What is ‘ethnically-led’ Wagner?
OperaYou are about to find out.
From the press release:
…Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman (Der fliegende Holländer) comes to The Bradshaw Hall at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire this July.
In what is believed to be the UK’s first ethnically-led Wagner production, The Flying Dutchman is presented by Persona Arts, with music direction from international baritone Byron Jackson and stage direction by Iqbal Khan …
A professional cast with heritage from across the Commonwealth is joined by a skilled community chorus, drawn from the West Midlands region, including the Birmingham Choral Union, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and St Mary’s Church, Handsworth. Music comes from the Central England Camerata, under the baton of Jack Ridley.
Main character parts are performed by Anando Mukerjee, Mari Wyn Williams, Laura Woods, Christian Joel and Gerrit Paul Groen, with Byron Jackson taking the role of The Dutchman….
The production is part of Byron Jackson’s mission to break down racial barriers that still exist within the opera and classical music sectors. The community chorus and orchestra are drawn from across Birmingham and the Black Country, and into rural areas of Shropshire and Worcestershire….
If this is OK, then it’s time for an all-white cast for Porgy n Bess to break down the racial barriers in opera. Aren’t people tired of “brown/blacks good, whiteys bad” ethos rampant in the self-loathing West?
Why not a Rheingold set in West Afrika in an inclusive context of syncretism with Voodoo culture and its universal values?
Has already been done in Bayreuth with Parsifal 20 years ago.
I think a recent production of Porgy and Bess in Budapest was “all whitey”.
Tired of it? Some of us have never given it any house room. It’s self-serving, vacuous, mendacious mealy-mouthed bull$h1t.
Indeed Tony. My decades of working in opera (last century) with every imaginable ethnic group, not to mention the LGBTXYZs, never produced any such contemporary “problems”.
The composer himself was a kind of doubtful lettertype man, dealing with a lettertype king and with quite some letter-subtexts in his plots. So, a diverse staging of his works cannot do much to undermine the works’ meaning.
In Europe, the first Porgy & Bess was all white.
Brilliant response. I look forward to an ethnically-led Meistersinger, Hans Sachs singing about “ein falscher, walsche Majestat”.
Before the woke-ism pandemic, there was an excellent Dutchman with a black guy named Simon Estes and nobody mentioned his race.
Exactly.
Because opera is ‘make-believe’ anyway and highly symbolic, not literal. Now, it’s all racist.
I think you are confusing that with many of the commentators on SD
In a recent interview in “Opera” (UK monthly), soprano Julia Bullock referred to the “damage” caused by opera. “Damage” that needs to be repaired if the medium is to move forward.
What damage? Please specify. Otherwise I dismiss the comment you attribute to her as rubbish.
I saw Simon Estes sing the Dutchman at Bayreuth in 1981 and the following year when he appeared as Amfortas in the centennial production of “Parsifal.”
What made it enjoyable back then, aside from his capable singing and unique stage presence, was the complete lack of woke posturing and self-congratulatory virtue-signaling.
It is a most stifling atmosphere that these self-appointed do-gooders have created.
Because he was a stupendously good singer and great actor.
A magnificent voice and stage presence. Sadly I only saw him once as an excellent Sarastro in Scotland.
Simon Estes was a magnificent Wotan in Tulsa Opera’s “Walküre” back in the early 1980s, Klobucar, who conducted, said he’d never heard the role better sung. Rumor had it that Solti wanted him to sing it at Bayreuth but that was a step too far for the administration…
I recall reading, at the time, that it was Sir Peter Hall who nixed Estes for the Solti/Hall Ring.
According to Stephen Fay’s book “The Ring: Anatomy of an Opera”, both Hall and Solti preferred Nimsgern’s voice to Estes’s. Fay adds, without giving any evidence, that Hall “did not object in principle to a black Wotan, as long as there were black singers among his daughters, but he felt Estes’s audition had relieved him of the need to make such a choice.”
Joel Lazar wrote, “Rumor had it that Solti wanted [Estes] to sing [Wotan] at Bayreuth but that was a step too far for the administration…”
That’s interesting. Years before Solti’s Ring, the Wieland-Wolfgang regime chose Grace Bumbry to sing Venus in Tannhäuser. So if the rumour is true, maybe Wieland was more open-minded than Wolfgang, or maybe a Black “world leader” was unacceptable but a Black femme fatale was not?
Maybe the lead singer is Dutch?
The viola section that counts together, plays together.
With a grant from Arts Council England but none for WNO to tour, that’s all your getting Birmingham.
There’s literally a full-scale staging of Tippett’s New Year – the first this century – in July.
Excellent news for what must be a rarity?
His “The Midsummer Marriage” was one of the first operas I went to and Tippett was there in a marvellous production in Cardiff, still recall it.
No Jews allowed.
Who is better suuted than Wagner to demonstrate racism?
A great many rappers, just for starters.
The Flying Ethnically-Mixed Non-Binary Person.
Oh, surely, Gender Fluid.
Never mind the quality, feel the ethnically led.
Oh why the snide comment? Just be delighted it is happening and spreading joy and music. Seriously why is everything on Slipped Disc seen as an attack?
Well said, Donna Conspiracy. NL knows exactly how to trigger his predominantly white, male, heterosexual, not young, middle-class readership into paroxysms of self-righteous, privileged outrage. I guess we can’t complain if we don’t want to pay to read this blog.
I have tried many times to explain to such people that racism is not symmetrical. That’s why they are wrong to claim that organisations like Persona Arts and Chineke are “racist”. They are simply trying to challenge discriminatory practices in the classical music industry which prevent talented Black performers from getting work. In an ideal world they wouldn’t be needed, but we haven’t reached that point yet.
The only singer in this production that I have come across before is the Senta. She is wonderful and I’m off to book my tickets now. I’d urge others to do the same.
“Racism is not symmetrical” = If you are shot for being black it is racism, but if you are shot for being Jewish, it is not?
Then why don’t they just say that’s what they’re doing? You might want to drop too all of that bigoted labeling you just did.
Such an arrogant condescendingly racist comment.
Are you seriously suggesting that today a black trumpet player is less likely to pass an orchestral audition than a white one because of the color of his skin?
Yes. All auditions should be blind.
Quite the opposite, I would have thought.
Nailed it. Thanks
From the press release: “The community chorus and orchestra are drawn from . . . the Black Country”. You couldn’t make it up.
The Black Country – Wikipedia has a description: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Country. There is a “Black Country” Museum also.
FYI, “Black Country” refers to a part of the English Midlands where coal seams come to the surface. It has zero to do with race and everything to do with geology, geography, and the Industrial Revolution. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Country
Gosh. Really?
How can the person singing the Dutchman also be the musical director? Is the orchestra not going to be conducted?
The website states “. . . featuring some of the UK’s finest opera soloists and the Central England Camerata under the baton of Jack Ridley.” He does not seem to be part of the cast per se.
Sounds fine to me. The 1939 Hot Mikado with an all black cast was a huge success on Broadway. My only caveat: please do not change Wagner’s music or the words.
I once witnessed a German quartet play a west side story medley.
It sounded. German.
‘Ethnically-led’ should surely be a Dutchman playing the lead?
As a POC I’ve never really cared for PC productions, and am quite annoyed when agencies/companies invoke wokeness or DEI quotas when so many of us just want quality performances regardless of performers’ race. I get that there’s a glass ceiling that many have hit up against; but I’d also hope that companies would in this day and age, acknowledge the BEST person for the job, even if that means they don’t look like them. We’ve seen Jessye Norman, Pretty Yende, and many others excel without the rhetoric or quota mandates.
I’m also hopeful that headlines and language used in reporting across all media, will someday be less rage-baiting than we’re seeing today. Wishful thinking?
Are any Jews involved?