Audience is warned about Bernstein’s Candide
NewsAhead of tonight’s performance, ticket holders at Welsh National Opera received the following email:
“Please be aware that throughout this operetta there is anachronistic and explicit language used as well as themes that some people may find distressing. These include;
occasional strong language
reference to rape
depiction of war and violence including murder
misogynist language
references to religious prejudices and blasphemy
a scene that shows nooses culminating in two hangings
references to slavery
depiction of an earthquake / volcano erupting”
We might as well pack up the whole of opera and stay home.
UPDATE: Other operas require warnings.
Oh for goodness sake what’s wrong with these people? Everyone is running scared. The world has gone mad.
Well, yes, stay at home! Everything now wlth a health warning.
There’s worse to come I fear. Soon, the woke brigade will ensure you stay home because they will stage a sit-in to prevent you from attending in the first place. What they find offensive is, by their lights, offensive by definition and must therefore be cancelled.
LOLOLOLOL
„For in the end, [Huxley] was trying to tell us what afflicted the people in ‘Brave New World’ was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.”
the quote is from Neil Postman
Yes, and they’d taken their Soma for so long that they had that beatific mien of the comfortable and complacent follower. The herd mentality in the western democratic (!) world is truly terrifying. And stupefyingly unimaginative.
Remind me to stay clear if Wales. Norman, you should repeat this post on April 1.
I can only imagine their warnings about Peter Pan.
Santo cielo, ma che serie di stupide raccomandazioni!
Vergognatevi, idioti!
Non siamo mica bambini dell’asilo!
For non Italian speaking two words will suffice:
Idiots. Stupids.
Se puede decir más alto pero no más claro.
I saw “Candide” in Los Angeles a few years ago with a “woke” audience. It was so popular they added an extra performance. These warnings are ridiculous.
Sounds pretty much like this morning’s news bulletin.
When are we going to start seeing trigger warnings for works by Xenakis?
“You may hear sounds that are unpleasant.”
Frankly my dear, should we give a damn? Every era has its expressions of madness, and “the world has gone mad” for millennia. Isn’t our Pavlovian anger part of the same madness? Just have a good laugh. That’s exactly what Candide is about, after all: having a good laugh when contemplating the madness, and then going back home to make your garden grow.
Any questions?
I for one am glad that they’re posting content warnings. No one wants to be caught off-guard with offensive or dated language. Bravo!
well, if your brain is off-guard toward reality, there is only you to blame there.
(the mental decadence and retardation of the current adult western generations is saddening)
Or volcanoes…….
Everybody know that volcanos are offensive due to their obviously discriminatory and defamatory activity. There will be soon a call to ban volcanos (and also earthquakes, to be on the safe side) from our part of universe.
Waiting for the closure of astronomical observatories to avoid solar eclipsis that can bring offense…
Absolutely! Any natural disaster is quite offensive, and I expect to be warned about it, so that I can either stay at home, or try not to be upset about it
Wow, you’d have to be pretty culturally illiterate to be that oblivious to the type of depictions in Candide. What next? Warning an Oedipus Rex audience that they may encounter incest…..?
Not to mention Le Sacre. How on earth did I manage all these years without a warning against the barbarism of a young maiden forced to dance herself to death? I’m just glad I came to no harm (but who can be sure?).
Well, thank God there’s no smoking involved!
They could just say: “If you are offended by the 18th Century then instead of attending Candide, please consider our productions of Hamlet or Sweeney Todd.”
Quite understandable. Many people consider earthquakes and erupting volcanoes rather “distressing.”
We all know that earthquakes and volcanoes can cause catastrophe, we just don’t need bloody telling as we are adults.
Sounds like they received some complaints from “concerned citizens”.
The infantilization is complete. Thanks ‘nanny’!!
Even Werther at Grange Park Opera this summer came with a similar health warning. There’s a suicide (which isn’t even dramatically staged, or staged at all come to that, in this production – he just lies on the floor and we have to make the assumption), but that’s it. Nothing remotely worth warning about in a drama.
Why don’t they just email the entire libretto six months before hand so the future audience can amend it by an elected committee?
Ah, was a single line of text changed? I was under the impression we were all whining over an *email*.
Now, if Bernstein included the customer service emails as part of his libretto, I will stand corrected.
yes, in fact, because of the stupid idea to have a female Pangloss, ‘my master told me’ became ‘my teacher’
Voltaire would be so pleased. These would-be censors have walked straight into his trap.
The Bible contains all that and more. I haven’t seen any health warnings on that so far. The TV news has those things regularly and bad language is found on TV virtually every day of the week.
Could it just be that this is all an effort to get people to see it? It rather reminds me that when they first put health warnings on cigarette packets, smokers insisted on buying the packets with health warnings as the contents were fresher than those without.
I saw a magnificent production of Candide in London about 15 years ago. I think it’s magnificent – greater even (by a whisker) than West Side Story.
I suspect that this is all a micturational-take by some comedian at WNO – or maybe a dry-run for advertising a forthcoming production of Lulu or Macbeth’s marital partner – either the real one depicted by Verdi or the one from Mtsensk – or maybe a new opera about a day in the life of a Metropolitan Police officer.
Sorry to disappoint you, Herbie, but the Bible has been banned from schools in Utah, according to this recent news item in the Church Times: https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2023/9-june/news/world/bible-banned-from-schools-in-utah
Where will it all end?
That was reversed in about a week.
How idiotic can you get! It’s Candide! Why the need to hire a producer whose work necessitates such warnings? Reminds me of the Edinburgh Festival Cosi set in colonial Africa which started with a rape during its most sublime overture. At least Edinburgh offered patrons money back along with the advance warnings.
On the contrary, those warnings sound like a selling point. It wasn’t so long ago – 15 years, maybe 20 – that I attended an opera production featuring a prominent warning at the theater entrance about the depravities about to be displayed onstage, and it was a scream (i.e., “hilarious joke” in case the idiom means something different outside of America). I thought we ought to do that more often.
If the product warning just becomes another front in a social culture war, if we can’t take the joke and let it drip off us, it sort of begs the question, just exactly who’s being the “snowflake” here?
“We might as well pack up the whole of opera and stay home.”
Capital idea!
The ”audiences” that require this warning bring to mind this humorous epitaph by Robert Burns:
“Light lay the earth on Billy’s breast,
His chicken heart so tender;
But build a castle on his head,
His scull will prop it under.”
In reply to a blog entry which claimed all sorts of profound insights in Wagneriam opera, i once wrote that the operas were philosophically no deeper than The Mikado. I pointed out that Walkure featured forced marriage, rape, incest, murder, theft (of swords), and stupifying of an unconsenting female. I asked if this was a measure of profundity. A reply stated that it sounded more like a normal Saturday night in his hometown.
Oh, did I miss the part where they cancelled the opera? Ah no, wait, it got performed. So, we’re wailing over an email?
Content warnings are seen as ‘cancel culture’ when they’re exactly the opposite – a tool to *enable* performing works and making them accessible to as many as possible.
We’re really making a fuss over a message in an email, sandwiched between ‘parking in lot 5’ and ‘unwrap your cough sweets quietly’?
This story has garnered some of the best comments I’ve ever seen on SD ! Well done all 🙂
And, in case we once again need to repeat the obvious, if you don’t care for content warnings, feel free to ignore them. Not all emails are for everyone, and not everything is about you.
Like, you don’t see me writing to the newspapers when a theatre dares to email me ‘arrive early, parking limited’ even though I take public transport.
> ‘if you don’t care for content warnings, feel free to ignore them’
Who are they for?
Why the assumption that audience members are delicate to the point of mental illness?
> ‘not everything is about you’
I could say the same. You may be overly delicate but that doesn’t mean that any allowances should be made for you.
If you’re speaking on some unknown, possibly non-existent person’s behalf (which is the woke way), then I’d suggest that you’re (1) wasting your time, and (2) possibly doing a disservice to someone who might really need some allowances made.
Emil, did you mention ‘a tool’?
But to me the point is: is the warming really necessary? Do they really think that people buying the ticket really don’t know the story? Do they think opera goers are 5 year old children, or hat they may be offended by a story depicting sex/murder/slavery/you-name-it? Would you really need a warning about murders when watching let’s say the Godfather?
I find the warming offending the intelligence of the people they think they are ‘protecting’.
Do they think people don’t know the story? Yes, I believe that lots of people buy opera/operetta tickets without knowing the story.
Would you need a warning watching The Godfather? Movies literally have ratings, age restrictions, and descriptions of potentially hurtful content (R-13, sexual themes, graphic violence, obscene language, etc.)
You seem to imply this is “protecting” people by preventing them from accessing the work. That’s not the case. No one’s blocking anything, no one’s forcing anyone to read anything. If you want the information (for instance, you want to bring children to the opera), you have it. If you don’t want it, you don’t need to read it. I don’t care about movie ratings, they don’t apply to me. But I am aware that other people in other situations watch movies too.
> Movies literally have ratings
We have ratings to protect the young. That’s all that’s needed.
An adult (someone who is full-grown, mature) is by definition someone who doesn’t need to be protected.
Good to see you are covering the important issues. Tomorrow, tune in for Norman’s piece on the film rating system, which is probably also woke somehow or other.
I just looked it up, and Oppenheimer has eight elements of “content advice”.
The darn woke film industry! I don’t need nobody to tell me whether I can bring my children to a movie about nuclear explosions. And why are they warning me about sex, violence, suicide, and flashing lights? That’s my business!
Truly, the film industry and regulators have coddled us for too long.
/s
To me that’s different: I may not know the story of a new movie (or at least not the details of the contents). For instance in the case of Oppenheimer as you mention, I would find ridiculous a warming about war scenes but I may understand a warming about sex (if present), because I may not expect it. And I may even imagine someone getting offended by an explicit, unnecessary sex scene in a war movie (I am grossly generalizing here but forgive me).
Equally, I can understand warmings/rates on movies shown on TV as they are broadcasted to a general, vast audience that include all sort of people.
But as I said above, opera goers know (or they should at least) exactly the content of the story they go to see, so why the warming?
Toe this has nothing to do with ‘woke’ culture (a term I personally don’t like), but simply common sense.
Or should we expect now warmings on books as well?
STOP saying WARMING
Sorry, I realized the mistake too late. I guess you understood what I ment anyway.
Not everything is about you, though, is it? Plenty of first time opera-goers and this is likely for their information, especially if they want to bring a child along, for example.
But that has nothing to do with me. I hardly go to opera. There are actually only a very few I really like. But I would never go to one without knowing the story in advance. Or do you really think that you can understand the story of let’s say Sigfrid on the spot, while sung in German?
Why should an opera-goer know the content of the story in advance? is there a test before they are allowed to buy a ticket? But it is different for movie-goers. Talk about elitism!
That’s just my personal opinion, obviously. If I ever go to Bayreuth to see a complete Ring cycle, the last thing I would like to do is to focus on the surtitles to understand what’s going on, but, instead enjoy the wonderful music, the singing and the acting.
It’s like a symphony. You can enjoy it the first time you listen to it, but if you know it already, you can appreciate many more aspects of it.
Are they going to put on The Rape of Lucretia, or Shostakovich Lady Macbeth?
They’re going to cancel them just like they cancelled Candide, that is, by commissioning a new production and playing it eight times in six cities. Such a cancellation indeed.
Recently in Chicago:
The Aaron Copeland song title and lyric “I Bought Me A Cat” was changed to “I Got Me A Cat”, because “I Bought Me A Wife” was deemed problematic.
Superintendent Budd’s line “a criminal case of rape” from Albert Herring was changed to “a criminal case of fraud”.
A production of Carmen had the word “gypsy” removed from all promotional material, supertitles and printed libretti.
This is totally ridiculous and unnecessary. I saw it at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was spectacular.
The same commenters that are offended by this email are also offended by Yuja Wang’s concert attire. Contradictory methinks…
As Emil said, the show went on. Only a heads up about content.
You couldn’t make it up. The patronising superiority of these ‘warnings’ which really tell stupid Joe and Jill Public what they should disapprove of or otherwise, are part of the current extreme puritanism we are suffering in the West. Not dissimilar from Socialist Realism, is it…. !!!
I actually wish more opera companies would publish information like this but much further in advance.
Specifically, I would like to be able to take my early and pre teens to the opera more often but it often deals with more adult themes and the production itself rather than the libretto is often more important in determining how suitable a particular opera might be.
All too often I err on the side of caution and we just don’t go – so why not have “family-viewing notes” and bring the next generation along!
Oh, God. Please don’t read Voltaire! Oh the shock and horror of hundreds of years ago.
It makes me chuckle that everyone here is getting so “triggered” by the trigger warning. It’s not like the show was cancelled, and if the warning was useful for even one person (who might’ve gone through things beyond what you might imagine), what’s the harm in having it?
Only one thing left to do” cultiver notre jardin” in proper sense and stay home far from these people
Absolutely pathetic. What happened to educating yourself about what you are going to see? The book is still in print. There are recordings and an excellent DVD with Bernstein conducting the LSO and soloists of this fantastically entertaining work. People need to get a grip.
… and following on from that point, Corno di Caccia, what on earth is the good of warning these people about the performance AFTER they have bought the tickets? Seems like your ordering a pizza for delivery, paying for it online, having it delivered to you and then seeing a notice on the box saying ‘this contains strychnine, belladonna, antifreeze and scrapings from the chef’s armpits.
This tale reminds me of the night in 1980 I ran into Sir Roy Shaw, Chair of the British Council, in the Crush Bar at Covent Garden. I was managing the Vancouver Opera at the time and was on a tour of European opera houses. He asked me if I’d been to Cardiff. I hadn’t. “You must go!”, he proclaimed. “It’s our best company!” I went, and he was right. The Onegin I saw in Wales was top notch!
I wonder what Sir Roy would say now.
Voltaire would be chortling at all this.
And would send whoever is responsible home avec grands coups de pied dans la derriere
Yes, by all means, let’s belittle those who find it beneficial to know ahead of time what potentially shocking/surprising things they may experience at the theatre. If the warning doesn’t apply to you, why do you care whether a warning is issued? Why do you feel the need to mock?
The next thing should be a warning of the warning: “the Opera does not think that you are mature adults, therefore our announcement contains some disturbing warnings about the opera content. If you are offended by being treated like a kindergarten child, then just get used to it and rethink your own attitude – because you may be not a true snowflake, as we ourselves are.”
God help Ligeti’s Grand Macabre. But even The Sound of Music would come with a health warning. Nuns are religiously exclusive, sheep emit too much world threatening gas, and of course Do-Re-Me is an insulting mockery of the intellectually challenged.
This neatly demonstrates how far down the ‘liberal left’ has come since Leonard Bernstein would have proudly described himself as a left-leaning liberal. Not to mention the Stalinist Lilian Hellman – they’d have been disgusted at this infantilised nonsense.
But WNO fail to say the show is AMPLIFIED – badly!
What happened to singers learning to project?
yes! and they even amplified the overture!!!! but Ed Lyon projected so well it drowned the buzzy amplified speaker
All I can say is ‘I saw WNO’s Candide in Birmingham this week and it was absolutely brilliant’. The applause at the curtain call was ecstatic, though there was one couple sitting in front of me that sat on their hands. Maybe they should have read the warning….but, at least, they did stay to the end.
I had a ticket and was not sent the message. Ed Lyon was sublime, the projection-style production was delightful and the orchestra had to be on stage as the Birmingham theatre appears to have no pit. But why a female Pangloss??? Just pointless.
What a load of c..p and b……s,
I went to an opera once and it had Men and Women in it. How outdated is that? Maybe they’d put a disclaimer up about that sort of thing now?!!