Conference Agenda

Representations of traumatic events in opera are widely and productively discussed in industry and academic discourse, mostly in the context of sexual violence (Bloechl, 2021; Cormier, 2024). However, these perspectives have not adequately addressed other sensitive content present in new operas and deeply relevant to modern life, such as the mass shooting in Innocence. Since its 2021 Aix-en-Provence premiere, Kaija Saariaho’s final opera has received four new productions in addition to the original by Simon Stone, appearing at eleven houses globally in just five years. Due to its musicodramatic power, its extreme social relevance, and Saariaho’s stature as a composer, it is likely to receive many revivals, meaning an increase in the population of audiences and artists reckoning with the real possibility and past occurrences of the traumatic event they have witnessed or depicted onstage. My paper addresses the need for a trauma-informed approach to Innocence and other operas like it. Contemporary operas have tended toward hyperrealistic musical and visual depictions of traumatic situations. While this persists, it is imperative to tell these stories responsibly and compassionately to avoid exploiting the trauma of others or retraumatizing artists and audiences, and to use their telling to build empathy, raise awareness, and inspire civic engagement to call for change and progress.

Drawing on ethnographic data from participant observation and interviews gathered during the production of Innocence at the Metropolitan Opera in April 2026, I analyze participants’ approaches through the lens of critical trauma studies. I build on foundational work by Alexander (2012), Herman (1992), and others, to situate gun violence as a topic in company with the Holocaust, sexual violence, and other sources of collective and personal trauma. I follow analyses about witnessing, writing and reading trauma by Allison (2016), Hartman (1997), and similar musicological studies by Cizmic (2024), Doran (2022), Rogers (2021), Wlodarski (2015), and others, to call for care-full approaches to operas like Innocence that resist monolithizing collective trauma. This research provides crucial insights and helps form best practices for opera practitioners as they approach work with highly sensitive content.

Operatic performances of maternal trauma have recently begun to receive direct, visceral, or hyper-realistic treatment in contrast with the subtler performance traditions of previous centuries. Stagings of Gounod’s Faust (1859) represent noteworthy case studies for understanding how depictions of traumatic motherhood have developed over the years. In the opera, the young Marguerite faces social ostracization after Faust impregnates and then abandons her. Hopeless and mentally unwell, Marguerite kills her infant and then faces execution. In nineteenth-century France, the opera—while idealistic in many ways—offered relevant social commentary in a world marked by intense debates about abortion, and in which the medicalization of postpartum depression contributed to huge increases in the number of women committed to asylums as the century progressed. Marguerite’s suffering thus engaged with traumatic experiences shared by many women at the time of the opera’s composition. With the widespread unavailability of abortion and proper maternal care in today’s world, Marguerite’s story remains as relevant as ever.

Scholars in the fields of theater and performance studies, including Patrick Duggan, James Thompson, and Caroline Wake, have demonstrated that performance lends itself to the expression of trauma; it can allow testimony to take place and cultivate experiences in which audience members become active spectators or witnesses. I explore a range of representations of Marguerite’s motherhood, from empathetic to monstrous to bloody spectacle, across several recent stagings of the opera. Productions I examine include Aik Karapetian’s staging with the Latvian National Opera (2016), Jean-Louis Martinoty’s Faust for the L’Opéra de Paris (2011), and Des McAnuff’s production for the English National Opera (2010). My analyses demonstrate that operatic performance can problematize idealized narratives of maternal suffering and can reshape nineteenth-century texts to better address past and present traumas shared by women. Productions have the power to bear witness to historical and current instances of women’s suffering, turning spectators into sympathetic witnesses and raising questions about the ethical responsibilities of performance. Ultimately, I ask how today’s gritty performances of maternal trauma can become sites for ethical engagement with painful maternity past and present.

Musicological scholarship has long agreed (Smart, 2000; Locke, 1995; Clement, 1988) that operatic agendas of sexual control are worked out across women’s bodies, whether her promiscuity is stifled by a jealous lover, or her purity is protected by a cunning servant. Throughout the 19th century, gynecological labor that had previously fallen to women was appropriated by masculine science and confined within hospital walls. The penetration of racist and patriarchal science into gynecological care has been well explored in the social sciences but has not yet found its way into musicology. What happens when the ultimate materialization of sexual control—stirrups and a speculum—make their way onto the operatic stage?

My paper analyzes two recent operatic productions that include hyper-realistic representations of gynecological exams: Peter Konwitschny’s 2025 production of Strauss’ Die Frau ohne Schatten in Bonn and a new work, Daniel Schlosberg’s 2024 opera The Extinctionist, directed by Shadi Ghaheri. In his production of Die Frau, Konwitschny attempts to counter the work’s original pronatalist message by setting the plot in a gynecological office and killing off the female leads by time the curtain falls. In The Extinctionist, the audience watches as the protagonist undergoes an invasive pap smear and sings, “That hurts! So bad I, Ow! Fuck!” Whether included in an opera about selling your fertility to an Empress or making reproductive decisions with the environmental impact in mind, trauma between the stirrups endures. Through my investigation, I show how the victimization of women’s bodies in hyper-realistic stagings of gynecological examinations, those which are largely traumatic for women, contribute to opera’s ongoing performance of sexual and gender-based violence. Joining scholarship on trauma-based approaches to operatic practice (Cormier, 2024) with literature in the medical humanities, namely on obstetric violence (Morris et al., 2021; Katz Rothman, 2021), I ask whether performers and audience members face potentially retraumatizing themselves when participating in these representations. To conclude, I will turn to Florentina Holzinger’s music theater piece A Year Without Summer, which explicitly resists the masculine colonization of her body while still using stirrups and speculum.