audience members who complained), he modified the scene with the needs of the other—specifically women in the ROH audience—in mind.

. My case studies represent an array of operas from German, Italian, and French traditions from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Some of the operas in this book are here because the written texts feature sexual violence in relatively explicit ways that can be amplified or obscured in performance, especially the two Mozart selections, Don Giovanni and Die Entführung aus dem Serail. The other operas do not necessarily thematize sexual violence in their written texts. In some cases, sexual violence may be implied and made explicit in performance (Salome, Turandot, Guillaume Tell), and in others it is absent from the written texts and embedded in the operas only due to the agency of directors (Un ballo in maschera, La forza del destino). There are a couple of notable absences that might stand out to readers familiar with this topic: Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia and Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah. Unlike any of the operas in this book, these two operas are about rape. They tell the stories of the violent rapes of innocent young women whose lives are destroyed as a result of their assaults.35 The ways that these rapes are represented on opera stages is certainly important and politically charged. Regardless of the particulars of the stagings, however, the written texts of these two operas take for granted the fact that rape is a serious and violent crime that does lasting damage to its victims. This approach to rape is unusual in the opera canon. Much more common is the burying, obscuring, and glossing over of rape seen in productions of and discourse around operas that include or thematize rape but are not about rape. It is this latter category that I am predominantly interested in for the sake of this book because it encompasses such a large percentage of the operas currently being performed. Sexual violence is particularly insidious in those operas where it lurks just below the surface or where it is added in production. In the Anna Bolena production with which I opened this book, the intrusion of sexual violence into the scene between Anna and Riccardo, and the almost offhanded nature of its inclusion, was an unsettling reminder of the omnipresence of sexual violence in our culture. Similarly, in the operas I discuss in this book, I am interested in the way sexual violence emerges from or intrudes into operas that do not set out to comment on it.

. Over the years, Don Giovanni has no doubt lost some historical meanings as it has acquired new ones. Audiences today may be less sensitive to references to Commedia del’Arte archetypes and they may be less likely to interpret Giovanni as a Romantic hero. Different elements of the story and different interpretations begin to come to the fore when we approach Don Giovanni in light of our current cultural values and experiences. In this chapter, I focus on the way twenty-first century productions of Don Giovanni interact with contemporary rhetoric around sexual violence. On the question of sexual violence in Don Giovanni, the representation of Giovanni himself certainly matters; staging choices can make him more or less sympathetic and more or less desirable to the audience. But I am particularly interested in the way the women in the opera are represented in production. I find that the way Donna Anna, Donna Elvira, and Zerlina respond to Don Giovanni to be a powerful indicator of a production’s take on the nature of his crimes. A focus Page 17 →on the women also centers a feminist perspective on the opera’s story, which I believe is vital to understanding this work in the twenty-first century.1

. The representations of sexual violence in these productions of Don Giovanni are in dialogue with contemporary beliefs and narratives about rape. I am particularly interested in the ways that these productions alternately challenge or reinforce rape myths. Rape myths are common, prejudicial beliefs about sexual violence that serve to excuse perpetrators and discredit victims. Prominent examples that come up in this chapter include the ideas that women routinely lie about rape for revenge and that women secretly want to be raped. The common parlance of calling these ideas myths can lead to some confusion. It is not controversial, for instance, that some women have lied about sexual assault or have said no to a sexual encounter when they meant yes. But when media representation amplifies anti-victim stereotypes about sexual violence, public perception can become skewed and real-life victims are put in the position of having their own stories doubted based on their resemblance to the stereotype.3 In the context of opera, choices about how fictional sexual violence plays out are entirely at the discretion of the creative team behind the production. It is worth thinking about how these productions as cultural texts interact with popular ideas and conceptions about sexual violence.

. At the intersection of the axes of agency and rape myths is the question of trauma associated with sexual violence. One rape myth common to news coverage of sexual violence is the idea that rape is just sex and does not need Page 19 →to be taken seriously as a violent crime.4 In reality, sexual violence is the type of trauma associated with the highest conditional risk for development of post-traumatic stress disorder.5 These productions vary greatly in their representations of trauma in the characters of Donna Anna, Donna Elvira, and Zerlina. In some cases, depicting the trauma responses in these women leads to a nuanced exploration of the relationship between trauma and agency in the aftermath of sexual violence. In other cases, the absence or careless depiction of trauma suggests that rape and attempted rape are inconveniences from which women can easily move on. Onstage, realistic representations of trauma can shape an audience’s understanding and move their sympathies. The way that a production of Don Giovanni represents the suffering of the women is closely related to how seriously it takes Giovanni’s crimes.

. At the intersection of the axes of agency and rape myths is the question of trauma associated with sexual violence. One rape myth common to news coverage of sexual violence is the idea that rape is just sex and does not need Page 19 →to be taken seriously as a violent crime.4 In reality, sexual violence is the type of trauma associated with the highest conditional risk for development of post-traumatic stress disorder.5 These productions vary greatly in their representations of trauma in the characters of Donna Anna, Donna Elvira, and Zerlina. In some cases, depicting the trauma responses in these women leads to a nuanced exploration of the relationship between trauma and agency in the aftermath of sexual violence. In other cases, the absence or careless depiction of trauma suggests that rape and attempted rape are inconveniences from which women can easily move on. Onstage, realistic representations of trauma can shape an audience’s understanding and move their sympathies. The way that a production of Don Giovanni represents the suffering of the women is closely related to how seriously it takes Giovanni’s crimes.

. It is an act of reparation, then, recognizing the sexual violence that I once ignored, to name this book Rape at the Opera. Calling what the Duke does to Gilda a seduction and calling Don Giovanni a womanizer is part of the problem.5 “Rape” is a powerful word and a word that I understand is difficult for some readers. But I am troubled by the idea that using the word rape to say, for instance, “The Count plans to rape Susanna on her wedding night,” is more shocking to some opera lovers than the plot point to which it refers. I believe that naming sexual violence and its perpetrators in this context is powerful in part because it highlights this disconnect. Many operatic rapes and attempted rapes happen in the shadows just offstage. My hope is that by using this language and by writing this book, I can spotlight something many fans, scholars, and practitioners of opera might rather not think about at all.

. The majority of the productions I survey here approach staging this Page 24 →scene in almost identical ways. This typical Donna Anna, dressed in elaborate mourning attire, performs her grief and rage to the audience or the camera. She rarely looks at Ottavio, to whom her words are addressed, and instead gazes into the middle distance with her pained expression clearly directed toward the viewer. This scene is obviously a serious one, but Donna Anna’s seriousness in most of these productions is so exaggerated that it calls attention to itself as performance. There is contention among Mozart scholars about how the opera seria style should be viewed in his comic operas generally, and Don Giovanni’s already complicated relationship with genre amplifies the discord.17 Donna Anna’s highly stylized performance reflects the highly stylized aria she sings, but regardless of the original or intended meaning of Anna’s opera seria attributes in the context of Don Giovanni, when modern-day stagings emphasize the distance between Donna Anna’s pathos and her comic surroundings, Anna’s extreme emotion can feel absurd to an audience, especially to those who may not be sensitive to the nuances of this opera’s relationship to genre. The trappings of conventional nobility can make it difficult for audience members to identify with Anna and, as a result, empathize with her. In sum, this approach to the scene in which Anna discloses her abuse feels outdated in light of contemporary victim-centered discourses about sexual violence. Given recent discourse about making space for victims to tell their stories, we might rethink the way that we stage Donna Anna telling hers.

. The version of Donna Anna’s story in this production, considered in isolation, is not without value. The exaggerated, theatrical performance that Anna gives in this number is an interesting way of resolving the tension between Anna’s high opera seria style and the more comic elements of the opera by making the former self-consciously parodic within the drama of the scene. But Bieito’s production does not exist in a vacuum, and reading his Don Giovanni in its larger context complicates my perception of his interpretation of the story. It has been well established that Donna Anna has not been treated generously in the reception history of Don Giovanni, with critics frequently reducing her to a “repressed hypocrite, vengeful harpy, or humorless ice princess.”18 Additionally, critics and directors have often suggested that Donna Anna may harbor a secret, burning desire for Don Giovanni.19 Bieito hyperbolizes this reading of Anna in his seedy, contemporary setting, but the basic interpretation of her character is not new. Believing that Anna desires Don Giovanni necessitates interpreting the words she sings in the opera through a skeptical lens. In Bieito’s version of events, Anna’s secret desire has become an explicit sexual relationship, and skepticism about the story she tells Ottavio is now utter disbelief.

. The version of Donna Anna’s story in this production, considered in isolation, is not without value. The exaggerated, theatrical performance that Anna gives in this number is an interesting way of resolving the tension between Anna’s high opera seria style and the more comic elements of the opera by making the former self-consciously parodic within the drama of the scene. But Bieito’s production does not exist in a vacuum, and reading his Don Giovanni in its larger context complicates my perception of his interpretation of the story. It has been well established that Donna Anna has not been treated generously in the reception history of Don Giovanni, with critics frequently reducing her to a “repressed hypocrite, vengeful harpy, or humorless ice princess.”18 Additionally, critics and directors have often suggested that Donna Anna may harbor a secret, burning desire for Don Giovanni.19 Bieito hyperbolizes this reading of Anna in his seedy, contemporary setting, but the basic interpretation of her character is not new. Believing that Anna desires Don Giovanni necessitates interpreting the words she sings in the opera through a skeptical lens. In Bieito’s version of events, Anna’s secret desire has become an explicit sexual relationship, and skepticism about the story she tells Ottavio is now utter disbelief.

. In addition to the context of the opera’s reception history, there is the context of twenty-first century sexual politics, into which Bieito’s production has been received since its premiere in the early 2000s. The rape myth that women routinely lie about sexual violence is a relatively complex one. Concrete numbers about the percentage of false rape allegations are incredibly difficult to measure as rape cases are often difficult to investigate and prosecute and many remain unsolved for lack of evidence. Accusations deemed “unfounded” often bolster the numbers of false accusations even though this classification refers more to an unavailability of proof than to any evidence or perception that the alleged victim has been dishonest. Despite the methodological challenges, the question of the prevalence of false accusations of rape is a hotly contested issue with high stakes for rape victims. There is a troubling and persistent disparity between researchers, who estimate very low rates of false allegations, and front-line criminal justice professionals, who Page 26 →insist a great number of rape accusations are false.20 The nuances of this issue have been somewhat flattened in popular rhetoric about “believing victims,” but this rallying cry has its place as a reminder that when listening to accusations of rape, as with accusations of any crime, the best practice is to assume an alleged victim is telling the truth until their report is contradicted by some other evidence.21 “Believing victims” is a response to a culture in which stories about women who wantonly lie about rape are overrepresented. When women accuse powerful men of sexual misconduct, we hear again and again that they are doing it for attention or out of spite. Rosalind Gill has argued that the prevalence of the stereotype of women crying rape for revenge or for attention has led to a situation where “it would not be an exaggeration to say that all rape claims are viewed through this sceptical lens—which constitutes a major barrier to women reporting sexual attacks, since many fear, quite rationally, that they will not be believed.”22

. In addition to the context of the opera’s reception history, there is the context of twenty-first century sexual politics, into which Bieito’s production has been received since its premiere in the early 2000s. The rape myth that women routinely lie about sexual violence is a relatively complex one. Concrete numbers about the percentage of false rape allegations are incredibly difficult to measure as rape cases are often difficult to investigate and prosecute and many remain unsolved for lack of evidence. Accusations deemed “unfounded” often bolster the numbers of false accusations even though this classification refers more to an unavailability of proof than to any evidence or perception that the alleged victim has been dishonest. Despite the methodological challenges, the question of the prevalence of false accusations of rape is a hotly contested issue with high stakes for rape victims. There is a troubling and persistent disparity between researchers, who estimate very low rates of false allegations, and front-line criminal justice professionals, who Page 26 →insist a great number of rape accusations are false.20 The nuances of this issue have been somewhat flattened in popular rhetoric about “believing victims,” but this rallying cry has its place as a reminder that when listening to accusations of rape, as with accusations of any crime, the best practice is to assume an alleged victim is telling the truth until their report is contradicted by some other evidence.21 “Believing victims” is a response to a culture in which stories about women who wantonly lie about rape are overrepresented. When women accuse powerful men of sexual misconduct, we hear again and again that they are doing it for attention or out of spite. Rosalind Gill has argued that the prevalence of the stereotype of women crying rape for revenge or for attention has led to a situation where “it would not be an exaggeration to say that all rape claims are viewed through this sceptical lens—which constitutes a major barrier to women reporting sexual attacks, since many fear, quite rationally, that they will not be believed.”22

. In addition to the context of the opera’s reception history, there is the context of twenty-first century sexual politics, into which Bieito’s production has been received since its premiere in the early 2000s. The rape myth that women routinely lie about sexual violence is a relatively complex one. Concrete numbers about the percentage of false rape allegations are incredibly difficult to measure as rape cases are often difficult to investigate and prosecute and many remain unsolved for lack of evidence. Accusations deemed “unfounded” often bolster the numbers of false accusations even though this classification refers more to an unavailability of proof than to any evidence or perception that the alleged victim has been dishonest. Despite the methodological challenges, the question of the prevalence of false accusations of rape is a hotly contested issue with high stakes for rape victims. There is a troubling and persistent disparity between researchers, who estimate very low rates of false allegations, and front-line criminal justice professionals, who Page 26 →insist a great number of rape accusations are false.20 The nuances of this issue have been somewhat flattened in popular rhetoric about “believing victims,” but this rallying cry has its place as a reminder that when listening to accusations of rape, as with accusations of any crime, the best practice is to assume an alleged victim is telling the truth until their report is contradicted by some other evidence.21 “Believing victims” is a response to a culture in which stories about women who wantonly lie about rape are overrepresented. When women accuse powerful men of sexual misconduct, we hear again and again that they are doing it for attention or out of spite. Rosalind Gill has argued that the prevalence of the stereotype of women crying rape for revenge or for attention has led to a situation where “it would not be an exaggeration to say that all rape claims are viewed through this sceptical lens—which constitutes a major barrier to women reporting sexual attacks, since many fear, quite rationally, that they will not be believed.”22

. Bieito’s Donna Anna invents a story about rape and falsely accuses Don Giovanni because she is angry. The rape accusation allows Anna to tell Ottavio that it was Giovanni who killed her father without admitting that it was her affair that motivated the confrontation. She convincingly accuses Giovanni of both the crime he committed against her father, which she had been covering up, and an invented crime against herself. When she asks Ottavio to seek vengeance for her, her father’s murder and the concocted rape are merely excuses—she really wants to see Giovanni punished for being unfaithful to her. This is a shrewdly calculated lie told by a jilted lover as punishment. This kind of false allegation is exceptionally rare in reality, but dominant in the kinds of stories we tell about rape.23

. While it is uncommon for women to lie about being sexually assaulted, incidents of sexual violence are traumatic events, and trauma has a powerful effect on memory. Research on trauma and memory has been increasingly visible in recent years, in particular as a way of illuminating some of the problems with the way we investigate and prosecute rape cases.24 During a traumatic incident, stress hormones have two distinct effects on the way that memory is encoded: while early moments of the traumatic event are super-encoded as “flashbulb” memories, an extended traumatic experience can temporarily impair the hippocampus leading to minimal encoding and fragmentary memories.25 A charitable interpretation of the disjunction between the scene we see played out at the opera’s opening and the one Donna Anna recounts in Pynkoski’s production might view the moment at which she recognizes that the man in her bedroom is not Ottavio as a vividly encoded memory at the beginning of a traumatic experience, and everything thereafter as fragmentary. Perhaps the details of the ways in which she played along and the length of time spent in his arms are lost to her. This certainly could be an interesting way to represent this storyline in a production of Don Giovanni informed by our improved understanding of trauma and memory. For a reading like this to be readily legible to an audience, though, it would take some more work from the staging than we see here.

. While it is uncommon for women to lie about being sexually assaulted, incidents of sexual violence are traumatic events, and trauma has a powerful effect on memory. Research on trauma and memory has been increasingly visible in recent years, in particular as a way of illuminating some of the problems with the way we investigate and prosecute rape cases.24 During a traumatic incident, stress hormones have two distinct effects on the way that memory is encoded: while early moments of the traumatic event are super-encoded as “flashbulb” memories, an extended traumatic experience can temporarily impair the hippocampus leading to minimal encoding and fragmentary memories.25 A charitable interpretation of the disjunction between the scene we see played out at the opera’s opening and the one Donna Anna recounts in Pynkoski’s production might view the moment at which she recognizes that the man in her bedroom is not Ottavio as a vividly encoded memory at the beginning of a traumatic experience, and everything thereafter as fragmentary. Perhaps the details of the ways in which she played along and the length of time spent in his arms are lost to her. This certainly could be an interesting way to represent this storyline in a production of Don Giovanni informed by our improved understanding of trauma and memory. For a reading like this to be readily legible to an audience, though, it would take some more work from the staging than we see here.

. This is a compelling representation that evokes something real about trauma. Cathy Caruth writes that “trauma is the confrontation with an event that, in its unexpectedness or horror, cannot be placed within the schemes of prior knowledge . . . and thus continually returns, in its exactness, at a later time. Not having been fully integrated as it occurred, the event cannot become . . . ‘narrative memory’ that is integrated into a completed story of the past.”26 When Donna Anna is called upon to recount the traumatic event of her attempted rape, she is unable to intellectualize it. She cannot simply narrate it as something that happened in the past. Rather, she relives it vividly, to the point that she loses her grip on reality. When she wields the knife in this scene, we see her revert to her state of mind from the opening scene with Giovanni. When Ottavio turns and she sees his face, she crashes back into the present and drops the knife. This representation aligns with a common understanding of flashbacks associated with post-traumatic stress. Sivadier’s production makes Anna much more sympathetic in this scene. Because her pain and fear are represented in a way that reflects what we know about trauma and the psyche, Sivadier’s Anna appears more human to us.

. Anna’s ambivalence toward intimate contact with Ottavio continues through the rest of Norris’s production. In the scene before her second-act aria, “Non mi dir, bell’idol mio,” Ottavio tries to comfort Anna and straddles her while she lies on the stage. At first, Anna seems to be enjoying the intimacy, but as Ottavio moves his hand from her back to her breasts, she throws him off. Her text in this scene expresses her inability to think about marriage while she is still mourning her father, but in this staging, it is difficult not to see her negative reaction as a consequence of Ottavio’s attempt at physical intimacy as much as, or at least in conjunction with, his desire to talk about marriage. When Ottavio tells her she is cruel to put him off, she slaps him across the face but then almost immediately embraces him. We never get to see how Anna and Ottavio interacted before her assault, but based on Ottavio’s shock and sadness each time she rebuffs him, we can assume that there was tenderness and intimacy that she is struggling to recover. She appears to desire closeness, but whenever Ottavio tries to initiate intimate contact, it triggers a powerful negative response. In the final ensemble of the opera, Ottavio offers Anna a bunch of heart-shaped balloons that symbolized his love for her earlier in the production, and she walks away from him. They sing the rest of the finale from opposite ends of the stage with the rest of the cast between them. Critics of Donna Anna in the written text have often used her frigid response to Ottavio’s affections and their looming marriage as evidence of her alleged desire for Don Giovanni, but Norris’s representation of Anna as traumatized by her assault humanizes her and encourages sympathy for her plight even as she rejects Ottavio.28

. These different versions of Zerlina and Don Giovanni raise different issues for audiences today in light of contemporary sexual politics. When Zerlina appears to be in control of the situation throughout “Là ci darem,” obviously intends to leave with Giovanni from the beginning, and plays coyly Page 31 →with him through the duet, we might be happy to see this young peasant girl harnessing what little power her gender and sexuality grant her. But at the same time, she enacts a potentially dangerous myth of feminine sexuality: she says no, but she means yes. This myth came up in the opening scene of the opera in those stagings that show Anna as desiring Don Giovanni even as she proclaims the opposite. In Zerlina’s case, there is evidence in the libretto that she is charmed by this handsome stranger, and she does eventually agree to run away with him. Still, approaching the scene in this way reinforces the myth that women really want sex even as they say they do not. And this myth can have real consequences. In studies of college students, for instance, there tends to be a gender gap in conceptions of consent. Whereas women tend to indicate that they grant consent verbally, men are more likely to interpret consent through body language.29 This disparity can be dangerous in cases where a woman’s words and her body language are perceived as being at odds, as they are for these Zerlinas before they say “andiam.”

. Bieito’s Zerlina is terrified to see Giovanni in the Act 1 finale and does not want to be anywhere near him. She drinks to excess and eventually Giovanni lifts her over his shoulder and carries her offstage. Zerlina reappears bleeding heavily from the mouth and with bloodstains down the front of her wedding dress. Giovanni pulls off her blonde wig of ringlets to reveal her short brown hair underneath. If Giovanni’s heightened violence serves the plot here, it is by marking Zerlina physically with the bloodstains and short hair so that the trauma she has endured thus far will not be easily forgotten through the rest of the opera. She neither changes out of the bloodied dress nor replaces her wig. Now, when she returns to Masetto again to comfort him in her second aria, “Vedrai, carino, se sei buonino,” we cannot forget what she has just gone through. In Bieito’s production, Zerlina’s interminable cheerfulness, expressed in her words and her music, begins to look like a coping mechanism. Herman writes that “the ordinary response to atrocities is to banish Page 36 →them from consciousness,” but that despite our efforts “atrocities . . . refuse to be buried.”37 Bieito literally marks Zerlina with her traumatic experience so we cannot ignore it even as she tries to ignore it herself.

. We are first introduced to Donna Elvira in Act 1, right after Don Giovanni kills the Commendatore. At that point, we learn that Elvira had been a former conquest of Giovanni’s and she has come looking for him. Leporello reveals to her the truth of Giovanni’s exploits with women, and she spends the rest of the first act trying to convince Zerlina, Donna Anna, and Don Ottavio that Giovanni is not to be trusted. In the first scene of Act 2, Giovanni’s humiliation of Elvira continues. He devises a plan to seduce Donna Elvira’s maid: in the courtyard outside Elvira’s window, Giovanni and Leporello swap clothes; Giovanni hides and calls up to Elvira while Leporello gestures along; Elvira comes down, expecting a reunion; and Leporello keeps her occupied while Giovanni moves on to the maid. Elvira believes that Leporello is Don Giovanni until the end of the next scene. Elvira’s interaction with Leporello-as-Giovanni is marked by tender and erotic language. Leporello plays along until he is able to extricate himself, at one point remarking as an aside, “I’m starting to enjoy this.”38

. In addition to making Elvira’s seduction by deception more believable in a realist modern setting, Elvira’s drunkenness in Bieito’s production calls to mind the popular rape myth that if a victim of sexual assault is intoxicated, she bears some responsibility.40 Particularly common is the contention that women frequently consent to sex while intoxicated and then, regretting their decisions the next mornings, “cry rape” to protect their reputations. Bieito’s staging of this scene pushes back against this victim-blaming narrative by making it exceedingly clear that Giovanni and Leporello are knowingly taking advantage of Elvira, who is clearly not an equal participant in the sexual activity depicted onstage. It is clear from the staging and the body language of the singers that we are meant to recognize Elvira as much more inebriated than Giovanni or Leporello, who both seem relatively unaffected by their drinking in the Act 1 finale. Elvira is already unable to consent to intimacy with Leporello in this scene because she has been deceived about his identity. And she is also incapable of consent due to her extreme intoxication.41 An intoxicated Elvira makes this scene more believable and highlights a real contemporary problem about alcohol-assisted sexual assault.42 I would not suggest that all productions of Don Giovanni should perform this scene as the gritty examination of the relationship between alcohol, consent, and sexual abuse we see here. But Bieito’s production models one way of engaging with problematic material in this opera informed by contemporary attitudes about sexual violence by sacrificing the humor of this scene.

. In addition to making Elvira’s seduction by deception more believable in a realist modern setting, Elvira’s drunkenness in Bieito’s production calls to mind the popular rape myth that if a victim of sexual assault is intoxicated, she bears some responsibility.40 Particularly common is the contention that women frequently consent to sex while intoxicated and then, regretting their decisions the next mornings, “cry rape” to protect their reputations. Bieito’s staging of this scene pushes back against this victim-blaming narrative by making it exceedingly clear that Giovanni and Leporello are knowingly taking advantage of Elvira, who is clearly not an equal participant in the sexual activity depicted onstage. It is clear from the staging and the body language of the singers that we are meant to recognize Elvira as much more inebriated than Giovanni or Leporello, who both seem relatively unaffected by their drinking in the Act 1 finale. Elvira is already unable to consent to intimacy with Leporello in this scene because she has been deceived about his identity. And she is also incapable of consent due to her extreme intoxication.41 An intoxicated Elvira makes this scene more believable and highlights a real contemporary problem about alcohol-assisted sexual assault.42 I would not suggest that all productions of Don Giovanni should perform this scene as the gritty examination of the relationship between alcohol, consent, and sexual abuse we see here. But Bieito’s production models one way of engaging with problematic material in this opera informed by contemporary attitudes about sexual violence by sacrificing the humor of this scene.

. In addition to making Elvira’s seduction by deception more believable in a realist modern setting, Elvira’s drunkenness in Bieito’s production calls to mind the popular rape myth that if a victim of sexual assault is intoxicated, she bears some responsibility.40 Particularly common is the contention that women frequently consent to sex while intoxicated and then, regretting their decisions the next mornings, “cry rape” to protect their reputations. Bieito’s staging of this scene pushes back against this victim-blaming narrative by making it exceedingly clear that Giovanni and Leporello are knowingly taking advantage of Elvira, who is clearly not an equal participant in the sexual activity depicted onstage. It is clear from the staging and the body language of the singers that we are meant to recognize Elvira as much more inebriated than Giovanni or Leporello, who both seem relatively unaffected by their drinking in the Act 1 finale. Elvira is already unable to consent to intimacy with Leporello in this scene because she has been deceived about his identity. And she is also incapable of consent due to her extreme intoxication.41 An intoxicated Elvira makes this scene more believable and highlights a real contemporary problem about alcohol-assisted sexual assault.42 I would not suggest that all productions of Don Giovanni should perform this scene as the gritty examination of the relationship between alcohol, consent, and sexual abuse we see here. But Bieito’s production models one way of engaging with problematic material in this opera informed by contemporary attitudes about sexual violence by sacrificing the humor of this scene.

. Donna Elvira displays powerful and mercurial emotions throughout the opera. In many productions of Don Giovanni I have seen, Elvira’s emotions are exaggerated to the point of comedy; she swings irrationally between hatred and love for Giovanni, highlighting how truly irresistible this man Page 38 →is.43 These representations reinforce a misogynistic stereotype of women’s irrationality and they ignore the historical context of the opera’s written text; Elvira, having given herself to Giovanni and having been abandoned, may no longer be a viable wife to another man. In production, a director chooses how to portray Elvira’s pursuit of Giovanni and how sympathetic an audience may find her to be.44

. Donna Elvira displays powerful and mercurial emotions throughout the opera. In many productions of Don Giovanni I have seen, Elvira’s emotions are exaggerated to the point of comedy; she swings irrationally between hatred and love for Giovanni, highlighting how truly irresistible this man Page 38 →is.43 These representations reinforce a misogynistic stereotype of women’s irrationality and they ignore the historical context of the opera’s written text; Elvira, having given herself to Giovanni and having been abandoned, may no longer be a viable wife to another man. In production, a director chooses how to portray Elvira’s pursuit of Giovanni and how sympathetic an audience may find her to be.44

. While the sexual violence of the canon is routinely understated and obscured by innuendo and ambiguity, acts of sexual violence are mainstays of contemporary opera performance practice, especially in the school of Regietheater. Frequently evoked as a castigation, the terms Regietheater and Regieoper (director’s theater or director’s opera) refer to the modern practice of granting freedom to the director to alter or disregard stage directions Page 5 →and indications about mise-en-scène in the texts they stage. Regietheater productions break with traditional interpretations of a work, frequently in a provocative manner, in the service of speaking to a modern audience and drawing parallels to modern ideas. Axel Englund argues that all Regietheater can be understood in terms of perversion because it flagrantly disregards the ideal of fidelity to works of the canon typically treated with reverence.7 Popular criticism of Regietheater productions typically argues that including sex and violence in canonic operas is inappropriate and a clear violation of the meaning of the operas. This is a limited interpretation. While it is true that many of the onstage representations of sex and violence that Regietheater productions may feature are not indicated in the stage directions, these themes are rarely as foreign to the operas as conservative critics make them out to be. As Englund notes, “opera has been scandalizing audiences for centuries through its lack of proper sexual morals.”8 I believe that Regietheater representations of sex and violence offend so many audiences not because they are foreign to the operas of the canon, but because they reveal something uncomfortable about that canon.

. A particularly good snapshot of a production’s opinion of Elvira’s suffering is found in the second-act recitative and aria, “In quali eccessi, o Numi . . . Mi tradì quell’alma ingrata.” After having Giovanni and Leporello’s deception revealed and Giovanni’s guilt in the murder of the Commendatore and assault of Masetto confirmed, Elvira is left alone onstage. She is torn between her desire for vengeance and her desire to be with Giovanni. She muses on the terrible things Giovanni has done but admits she would still forgive him.46 She asks how productions of operas “might make contact with an audience that takes female ‘strength’ as an article of faith.”47 Feminist consciousness, especially around the issue of sexual violence, has only grown in the opera-going public since Hunter posed this question. The other productions that stage “Mi tradì” explore different depictions of women and trauma that are worth considering.

. Sivadier’s production is also noteworthy in its approach to Elvira in this scene. It can be tempting to condemn Elvira for continuing to defend and forgive Giovanni. A performance of “Mi tradì” as straight tragic romance does little to combat this inclination. But Sivadier emphasizes in his Elvira a sense of confusion and even fear at her own feelings. She shares the stage with the post-coital sleeping bodies of Don Giovanni and her maid. She wakes her maid and interacts with her as she sings, holding the young woman’s face in her hands in a pleading gesture. She moves to sit with Giovanni, who does not wake up as she holds his head in her lap. Her actions and body language throughout are loving and angry in equal measure, and her expression of emotional torment never wanes. She runs her hands through her hair and clutches at her scalp looking childlike, lost, disoriented. The sentiment of this aria, when staged in this way, becomes less a great romance and more the fallout of abuse. In the opera, we have seen Giovanni and Leporello mock her, gleefully share with her the truth that she is merely a name on Giovanni’s list, and discredit her to the other characters. Then, in order to trick her into an intimate moment with Leporello, Giovanni professes to love her and threatens to kill himself if she will not give him another chance. Given this context, Elvira’s behavior here can read as another manifestation of trauma. In her landmark text, Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman notes that traumatized people sometimes dissociate the emotions caused by traumatic events from clear memories of the events themselves.49 Elvira’s wide-eyed confusion and terror here feels like proportionate emotional distress for what we have seen Giovanni put her through, but she is struggling to make the connection between that pain and Giovanni himself. Her overtures of forgiveness here read not as the steadfastness of her love but as a failure to account for Giovanni’s ongoing mistreatment.

. In Zambello’s and Sivadier’s productions, Anna and Zerlina display deep empathy for Elvira’s pain, having been the victims of Giovanni themselves. Feminist therapist Laura Brown pointed out in the 1990s that old definitions of trauma considered traumatic events to be those that fell outside the typical boundaries of the human experience. She finds that this definition excludes the trauma of sexual assault and domestic violence, because they occur so frequently in women’s lives as to appear “normal.” She advocates for a feminist analysis that draws attention to “the private, secret, insidious traumas” experienced by women in our society.50 We know Elvira has been lied to and betrayed by a man she trusted. We know that man has gone on to mock and denigrate her and has continued to manipulate her feelings for his own gain. She believes that she is in a relationship with Don Giovanni that can still be healed. On stage today, she resembles a victim of intimate partner violence. Zambello’s and Sivadier’s approaches to representing Donna Elvira’s experience encourage us not to see her as ridiculous but to feel for her the way Anna and Zerlina do.

. Though Kent updates the setting of his production to the 1950s, the representation of the women in the opera remains rooted in the eighteenth century. He doesn’t grant his characters any additional agency in his staging choices, with one significant exception. The Glyndebourne Festival advertised this production as a rare opportunity to see the full Vienna version of the opera.52 Notably, this means that Kent’s version included the rarely seen second-act duet between Zerlina and Leporello. In this scene, Zerlina ties Leporello up and threatens to shave him without any soap. It is charming and light-hearted, but it also grants Zerlina some resolution to her arc in the opera and allows her to take some action in the plot that is not informed directly by Masetto or Don Giovanni. I would love to see more productions of Don Giovanni consider including this duet. I believe it could satisfy a part of what audience members like Mary Hunter’s students are looking for when they seek out strong women in this opera.

. When I address the latent (and not so latent) sexual violence and misogyny present in the libretti of many beloved operas, I walk on well-tread ground. There is a rich history of scholarship on violence against women in opera extending back to Catherine Clément’s landmark book, Opera, or the Undoing of Women.9 And recent years have seen the expansion of this work specifically in regards to sexual violence in opera.10 I continue this work here, taking up the project of resistance by critiquing the way operatic sexual violence is staged in the twenty-first century and the influence these representations have on our understandings of canonic operas and of sexual violence in our own culture. Naomi André calls this kind of approach, which is sensitive to the present-day relevance of historical works, an “engaged musicology.”11

. The final two productions, directed by Norris and Bieito, are by far the most violent and both include explicit representations of sexual assault onstage. The Don Giovannis in the other four productions are ambivalent figures—their brutish actions are balanced (to varying degrees) by their charm and humor. But Norris and Bieito subscribe to a different vision of Don Giovanni. Gritty, dark Don Giovannis have been popular for some time now.58 Even the Metropolitan Opera, that bastion of operatic conservatism, has experimented with gruff, violent Giovannis, especially Bryn Terfel’s famous performances from 2000. But leaning into this opera’s darker themes does not in itself produce more ethical representations of sexual violence and violence against women.

. All but one of the productions in this chapter were conceived of and premiered before the #MeToo Movement came to mainstream prominence in the fall of 2017. After this watershed moment for sexual violence awareness, #MeToo rhetoric began to crop up in promotional and press materials around productions of Don Giovanni. In advance of Opera Atelier’s 2019 production, the Toronto Star ran an interview with Pynkoski under the headline, “Is Don Giovanni a #MeToo Monster or an Honest Seducer?”59 Although Pynkoski’s approach to this opera was explicitly historical, the press around this production still tried to frame it in terms of contemporary politics. At the end of the Star article, Pynkoski makes his resistance to the interviewer’s #MeToo framing clear: “I don’t want to adjust any existing work of art to reflect anything that is happening socially right now. . . . We change; I don’t think the work changes.”60 But some directors have been interested in seeing Don Giovanni change to reflect the society around it. I close this chapter with a brief look at an English production by a young director who consciously and sensitively engages with contemporary feminist politics of sexual violence.

. All but one of the productions in this chapter were conceived of and premiered before the #MeToo Movement came to mainstream prominence in the fall of 2017. After this watershed moment for sexual violence awareness, #MeToo rhetoric began to crop up in promotional and press materials around productions of Don Giovanni. In advance of Opera Atelier’s 2019 production, the Toronto Star ran an interview with Pynkoski under the headline, “Is Don Giovanni a #MeToo Monster or an Honest Seducer?”59 Although Pynkoski’s approach to this opera was explicitly historical, the press around this production still tried to frame it in terms of contemporary politics. At the end of the Star article, Pynkoski makes his resistance to the interviewer’s #MeToo framing clear: “I don’t want to adjust any existing work of art to reflect anything that is happening socially right now. . . . We change; I don’t think the work changes.”60 But some directors have been interested in seeing Don Giovanni change to reflect the society around it. I close this chapter with a brief look at an English production by a young director who consciously and sensitively engages with contemporary feminist politics of sexual violence.

. Rather than a triumphant celebration of the defeat of Don Giovanni, when layered on top of our realization of the story as a contemporary tale of toxic masculinity and its poisonous effect on all of those around it, the epilogue became a strong rallying cry to go away and fight the injustices still going on around us because of this kind of man—both real and allegorical. We were saying not only, “We all know this man, and men like him. Open your eyes, go out and fight, because we have to believe that goodness can win. There’s no Commendatore who’s going to do it for you.” But also, “We’re here, and we see him, and we’re not giving up.”61

. Attridge’s comments illuminate some of the kinds of thinking that can go into crafting representations of sexual violence that are victim-centered and informed by contemporary feminist politics. Increased popular awareness of the prevalence and harm of sexual violence today practically ensures that many audience members and critics will bring these ideas into the theater with them. Don Giovanni presents a number of problems when staged in the midst of our cultural conversations about sexual violence, and they are problems that need our attention. In the 2019/2020 season, Don Giovanni was the eighth most performed opera worldwide with 662 performances of 129 different productions.62 This is an opera that is widely beloved, even by many of its harshest critics, and its continued popularity feels assured. An ethically informed approach to the production and reception of this opera entails facing the issues presented by the opera directly, through the lens of our own Zeitgeist.

. When Salome demands that Herod deliver her the head of John the Baptist, Herod pleads with her to reconsider. He reminds her of how kind he has always been to her, bemoaning, “I have ever loved thee . . . It may be that I have loved thee too much.”1 These words, coupled with his wife’s ongoing complaints that Herod looks at Salome too much, carry a menacing implication for the relationship between stepfather and stepdaughter in Oscar Wilde’s play. This sentiment has inspired a host of contemporary opera directors to interpret Richard Strauss’s operatic adaptation of Salome as a story about incestuous sexual violence. In these productions, Herodes’s leering and his lecherous desire become indicators of a sexually abusive relationship. At least thirteen productions of Salome in the first two decades of the twenty-first century add sexual violence to the story during the Dance of the Seven Veils to depict Salome as a survivor of sexual trauma. Presenting Salome as a rape victim shapes and delimits possible interpretations of her character and her actions in the opera.

. Richard Strauss’s Salome premiered in Dresden in 1905, just two years after Strauss saw Oscar Wilde’s play performed in Berlin. Strauss used as his libretto a German translation of the play written by Hedwig Lachmann and trimmed it to size himself. Early Salome narratives come from the biblical story told in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark and from Josephus’s first-century historical volume Jewish Antiquities. Salome is the stepdaughter of Herod Antipas, the first-century tetrarch and ruler of Galilee and Perea. According to the Gospels, Herod arrested John the Baptist, who had been publicly condemning Herod’s marriage to Herodias given her previous marriage to Herod’s brother. In the biblical account, Herodias bears a grudge against the Baptist, but Herod is unwilling to execute the man he believes to Page 48 →be holy. On Herod’s birthday, Herodias’s daughter (who is named Salome, according to Josephus) dances for Herod and pleases the tetrarch so much that he offers to give her any gift she desires. Herodias tells the girl to ask for the head of John the Baptist, and Herod, unwilling to break his word in front of his guests, agrees. Oscar Wilde’s Salomé came out of a fin-de-siècle obsession with the mysterious dancing princess. He captured the Orientalism, eroticism, and scopophilia that characterized many depictions of Salome’s body in contemporary art, and he also gave her something new—a powerful and deviant sexual desire. Wilde’s Salome tells us definitively, “It is for mine own pleasure that I ask the head of Jokanaan in a silver charger.”2 She is not her mother’s pawn and this is no whim; she desires Jokanaan for herself, and she will have him to do with as she pleases.

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