Conference Agenda

Catherine Clement’s 1979 text “Opera, or, the undoing of women” catalogues the mistreatment that leads to the death of many of opera’s most beloved leading ladies. However, death is not the only way women are undone in many operatic stagings and libretti. To ensure that musical performances engage with social inquiry, we must consider the responsibility we have to the audience—and the content they are subjected to—perhaps more than our allegiance to a given script.While Clement, McClary, and other writers laid the groundwork of including feminist critique into the academe, directors and performers have changed little beyond one-off performance that revolve around social commentary. One goal of this project is to consider if there is need to shift feminist critique from scholarly work to performance practice.

While much of the critique surrounding the treatment of women is dismissed as a historical grievance rather than an operatic one, McClary reminds musicologists that “just as in any anthropological investigation, these cultural objects and rituals are studied not as autonomous entities in and of themselves but as constructions that reveal a great deal about the values of the people who produce, preserve and transmit them” (p.xi, Clement, 1979). In the case of opera, we—the audience member, performer, and musicologist—are not only acting as conservators of these cultural objects but assume the role of transmitters of these values as well. The Juilliard School’s 2019 performance of Cosí fan Tutte made a step in this direction. In an opera that traditionally tolerates the abuse of consent in the underlying rape-by-fraud that drives the plot, this modern staging granted agency to Fiordiligi and Dorabella without altering the libretto.

This paper will explore the 2019 performance as a case study for scrutinizing consent for the sake of contemporary audiences and propose a staging solution for future consideration. Additionally, analysis of the arias sung by the sisters and their “ironic seria” language (Brown-Montesano, 2007) will provide support for the legitimacy of this interpretation. I also plan to examine how the trope of rape-by-deceit is treated in other opera buffa from this period.

Since its beginnings, opera as a genre has explored “real” portrayals. This has been expressed through discourses around verisimilitude, naturalism, verismo, and the depiction of events from history with historical (and sometimes still living) people. In many ways, nineteenth-century opera fulfilled much of the same cultural business that the movies achieved in the twentieth century. Today, screens have advanced to include TV, computers, and cell phones. Opera in the twenty-first century also continues to evolve as its cultural position caters to wider audiences (not only the wealthy elite) with a broader mission that has engaged social justice to include the movements around Me Too, Queer and Trans lives, and Black Lives Matter.

Coupled with the scholarship of others, my own research into the construction of Black Opera (Black participation in opera through composers, librettists, subjects for plots, singers, and those involved with production behind the scenes) has highlighted the insidiousness of exclusion. Black folks in the United States have been involved with opera since the nineteenth century; the erasure of this participation is painful and has caused harm. An unexpected place to carefully repair this harm is through a recovery of the history and to engage with the rich legacy of Black participation in the past and the present golden age of Black Opera. In this talk I will touch on Blue (2019, Tesori and Thompson), Fire Shut Up in My Bones (2019, Blanchard and Lemmons), Omar (2022 Giddens and Abels), and The Factotum (2023 Liverman and Jackson).

Efforts to acknowledge and repair opera’s colonial, Eurocentric, and imperialist past have characterized numerous twenty-first century productions and much scholarly discussion. While this discourse has resulted in select representation of and collaborations with Native American peoples and communities, Indigenous presence on the operatic stage in North America remains a relative rarity. In this talk, I examine opera's recent efforts to engage in these collaborations, and the inherent tensions and unsettling potentialities of operatic depictions of Indigenous peoples and narratives. Drawing on City Opera Vancouver’s/Pacific Opera’s joint 2017 production of Brian Current’s Missing, Tapestry Opera’s 2019 production of Dean Burry’s Shanawdithit, and The Industry’s 2020 production of Du Yun’s and Raven Chacon’s Sweet Land as case studies, I demonstrate how recent operas have often foregrounded traumatic narratives of historic and ongoing colonial violence. Though these operas also contain important and noteworthy efforts to depict Indigenous agency, epistemologies, and histories, they nevertheless remain at times in a largely colonial mode and structure, reinscribing what Unangax̂ scholar Eve Tuck terms “damage-centered” narratives. Recent work in Indigenous sound studies, particularly the scholarship of Dylan Robinson and Trevor Reed, highlights the necessity of moving towards new structures and forms of art music that might ultimately foster narratives told by and for Indigenous peoples; several emerging opera workshops and in-progress stagings show these theories in practice. By discussing models of compositional and dramaturgical collaboration utilized in Calgary Opera Lab’s Namwayut (multi-authored, 2021-) and Edmonton/Against the Grain Theatre’s in-progress expansion and staging of Indians on Vacation (Ian Cusson, 2021-), I suggest a potential turning point in opera in North America. By engaging collaboratively and equitably with Indigenous narratives and communities, it is possible to create productions that strive to unsettle opera’s colonial logics, instead working to further Native American sovereignty and resurgence.