DEGRADING THE VALUE PROPOSITION.

The Custodians of High Culture are ripe for the madhouse.

In February, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City hosted a production of Fidelio, an Enlightenment paeon to freedom and to marital love. In Beethoven’s version of the opera, a wife disguises herself as a male prison guard to free her husband from a Spanish fortress; at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fidelio became a Black Lives Matter critique of mass incarceration. A BLM activist is writing a doctoral dissertation on the Thirteenth Amendment and investigating corrupt “fascists” in the criminal-justice system. In retaliation, racist cops shoot him, and a racist warden of a supermax prison throws him into solitary confinement. The activist’s wife, unable to persuade any lawyers to take up her husband’s case pro bono, goes undercover as a female correctional officer in her husband’s prison. This change from a male to a female disguise allows for a pleasingly homoerotic revision to the plot. In the original opera, a prison guard’s daughter falls in love with the new “male” employee, echoing Lady Olivia’s fruitless infatuation for the disguised Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. In the Met Museum’s Fidelio, produced by Heartbeat Opera, the prison guard’s daughter is a lesbian; her black father encourages his daughter to court the new black female assistant. Of all the production’s revisions, this paternal matchmaking is the most counterfactual, given black working-class attitudes toward homosexuality.

In a New York City where the arty set will go for Julius Caesar wearing an orange comb-over and an ill-fitting business suit, that might be par for the course.  Messing with the staging of operas (the Ring des Nibelungen most notoriously) is standard, and the groundlings must be catered to, purists be damned.  "That prompts Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen to ask, 'What or how much are we willing to sacrifice to continue to promote some of mankind’s greatest creative achievements, namely classical music?'"

It's not enough, though, to change the sexuality of the love interest or the setting of the political crime.  People bought tickets (probably at New York prices) with the expectation of seeing and hearing Beethoven.  That's not what they saw or heard.

In the current political and artistic environment, Fidelio was a Black Lives Matter manifesto waiting to happen. What made the Met Museum’s production noteworthy was that the revision did not occur exclusively through the staging; Heartbeat Opera rewrote the spoken dialogue as well. (That dialogue was delivered in English, while the arias and ensembles remained in their original German.) The activist’s wife complains that the “real conspiracy” was not the one for which her husband was detained but rather the “suppression of immigrants and people of color” in the U.S. The supermax prison contains people “whose only mistake was being poor and black.” The imprisoned activist rails against his black jailer: “You are complicit in a corrupt system that oppresses our people. I see in you a field Negro.” The white prison warden reveals the depths of his racism by announcing that if the activist really “wanted to help his community he would tell them to stop burning down their neighborhoods and to pull up their bootstraps.” Such an invocation of personal responsibility is—in the revisionist’s mind—a surefire sign of white supremacy. None of these lines is related to the original libretto.

There's a concert coming up at the university this weekend that draws a lot of the faculty. I wonder if there will be an opportunity to pose, say, to a drama or composition professor, a hypothetical in which a student substitutes woke maxims into the libretto of Fidelio, the question of whether such work would qualify as inspired parody or failed for its obvious plagiarism.

The article includes other recent maladaptations of late Classical or early Romantic works to suit contemporary sensibilities.  Go there, these are not for the faint of heart or the respecter of excellence.  It is not those who are familiar with the originals who suffer, though.

Such revisions imply that we should not try to stretch beyond the boundaries of our petty, circumscribed lives into a radically different aesthetic milieu. Many current revisions are animated by the hermeneutics of suspicion, seeing in past works of art only oppression and illegitimate privilege. Such deconstructive readings provide an excuse for ignorance and a pretext for prejudice. Even without that deconstructive agenda, however, rewriters and revisionists destroy the precious link between present and past that is the primary means of transmitting civilization and of keeping our minds open to beauty.

Put another way, when you have deconstructed all cultures in the name of multiculturalism, all are nyekulturny.