opera is a white man's game

I like to be bougie every once in a while. And with that comes a casual acquaintance with opera.

Coming to IU-Bloomington, it seemed pretty blasphemous I had never seen an opera. I quickly amended that and took advantage of the IU Opera and Ballet Theater.

Upon watching my fifth IU Opera production this past weekend, I realized while it’s fun to live in an upper-class world for the evening with the opera, our society has really let the art form fester as a class-based, white-centric expression of creativity.

Let’s be honest. For most, the opera is an expensive ticket for white people to go watch a story about rich white people of the past falling in their social standing and possibly dying — usually with intermittent naps.

The favorites, or the ones that sell the most tickets, are works that everyone knows, and they have become household names — “La Boheme,” “The Marriage of Figaro,” “La Traviata” or any other famous work by a dead white man.

Though modern opera might be trying to break the illusion that it’s all a white man’s world telling white man’s tales, we still fall short.

This past season, IU Opera and Ballet Theater produced “The Tale of Lady Thi Kinh,” a new opera based on the classic Vietnamese theater hát chèo and the culture’s folklore. It seemed like a great effort.

But we realized once the production was set into motion that we’re at IU, in the Midwest.

The classic Vietnamese tale featured a nearly all-white cast.
IU Opera and Ballet Theater’s new season is titled “Go Boldly,” but what do we constitute as bold in opera anymore?

Bold simply seems to mean taking on more of the classics as the season includes, “The Magic Flute,” “La Boheme” and even “South Pacific,” one of the more racially problematic American musicals.

They are works guaranteed to sell tickets. They’ll get upper-middle-class white people into some seats.

Breaking the mold next season seems to mean going so far as producing “The Last Savage,” a campy little opera that was basically shut down during its American premiere run at the Metropolitan Opera in 1964 because supporters of the civil-rights movement found it too insensitive.

That doesn’t bode well.

We’re stuck perpetuating this notion that opera is only for white people.
Even in an educational environment where we could hope to see some sort of push against the system, we have to succumb to ticket sales.

And what will sell? More white people onstage in anguish taking an entire 30-minute act to finally die.

sjostrow@indiana.edu
@ostrowski_s_j