Tea at Trianon: A White Otello?

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, October 3, 2015

A White Otello?

What a travesty! From NPR:

Verdi's opera is based on Shakespeare's play about a North African general who becomes a war hero and tries to fit into Venetian high society. Bartlett Sher directs the current Met production, which features Latvian tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko in the title role. Sher says he never even considered using blackface.

"Our cultural history in America is profoundly marked by our struggles with race and the questions of race," Sher says. "And it seems to me, as an artist growing up in America, that there'd be no way on Earth I could possibly figure out how to do it with that kind of makeup and that it just seemed like an obvious choice."

Metropolitan Opera General Manager Peter Gelb says he was relieved when Sher told him there would be no darkening makeup in Otello. The Met did, however, darken Antonenko's skin for the photograph on the cover of this season's brochure. Nevertheless, Gelb points out that the Met — like many opera companies — has had a colorblind casting policy for more than half a century.

"The Met has historically featured some of the greatest black artists of all time here, from Marian Anderson to Leontyne Price to Jessye Norman to Kathleen Battle," Gelb says.

Black women have had an easier time landing top opera roles than have black men, and there's a reason, André says: "Seeing a black male singer onstage with a white female heroine — there would be anxiety a lot of people could feel in the days of segregation, even in post-segregation times but where racial tensions are still very much around."

Much of the drama in Shakespeare's Othello is precipitated by a black man marrying a white woman. And while the libretto of Verdi's opera downplays the racial element, it's still in there.

African-American tenor Lawrence Brownlee, who's performed with just about every major opera company in the world, says times have changed and more roles traditionally played by white men have gone to black singers. Still, when asked what he thinks about the tradition of Otello being performed in blackface, Brownlee says he understands the dramatic concerns and the history. (Read more.)