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Freelancers in the opera industry
At the 2023 OBERTO conference dedicated to the topic “Opera and Money”, singer Mimi Doulton opened the panel discussion with the following impassioned plea about the essential role freelancers play in theatres and operas in the UK.
2023 OBERTO conference.
Freelancers make up an estimated 70% of the theatre and opera workforce in the UK. We are vital to the survival and day-to-day functioning of this industry. And yet, the freelance workforce is in crisis. I need you to care about that, because if there are no freelancers, there is no opera in this country.
For people in this room who might not have been freelance for some time, let me remind you of its realities. We get no sick pay, no maternity leave, no pension, and no paid holiday. We very rarely have access to HR or childcare support, we often work more than five days a week, our overtime and our preparation time is usually unpaid.
To calculate our fees on the assumption that we are under contract 48 weeks a year, like a person in full-time employment, is a fantasy. Memorising roles and developing concepts takes time between contracts. And although nobody sees us turning up to work in this time, I promise that we are investing time, and quite often money, in making sure we do a good job.
Our fees need to take all of this into account.
Do they? Let’s look to the 2023 Big Freelancer Survey and see if we can find some answers.
The average income for freelancers working in opera is 11% under the UK average income. We are underpaid.
There is a gender pay gap of 28% for opera freelancers. Women – on average – are earning below minimum wage. We are paid unfairly.
The average income does not change whether you have 10, 20 or 30 years’ experience in this industry. In fact, it goes down a little. We have little hope of salary progression.
68% of opera freelancers report feeling that their work is quite or very insecure. 68% of opera freelancers earn less than half of their income from actually working in opera. We have chronic job insecurity.
78% of London-based opera freelancers are earning less than the average London rent. That is just rent – no other costs. 61% are earning less than the London Living Wage. They could literally make more money working in a posh coffee shop. We cannot afford to live on what you are paying us.
Five to eight years of expensive training, followed by badly paid or unpaid young artist schemes and apprenticeships, to develop highly specialised skills that I know everyone in this room appreciates. And for what? Low and unequal pay, irregular work, chronic job insecurity, no salary progression, and less than a basic living wage.
Why is this important?
As long as we refuse to tackle these economic barriers, there is no point in talking about diversifying this industry. Because, taking everything I have just said into account: if you met a 17-year-old tomorrow who was trying to decide whether to train – let’s say as a singer – but did not have access to private means or family wealth, and did not have access to free or subsidised property in a major UK city, and did not yet have access to the circle of elite donors that hover on the edges of our industry – would you really encourage them to go to conservatoire in good conscience? Would it be moral to encourage them to choose this life of insecurity and financial struggle, where the average person cannot afford rent, let alone pets or children on what they are being paid?
If you did encourage them to make that choice, yes, they might be exceptionally lucky. But chances are that ten years down the line they’ll be working three part-time jobs alongside their singing. Burning out, with little time to practice or progress, watching their wealthier colleagues sail through with infinite access to money to pay for coachings, travel to auditions, and application fees.
If you look at what people say they want from the Big Freelancer Survey, they aren’t actually asking much. 5 day weeks, paid overtime, sensible workloads, access to HR, fair pay. These are all things that are taken for granted in other sectors in this country. It is laughable that that is what we are asking for.
If you care about art, if you care about artists, if you care about diversity as you all say you do; then let’s sort this out. Let’s start viewing union minimums as just that – minimums – let’s stop exploiting people, let’s stop talking, and then let’s actually do the work to make it possible for anyone to work in opera.
To quote one survey respondent: Working in this industry over the last year has been: ‘an exercise in being undervalued, having my experience ignored, being taken advantage of and being made to feel that to push back is to risk my livelihood’.
Another says, ‘I’d like to feel valued, instead of a necessary but begrudged expense, and to quote a third person, ‘I’d like to not feel like some kind of monster for asking for a half-decent fee from a major national house’.
What do we want?
The path we are on. There is an alternative.
We are not responsible for solving these problems. We are telling you what they are and it is your duty to sort them out.
Freelancers Make Theatre Work, or FMTW, was founded during the Covid-19 pandemic to represent the voices of freelancers in our industry, who make up an estimated 70% of the theatre workforce. In more recent years it has become our role to educated both our industry and the wider public about two things: firstly, that the freelance workforce is vital to the survival of the theatre industry. Secondly, that the freelance workforce is in crisis.
How do we know this? One thing that the pandemic highlighted was the staggering lack of data that exists about freelancers, and so we decided to start creating that data. Every year we run a Big Freelancer Survey, collecting the important information.
You can follow FMTW on X (Twitter): @FreelancersMake
If you want to learn more about the 2023 survey, you can access it here: Big Freelancer Survey Report 2023
New Publication: Italian Musical Migrations
Professor Alexandra Wilson and former Oberto research student, Dr Andrew Holden, have published articles in a special issue of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies. The special issue, co-edited by Andrew Holden, brings together six different perspectives on the rich history of ‘Italin Musical Migration to London’. The contributors were participants in a conference on the same theme at Birmingham, organised by co-editor Nicolò Palazzetti at the University of Birmingham in 2019.
LSE Digital Library
Alexandra Wilson’s article, ‘Opera for the country lout: Italian opera, national identity and the middlebrow in interwar Britain‘, relates the reception of Italian opera and musicians to wider debates about taste-formation and the ‘battle of the brows’ during this crucial period of cultural self-definition.
Andrew Holden’s article, ‘A slice of operatic life in London’s East End 1880-1940‘ (currently available on open access) developed from research on the musical life of the philanthropic institutions of East London which was the subject of a conference co-hosted by Oberto at Queen Mary, University of London in 2017, ‘Opera in the East End’. The article takes as a point of departure a remarkable photograph of Queen Mary emerging from a performance of Pagliacci in Bethnal Green through a guard of honour formed by local choristers dressed as Calabrian peasants.
With the continuing shuttering of theatres almost everywhere and performers unable to travel, Italian Musical Migrations reminds us of the fragile regard in which opera has long been held and how dependent it has always been on the mobility of artists and cultural exchange at all levels of society.
OBERTO Conference 2023 – reminder
A reminder that registration for OBERTO’s forthcoming conference on ‘AN EXCLUSIVE AND EXPENSIVE ARTICLE?’ OPERA AND MONEY closes on 1 September. The conference is taking place at Oxford Brookes University on Tuesday, 12 September. It is free but registration is required. Please email oberto@brookes.ac.uk (including adding any dietary or other requirements).
OBERTO Conference 2023
‘AN EXCLUSIVE AND EXPENSIVE ARTICLE?’ OPERA AND MONEY
This year’s conference will be held at Oxford Brookes University on Tuesday, 12 September. See here for details. Registration is free. Please email oberto@brookes.ac.uk
OBERTO Conference, 2023 – Call for Papers
This year’s conference will address the topic – ‘AN EXCLUSIVE AND EXPENSIVE ARTICLE?’ OPERA AND MONEY. It will be held at Oxford Brookes University on Tuesday, 12 September . See here for details
‘Don’t mention the C Word’ – re-assessing the meaning and impact of censorship in opera
This has now been made an online conference on
Wednesday 24 June, 2020 11:00 BST to 18:00 BST
If you would like to register for log-in details to attend, please email andrew.holden@rhul.ac.uk by Tuesday 23 June.
Supported by the Institute of Musical Research, RHUL, Performance and Cultural Industries, University of Leeds and OBERTO, Oxford Brookes.
At its 2015 conference in Madrid, Opera Europa, the main European industry network, heard from opera producers in Perm, Russia about the threat they face from renewed political oppression. Alexander Pereira, then Artistic Director of Teatro alla Scala, Milan, told the conference “there is no future without solidarity”. But solidarity with whom, and against what? This conference will explore a new understanding of opera’s regulation in a world in which binary poles between freedom of expression and censorship in opera have broken down.
The opera business model in its mature markets has been undermined by shrinking public grants and become more reliant on philanthropy. As opera ecologies expand in regions like East Asia and the Middle East, gender norms, sexuality and violence, cultural habits like smoking and tattoos, and the visual representation of naked flesh, are policed in highly individual contexts. Performance tradition and power structures in opera are also being breached by more collaborative approaches to production and community opera, as well as performer and audience activism based on gender, ethnicity and disability. These trends challenge existing concepts of censorship, in which a range of participants have agency in processes which may mimic regulatory control, but in pursuit of diversity and against cultural appropriation, for example ethnocentric operatic tropes such as ‘blackface’ Otellos and ‘yellowface’ orientalism.
The boundaries between taste, market forces, local cultural contexts and artistic freedom have always been shadowy. This one-day conference will address the pressing need for a more nuanced articulation of how censorship is operating in the global market for opera.
Provisional Programme
| Welcome and Introduction – Test video, Housekeeping and Etiquette (10:45 BST) | Andrew Holden and Kara McKechnie |
| Session 1 (11:00 to 13:15 BST) | Kara McKechnie (University of Leeds) – ‘Free Kirill – Stuttgart Opera’s 2017 campaign for Serebrennikov’ |
| Fueanglada Prawang (Bangor University) – ‘Thai opera and a censorship drama: Sucharitkul’s Ayodhya’ | |
| Michelle Assay (University of Huddersfield) – ‘Our wills and fates do so contrary run’: an ill-fated Georgian Hamlet Opera’ | |
| Charlotte Armstrong (University of York) – ‘Exhibition and Erasure: Disability on the Contemporary Opera Stage’ | |
| Alan Williams (University of Salford) – ‘The Case for Self-Censorship: the politics of representation and anti-realism in opera’ | |
| CLOSING REMARKS | |
| BREAK 13:15 to 15:15 |
| Welcome – Re-test video, welcome back, housekeeping, etiquette. (15:15) | Andrew Holden and Kara McKechnie |
| Session 2 (15:30 to 18:00pm) | Michael Walling (Opera Director) and Haili Ma (University of Leeds) – ‘Nixon in China, censorship, production and consumption’ |
| Haili Ma (University of Leeds) -‘ Chinese opera as a national cultural industry, the case study of Errenzhuan’ | |
| Imani Danielle Mosley (Wichita State University) – ”I Will Always Be a Black Aida!’: Opera at the Intersection of Racism and Cancel Culture’ | |
| Andrew Holden (Institute for Musical Research, Royal Holloway, London) – ‘Love for Three Oranges – Prokofiev’s edited adventures in America’ | |
| Inka-Maria Nyman (University of Turku) – ‘Accessibility to opera in a minority language context in the digital age’ | |
| Nicolò Palazzetti (University of Strasbourg) – ‘Backstage live. Opera and the obscene in the Web Age’ | |
| 17:50 | CLOSING DISCUSSION |
| 18:00 | END |
Postponed until 2021 – Travels in Hyperreality: medievalism and postmodern musical cultures
A joint conference organised by the School of Arts at Oxford Brookes University and REMOSS (Representations of Early Music on Stage and Screen)
It has been 37 years since Umberto Eco wrote Travels in Hyperreality. Gazing at the ‘postmodern neomedieval Manhattan new castle’ of Trump Tower, he found ‘a new feudalism’ in a ‘New Middle Ages’. Now that Trump is sovereign, Eco’s playful comparisons between saints and pop stars overspill their boundaries grotesquely. But why is the pop star so sainted? And if ‘the relationship between illuminated manuscript and cathedral is the same as that between MOMA and Hollywood’, does the tower loom as large as the soundbite?
For its fifth annual conference, the REMOSS (Representations of Early Music on Stage and Screen) study group invites proposals on the theme of ‘Travels in Hyperreality’, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between pre- and postmodern musical cultures. We aim to acknowledge medievalism’s pervasiveness in postmodern society and ask what worldviews we share with premodernity—what relationships with ambiguity, truth, reality, and excess—and how they manifest themselves in the world of sound.
Keynote lectures will be given by Lindsay Steenberg and Bruce Holsinger.
Contributions could cover (and are not limited to):
- pre-/postmodern ideas of reality
- video game music and soundscape
- contemporary opera and musical theatre
- hyperreality in film and television music
- medievalism, racism, and violence on stage and screen
- historically informed performance, reconstruction, and roleplay
- medievalist influences in compositional practice
- the influence of medieval conceptions of gender, sexuality, body, sound, and music
- pre-/postmodern ideas of reality
Our conception of ‘early music’ is a broad one, including the use, or re-use, of ‘real’ early music in contexts new and old. As ever, the conference will be live-streamed, and we welcome both speakers and delegates to attend digitally. All proposals and contributions will be considered.
If you have any questions about the conference, feel free to contact any of the organisers, particularly George Haggett, george.haggett@magd.ox.ac.uk .
Programme committee:
James Cook (University of Edinburgh)
George Haggett (Magdalen College Oxford)
Alexander Kolassa (Open University)
Leander Reeves (Oxford Brookes University)
Adam Whittacker (Royal Birmingham Conservatoire)
Sign-up for our jiscmail newsletter at: REMOSS@JISCMAIL.AC.UK
CFP: ‘Don’t mention the C Word’ – re-assessing the meaning and impact of censorship in opera
Former Brookes doctoral student, Dr Andrew Holden is organising the following conference hosted by the University of Leeds, supported by OBERTO, RHUL, Oxford Brookes and an Early Career Fellowship from the Institute for Musical Research.
Call for Papers – deadline Friday 13 March 2020.
‘Don’t mention the C Word’
– re-assessing the meaning and impact of censorship in opera
University of Leeds, Thursday 11 June 2020
At its 2015 conference in Madrid, Opera Europa, the main European industry network, heard from opera producers in Perm, Russia about the threat they face from renewed political oppression. Alexander Pereira, then Artistic Director of Teatro alla Scala, Milan, told the conference “there is no future without solidarity”. But solidarity with whom, and against what? This conference will explore a new understanding of opera’s regulation in a world in which binary poles between freedom of expression and censorship in opera have broken down.
The opera business model in its mature markets has been undermined by shrinking public grants and become more reliant on philanthropy. As opera ecologies expand in regions like East Asia and the Middle East, gender norms, sexuality and violence, cultural habits like smoking and tattoos, and the visual representation of naked flesh, are policed in highly individual contexts. Performance tradition and power structures in opera are also being breached by more collaborative approaches to production and community opera, as well as performer and audience activism based on gender, ethnicity and disability. These trends challenge existing concepts of censorship, in which a range of participants have agency in processes which may mimic regulatory control, but in pursuit of diversity and against cultural appropriation, for example ethnocentric operatic tropes such as ‘blackface’ Otellos and ‘yellowface’ orientalism. Many of these trends encourage risk aversion and self-censorship.
The boundaries between taste, market forces, local cultural contexts and artistic freedom have always been shadowy. This one-day conference will address the pressing need for a more nuanced articulation of how censorship is operating in the global market for opera.
Potential Conference Themes:
- Theoretical concepts and expanded definitions of censorship
- Legacies of censorship.
- What is being censored in opera – text, music, characterisation, staging, space, reception.
- Processes of adaptation
- Censorship of opera in relation to other art forms.
- Local, regional, national conventions, transnational circulation, globalisation.
- Emerging markets – artistic, cultural, religious, political contexts.
- Opera business models and their impact on artistic expression – state and private funding, co-production and hires.
- Evolving sub-genres of opera – eg. community opera, site-specific opera.
- Agency and power dynamics within opera production.
- Broadcasting, digital criticism, social media, audience activism.
- Rhetorics of censorship including cultural sensitivity and exchange, diplomacy, marketing
Abstracts for 20-minute papers (max 300 words) and short biographies (max 150 words) should be sent to andrew.holden@rhul.ac.uk by Friday 13 March 2020.
Interdisciplinary approaches, and paper proposals from early career researchers and opera practitioners are particularly welcome.
The conference is hosted jointly by the School of Performance and Cultural Industries and the School of Music, also supported by OBERTO at Oxford Brookes University.
The conference will be free to attend. A small number of travel and accommodation bursaries, generously provided by the Institute of Musical Research, will be available to doctoral candidates, and early career researchers.
For any additional information contact Andrew Holden: andrew.holden@rhul.ac.uk
OBERTO Conference 2019: The Canon Reloaded? Operatic Repertoire in the Twenty-First Century
The 2019 OBERTO conference will take place at Oxford Brookes University on Tuesday, 10 September 2019. A day of presentations and panels, featuring opera scholars as well as opera industry professionals, will explore how opera houses and opera audiences create repertoires, and whether and how the operatic canon needs to be refreshed for the twenty-first century.
9am Registration
9.45am Welcome
10am Session 1: Foundations
Mike Gibb (Founder of Operabase): New Opera in the 21st Century – A Guided
Tour
Cormac Newark (Guildhall School of Music and Drama): The Oxford Handbook of the Operatic Canon
11am Coffee break
11.30am Session 2: Interventions
Leo Doulton (director and librettist): Frankenstein’s Donster: Reinventing Don
Giovanni with the Arcola Queer Collective
Andrew Holden (Oxford Brookes University / Turin): Don’t Mention the ‘C’
Word – Negotiating and Confronting the Transnational Circulation of Opera
Imani Danielle Mosley (Wichita State University): ‘The Positives Outweigh the
Negatives’: Performing Opera in the Age of Social Justice and Social Media
1pm Lunch
2pm Session 3: Institutions and Orthodoxies
Adriana Festeu (Royal Academy of Music): Programming Operatic Repertoire
for Young Singers
Sid Wolters-Tiedge (Forschungsintitut für Musiktheater, University of
Bayreuth): ‘Verachtet mir die Meister nicht’: Directing the Operatic Canon as
Institutional Practice in Germany
Alexandra Wilson (Oxford Brookes University): Dead White Men and the Spectre of Elitism
3.30pm Tea break
4pm Session 4: Marginalia?
Jeremy Gray (Bampton Classical Opera): Footnote Operas: Probing the
Marginalia of Classical Opera
Alexandra Monchick (California State University, Northridge): Outside the
Operatic Canon after #MeToo
5pm Panel Discussion
with Benedict Nelson (baritone), Brian Robins (Early Music World), Jane-Eve
Straughton (English Touring Opera), Michael Volpe (Opera Holland Park)
The conference takes place in Headington Hill Hall, on the Headington Hill Campus. Directions can be found here: https://www.brookes.ac.uk/about-brookes/contacts-maps-and-campuses/headington-campus/
The conference is free, and lunch, tea and coffee will be provided. Please register if you plan to attend by emailing tde-oberto@brookes.ac.uk before 1 September 2019, and include any dietary preferences.
2019 OBERTO conference – CFP deadline extended
The topic for this year’s OBERTO conference is “The Canon Reloaded? Operatic Repertoire in the Twenty-First Century”. Please see The 2019 OBERTO Conference – CFP for more details. The CFP deadline has been extended to Friday, 28 June, 2019. Please send abstracts of 250 words or queries to oberto@brookes.ac.uk .
The conference will take place at Oxford Brookes University on Tuesday, 10 September 2019.
The 2019 OBERTO Conference – CFP
The Canon Reloaded?
Operatic Repertoire in the Twenty-First Century
The 2019 OBERTO conference will take place at Oxford Brookes University on Tuesday, 10 September 2019. The topic this year is “The Canon Reloaded? Operatic Repertoire in the Twenty-First Century”.
****************
In 1932, A. H. Fox-Strangways, editor of the journal Music & Letters, wrote: ‘At the sound of the word “opera” a good many are repelled because they think at once of Faust and Aida only’. Every age has its operatic warhorses, and although these change periodically over time – Faust is no longer as ubiquitous as it was when George Bernard-Shaw claimed to have heard it around 90 times in a decade – the centrality of certain key works to the operatic canon remains largely unchallenged.
Musicologists have been discussing the mechanics and the politics of the musical canon since the 1990s. This might seem, on the face of it, like one of those New Musicology debates that are now rather dated. In reality, the debate is as alive as ever, except that is now more likely to be taking place on Twitter and other social media, and grabbing headlines in the daily press. Discussions rage about whether familiar works should be sidelined, or even jettisoned, in favour of more contemporary and neglected works from the past. The debate has become entwined with political activism to a pronounced degree, with some commentators calling for opera companies to “redress historical wrongs” by staging certain quotas of operas by female or BME composers. Censorship hovers at the fringes of the conversation, with some even advocating for repertory operas that offend present-day political sensibilities to be banned.
This conference, organised by the OBERTO opera research group at Oxford Brookes University, aims to explore the arguments for and against maintaining, refreshing or discarding the operatic canon and will consider implications for operatic creators, performers and audiences.
Possible topics include, but are by no means restricted to:
- Rejuvenating the canon and the limitations of the current performing repertory
- The economics of programming opera and other harsh realities
- Are some operas simply better than others? The taboo subject of ‘quality’ in classical music
- ‘Righting historical wrongs’: questions of gender and race
- The opera house as a museum of musical works
- Innovative stagings of standard repertory: merely tinkering around the edges?
- National canons and transnational difference
- Exporting operatic canons and the question of imperialism
- Operatic criticism before the “age of political correctness” and now
- Differences of perspective between academia, the opera industry, and different audiences
We invite proposals for 20-minute presentations, panel discussions and alternative format sessions such as lecture-recitals or poster presentations. We welcome contributions not only from academics but also from performers and opera industry or media professionals. Past OBERTO conferences have facilitated lively debates between academics, practitioners and members of the general public, and we would like to continue this tradition.
Please send abstracts of 250 words or queries to oberto@brookes.ac.uk by Friday 28 June 2019.
OBERTO Post Graduate Research Conference, 2019
Headington Hall, Oxford Brookes University
Friday 7th June 2019
The conference takes place in Headington Hill Hall, on the Headington Hill Campus. Directions can be found here: https://www.brookes.ac.uk/about-brookes/contacts-maps-and-campuses/headington-campus/
The conference is free and lunch and tea and coffee are provided. Please register if you plan to attend by emailing tde-oberto@brookes.ac.uk and include any dietary preferences.
Provisional Programme
10-11.30 Session 1: Masculinity
Sophie Horrocks (Durham University): “Mon père! J’ai peur!” Fatherhood and the construction of male identity in Halévy’s La Juive (1835)
Matthew Palfreyman (University of Leeds): Vengeful Passions: the performance of masculinity in Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci
Kerry Bunkhall (Oxford Brookes University): Opera, or the Undoing of Men? Representation of men in opera through the lens of feminist critique
11.30-12: Coffee
12-1: Keynote
Prof. Dr. Arnold Jacobshagen (Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Cologne / Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Christ’s College Cambridge): The obituary as a benchmark of canonization. (Trans-) national narratives on Rossini and his music
1-2: Lunch
2-3 Session 2:
| 2a: Wagner
Bradley Hoover (University of Oxford): François Delsarte’s influence on Wagnerian aesthetics Christopher Kimbel (Royal Holloway): The politics of ‘Bar’-form in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg |
2b: Millennial opera(s) Jane Forner (Columbia University): ‘Feminism is Humanism:’ religion and violence against women in Cecilie Ore’s Adam and Eve: A Divine Comedy (2015) Fueanglada Prawang (Bangor University): Thai Opera in performance: contexts and challenges |
3-3.30: Coffee
3.30-5 Session 3:
| 3a: Law and Order
Annabelle Page (University of Oxford): Patronage in absentia: Marcus Sitticus and the music of Monteverdi Giovanna Carugno (Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music): The ownership of operas in early 19th-century Italy: questions and (possible) answers for the musicologist Patrick Becker (Universität der Künste Berlin): Fair and court: excluding economy and vilifying Power in Bulgarian operas during state Socialism |
3b: Centres and Peripheries Emma Kavanagh (University of Oxford): Éduoard Lalo’s exotic Brittany: the case of Le Roi d’Ys Emese Lengyel (University of Debrecen): Folklore patterns, national identity and genre hybridisation in the case of 20th-century Hungarian comic operas Mahima Macchione (Oxford Brookes University): The ‘global’ reception of Puccini’s Il Trittico (1918) and the operatic culture of the post-war period |
5pm: Panel TBC
CFP: Postgraduate Research Conference, 2019
Oxford Brookes University
Friday 7th June 2019
OBERTO, the opera research unit at Oxford Brookes University, is delighted to announce its second dedicated postgraduate conference, aimed at providing students with a platform for presenting their research.
We invite proposals from both UK-based and international speakers with an interest in opera. 20-minute presentations on all facets of opera studies are welcome, including but not limited to the following areas:
- opera production, performance and reception
- opera and politics
- opera and gender
- opera and identity
- iconography and visual representation of opera
- singers
- musical analysis
- historiography
The day is designed to be supportive and inclusive, with opportunities for students to meet fellow researchers. Proposals from both Master’s and Doctoral students are encouraged.
There will also be a roundtable discussion concerning academia and public engagement, with advice for postgraduate students on building a public profile, and a summary of the research opportunities and events offered by OBERTO.
Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be sent by email to tde-oberto@brookes.ac.uk in Word document format. Please include your name, email address, institutional affiliation (if applicable), and details of any audio-visual requirements.
The deadline for receipt of proposals is 9am on Friday 26th April.
Opera in the Jazz Age
Professor Alexandra Wilson
Think opera is highbrow? Think again. In my new book, Opera in the Jazz Age: Cultural Politics in 1920s Britain (Oxford University Press), I investigate the place of opera in the 1920s ‘battle of the brows’, a heated debate about whether various forms of art should be 
categorised as highbrow, middlebrow, or lowbrow. It was a debate prompted, in essence, by the threat posed to traditional forms of culture and audience patterns by an explosion in popular culture and a shift in class structures after the First World War. In the course of my research, I discovered that opera’s place within discussions about the brows – which still have implications for how we think about the arts today – was far from straightforward.
I found that opera interacted in fluid ways with many forms of popular culture during the interwar period, including film and jazz. Opera singers were bona fide celebrities whom audiences camped out overnight to hear, their every move documented in the pages of the popular press. Opera was performed in many types of venue in the 1920s – music halls, cinemas, and restaurants as well as theatres – and popular with many different types of listener. Touring opera companies performed to socially mixed audiences in the industrial cities of the north and there was a particularly keen following for opera in the East End of London.
For all of these reasons and more, opera proved extremely difficult to pigeonhole. For some commentators of the time, it was too highbrow; for others, it was not highbrow enough. Opera proved in some ways uncategorisable, although interacted with the emerging middlebrow culture in intriguing ways.
There are many similarities between the operatic culture of the 1920s and that of today, but there are also important differences. Undercurrents of snobbery from above and suspicion from below swirled around opera in 1920s Britain, and yet it is equally important to recognise that there were also many sincere grassroots attempts to get more people listening to it and to educate people about it. There was, without doubt, more of a sense that opera was something that anyone could enjoy and could access, if they chose to take an interest. The term ‘elitism’ is one I never came across during my research into 1920s attitudes. Thus, my next project, funded by a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust, will investigate how attitudes towards opera have changed over the period from the end of the 1920s to the present, pinning down exactly when the ‘elitism’ tag began to be used. If we want to combat unhelpful stereotypes it is necessary, first, to understand their roots.
Opera in the Jazz Age can be found here: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/opera-in-the-jazz-age-9780190912666?cc=gb&lang=en&
You can listen to me talking about the book on BBC Radio 3’s Music Matters in an episode first broadcast on 12 January: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0001zph (from around 21 minutes in).
And a documentary I made for BBC Radio 3 about operatic culture in 1920s London can be accessed here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b099vsvw
Conference Report, OBERTO 2018: Opera and Violence
The 2018 OBERTO conference brought together an international field of speakers from the UK, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Canada and the United States and was attended
by a good crowd of academics, performers, directors and opera lovers. Fifteen papers explored the topic of “Opera and Violence” in its many facets, particularly debates surrounding “gratuitous violence” in modern stage productions, and works that are central to the repertoire yet replete with brutal and/or psychologically abusive plotlines.
The morning started with a session on Exoticism – Colonialism. Francesco Bracci (University of Bern) investigated resistance to colonial rule by supposedly “wild” or “irrational” peoples in grand operas from Spontini’s Fernand Cortez to Delibes’s Lakmé. Richard Langham Smith (Royal College of Music) debunked the myth that Georges Bizet had actually toned down the violence of Prosper Merimée’s novella, and demonstrated how Bizet and his librettists use acts of violence as focal points for each act. Trivia: the libretto features an astonishing array of different types of knives and firearms!
The second session focused on violence in contemporary stage works. George Haggett (Royal Holloway) tried “hearing the sounds of the 13th-century body in George Benjamin and Martin Crimp’s Written on Skin”; Nadine Scharfetter (University of Music and Performing Arts Graz) compared Olga Neuwirth’s American Lulu, which is set during the American civil rights movement, with Alban Berg’s original; and Annalise Smith (Memorial University) argued that Kamala Sankaram’s decision to stop the music during a rape scene in her opera Thumbprint was a more responsible approach to violence against women than smothering the upsetting event in beautiful music, as is – she said – customary in 19th-century operas. This started a lively discussion about the appropriate musical realisation of scenes of violence, with musicologist Suzanne Aspden pointing out that violence was invisible on the 18th-century stage, so even cautious depictions were quite radical in the 19th century, while composer Toby Young challenged Sankaram’s decision on aesthetic grounds. Conversations continued over the lunch break, which many delegates used to enjoy the grounds of Headington Hill Hall.
A parallel session took place in the nearby Music Room on abusive relationships between operatic characters. Emma Kavanagh (Linacre College, University of Oxford) explored the complex dynamics of love, jealousy and violence in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. She looked at the opera’s plot, libretto and music through the lens of Symbolist aesthetics, thus reaching interesting conclusions in terms of the invisible, yet established connections between violence, consent and the unseen/unheard. Robert Rawson (Canterbury Christ Church University) gave an engaging paper about the abusive traditional society/community as found in Janáček’s Jenůfa and Kat’a Kabanova. He thoroughly analysed the characters of both operas. as well as the influence of the local petty tyranny on their relationships and vicissitudes, with particular attention to the character’s violent or non-violent responses to the oppressive regime. Finally, Sid Wolters-Tiedge (University of Bayreuth) commented on the violent and slapstick components of Harrison Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy, connecting them to both the it’s roots in popular theatre and commenting on recent stagings in Berlin and Vienna. He thoroughly took apart the complex connections between irony/humour and violent acts, as well as their interplay with issues of representation in music and on stage.
After lunch the parallel sessions continued with the themes Dis/ability and violence in the Music Room, and Reception and (post-)Fascism in the Green Room of beautiful Headington Hill Hall. Christina Guillaumier (Royal College of Music) explored Prokofiev’s last opera, The Story of a Real Man, which glorifies the transformation of a wounded fighter pilot to Soviet superman. Charlotte Armstrong (University of York) admirably disentangled “Disability and degeneracy in Franz Schreker’s Die Gezeichneten” in a recent interpretation by opera director Calixto Bieito, where the already complex story of a hunchbacked anti-hero is further complicated by making the protagonist a paedophile, giving his moral degeneracy a contemporary edge.
The parallel session focused on issues of violence, propaganda and political re-education through opera in fascist and post-fascist contexts. First, Georg Burgstaller (RILM New York) talked about the performances of Peter Grimes within the Grazer Festwochen organized by the occupying British forces in Austria in 1947 and analysed the interplay between the work’s ‘Britishness’, its use within a regime of military occupation, and the Austrian reception. Nicolò Palazetti (University of Birmingham) explored the complex political, cultural and ideological agendas at play behind the performance of Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in 1938. After exploring the tight political links between Hungary and Italy and their consequences on cultural/musical patronage, Dr Palazzetti interpreted the opera’s plot, atmosphere and characters within the context of anti-Semitic propaganda, including the figures of Bartók and his librettist Balázs and their problematic relationship with the current regime.
The final session of the day brought together all delegates under the heading “Mozart and violence in contemporary stagings” and was one of the highlights of the conference. Since it is unlikely that war-horses of the repertoire will disappear from the world’s stages any time soon, even if their content might seem sensitive today, academics and practitioners alike grapple with how to represent storylines that are underpinned by arguably misogynist or racist world views. First Margaret Cormier (McGill University) compared two very different stagings of Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail. The first, again by Calixto Bieito (Berlin 2004), escalated the violence against women implicit in the original plot by setting the opera in a contemporary brothel. Wajdi Mouawad (Lyon 2016) took a diametrically opposed approach: in an attempt to subdue the orientalist stereotypes, he neutralised the violence against Constanze and Blonde by interpreting the opera as a flashback on the part of the women, who realise that their newly gained “freedom” is not so different from their previous captivity.
Laura Attridge
Two opera directors gave a direct insight into their work by explaining how they deal with the violent aspects of Don Giovanni – not just the physical violence against Donna Anna and the Commendatore but also the psychological abuse of Donna Elvira or Don Giovanni’s treatment of socially inferior characters like his servant Leporello and the peasant girl Zerlina. Alessandro Talevi’s 2012 production for Opera North embraced the challenge of the comedic elements by using puppetry reminiscent of a Punch and Judy show for some scenes. Laura Attridge, in contrast, faced the discomfort caused by Don Giovanni head on in her 2018 production for Waterperry Opera by interpreting the main protagonist as a contemporary upper-class bully who deservedly meets his downfall. The script of part of her talk can be seen on the Schmopera site.
Alessandro Talevi
Maria Thomas’s (University of Hertfordshire) personal reflection on the 2015 Royal Opera House production of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell, where director Michieletto replaced the ballet with a now notorious rape scene, led into a lively general discussion that developed many of the themes that had been sounded throughout the day. While the preceding sessions had focussed on composers, librettists and directors, now the expectations and reactions of opera audiences took centre stage. Are modern audiences so naïve that they just enjoy their favourite operas without giving a thought to the potentially problematic aspects of their plots? Do they need to be shaken out of their comfort zone by edgy, violent stagings, or is there such a thing as gore fatigue? Are opera houses patronising punters with trigger warnings, or is that a legitimate strategy to spare distress? The discussion was ably chaired by Mark Berry (Royal Holloway), and while it became very lively and intense, the participants felt comfortable to voice thought-provoking or controversial ideas and listened attentively to each other’s arguments, which demonstrated once more how our OBERTO conferences have become a forum for genuine debate amongst practitioners, opera lovers and academics. Several delegates also tweeted during the day using the hashtag #OBERTO2018, which gives a good idea of the day as it unfolded.
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