The opera canon can sometimes feel like a collection of problems. It is a parade of misogyny, racism, and assorted other forms of bigotry that remind us of some of the worst things the forbearers of Western art music believed about the world. And also, I love it. This book was generated by the tension between the deep discomfort I feel watching casual or gratuitous representations of sexual assault and the pleasure I nonetheless experience when I attend my favorite operas. This pleasure makes me unwilling to simply stop watching and listening to Don Giovanni, Turandot, and other operas where I know in advance I am likely to be deeply troubled by the depiction of sexual violence. And this pleasure is part of what motivates me to want to see the way we talk about and produce these operas get better.

Production is the best tool we have to explore and evolve our relationship to the canon. Through production, directors, producers, technicians, and performers co-create performances that are informed by, but not limited to, the written texts of our canonic inheritance. This work keeps old artworks alive and relevant, and it also gives modern-day creators the opportunity to intervene in the more troubling elements of these stories. Regietheater’s detractors often frame these interventions as attacks on the operas and their composers, but they sell the operas short when they try to shield them from criticism. We do a disservice to opera when we decline to engage deeply with what the canon means to us today and how its works are different in our context. Refusing to engage with contemporary ideas in the way we produce and talk about opera makes these works old and irrelevant by deciding a priori that they have nothing new to say to us.

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.

When staging operas that feature Orientalism in their written texts, whitewashing the stories in production can be understood as a tactic to sidestep the racism. This might be a particularly appealing option in operas where the exotic music has lost some of its specific signifying power to time; for example, while the Chinese music in Turandot still sounds Chinese to modern audiences, the Turkish music in Entführung does not sound Turkish outside of its association with a specific eighteenth-century European musical trope. Yet I worry that eliminating race from these operas just replaces one white racial frame with another one: instead of whiteness standing in contrast to a racialized other, whiteness is invisible as the default state of humans. I am not suggesting that these are choices being made intentionally by these opera creators. Rather, I think the whiteness of the opera industry and of directors specifically in North America and Europe limits the perspectives and the stories that audiences have access to. Mouawad’s Entführung for Lyon and Toronto is a great step toward bringing new perspectives into opera through production. Though I have my misgivings about elements of the approach to Page 144 →gender and violence in this production, I am glad it exists and I hope to see more work in this vein.

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.

When I have criticized directors and producers in this book, it has generally been for failing to take responsibility for the work their productions do and especially the harm they might cause others. Staging canonic operas that contain distressing and potentially harmful content without comment or intervention is not ethically neutral; it upholds and perpetuates the outdated and often deeply misogynistic and racist politics of these works in the present day. I want artists to consider the role their work might play in creating a better world. This impulse is visible in many of the productions I have discussed in the preceding chapters; using operas of the canon to criticize violence, racism, and misogyny is a valuable ethical project. These interventions are the Page 145 →most effective and the most radical when they balance care for others with that critical agenda. With representations of sexual violence in particular, the needs of women, especially survivors of sexual assault, may be anticipated and tended to as a central priority and practice.

While the focus of this book has been the representational issues of putting sexual violence onstage, the presence of sexual violence can be felt at every level of contemporary operatic discourse and practice. The opera industry itself is a minefield of harassment and abuse, and the ethical stakes of staging sexual violence do not end with the consequences for audiences watching these productions. Directors work through the bodies of singer-actors to craft these representations, and there are risks associated with onstage simulations of intimacy and violence. I have spent enough time around opera singers to know that being a woman in this industry almost necessarily means having had bad experiences with reckless approaches to staging intimacy without sufficient training or support. Singers are frequently asked to improvise scenes of intimacy in rehearsal with few if any guidelines given to ensure that all parties are comfortable and safe. This carelessness of approach and lack of oversight is not always harmful, but it can be a perfect storm for harassment and hostile work environments. It is not an exaggeration to say that every woman in the industry I have asked has a story about a time they felt uncomfortable or unsafe in a rehearsal room due to a director’s approach to representing intimacy.

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.

I am excited about the evolution of opera through new works that engage with social issues in contemporary, ethically informed ways. There are contemporary opera composers working through many of the same issues I have raised in this book by crafting representations of sexual violence that focus on the experiences of survivors. Laura Bowler and Laura Lomas’s 2022 Blue Woman at the Royal Opera House is one excellent example. Yet even as the number of new operas that deal sensitively with issues of gender, race, and violence increases, performances of the canon continue to make up the majority of work done at almost all major opera houses. I am therefore unwilling to either ignore or give up on the canon in my desire to see operatic practices and representations improve.

The misogynistic representation of sexual violence is one problem in Page 147 →the opera canon, which is also marked by racism, antisemitism, ableism, homophobia, and a host of other bigotries. Sexual violence has been my entry point for making arguments and recommendations that apply to the opera industry at large as we continue to negotiate with the canon as scholars, creators, producers, critics, and lovers of opera. I hope that this book might inspire and support studies of some of these other representational issues of the canon not just on the page but also on the stage. Opera lovers are quick to attest to the power this art form has to speak to its audiences through music in a way that can feel more direct and intimate than straight theater. If opera indeed has this special rhetorical power, surely it makes understanding, critiquing, and shaping the messages that it conveys particularly important. Investing in rethinking and remaking the canon in a way that supports contemporary values and priorities is not easy, but I believe it is the way that we keep opera alive and ensure that its stories support a future we want.