The Met gets tangled up in Turandot warnings

The NY Post reports that New York’s Metropolitan Opera has added a warning to Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot, informing audiences that the 1926 opera ‘is rife with contradictions, distortions, and racial stereotypes … It shouldn’t be surprising . . . that many audience members of Chinese descent find it difficult to watch as their own heritage is co-opted, fetishized, or painted as savage, bloodthirsty, or backward.’

The Post quotes Norman Lebrecht, dismissing the trigger warning as ‘manufactured racial exasperation’ that will only serve to kill the box-office.

Read more here.

Here’s is the full trigger paragraph, by Christopher Bronwer, the Met’s associate editor:
We must also consider the criticisms that Turandot—and Puccini’s appropriation, reconfiguration, and reharmonization of Chinese music—has received in recent years. As Ping-hui Liao, a professor of literary and critical studies at the University of California, San Diego, argues, despite the composer’s attempts at authenticity, “when the material is drawn from another culture, as in the case of Madama Butterfly or Turandot, it is integrated and ordered so that it becomes intelligible, controlled, and agreeable … the melodies are so well integrated that they lose their own autonomy and become part of a larger whole. In distinguishing between East and West, [Puccini] makes the former subservient to the latter.” Or, as Carner wryly suggests, while the Chinese characters don “national musical costume throughout … this costume may bear the trademark ‘Made in Italy.’” It shouldn’t be surprising then that many audience members of Chinese descent find it difficult to watch as their own heritage is co-opted, fetishized, or painted as savage, bloodthirsty, or backward.

And here’s my full comment to the Post:
There is a growing consensus among theatre people that trigger warnings are killing ticket sales. If I was warned that something was about to insult my heritage, intelligence or political sympathies, I would think three times at the very least before presenting my credit card.

Trigger warnings exist to cover the heightened legal anxieties of theatre administrators and the lately-inflated sensitivities of underpaid auxiliaries. They are bad for business and they should be scrapped.

As to Zeffirelli’s Turandot, I was monumentally insulted by its million-dollar extravagance, by its eye-watering lighting dazzle, by the preposterous storyline and by the harmonic inadequacy of its pseudo-pentatonic score. I was so affronted by all of these that I really didn’t have the brain space to be bothered by any manufactured racial exasperation. I went home whistling the decor.

Go see it.