IT’S NOT OFTEN YOU HEAR OPERA being praised for its progressive zeal. Quite the opposite, in fact: and it’s the people who run it who seem most obsessed with its reactionary infamy — as though it were a drunken uncle at a wedding, liable to do something appalling at any moment.
Why else go to such lengths to bowdlerise it for their ideal — albeit sadly imaginary — audiences of global majoritarians, the easily offended and general unwashed?
This happens in all sorts of amusing little ways. I fondly recall performances of HMS Pinafore at Holland Park where the management were so horrified by the idea of Little Buttercup’s gypsy plasma they made her say the line “the bumboat woman has mystic blood …” instead.
To date, nobody has asked…
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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, July 2024