For those of you who don’t follow this sort of thing, there has been a bit of controversy in the opera world recently regarding smoking. West Australian Opera, who is sponsored in large part by Healthway (the independently run but still government sponsored anti-smoking association), was possibly thinking about performing Bizet’s classic and beloved opera Carmen, when somehow word got round to those sponsors that Carmen takes place, at least partially, in a cigarette factory. Oh, and there is smoking involved. It is written right into the show. Apparently Bizet did not care about the feelings of Healthway when he composed this masterpiece. So the show was cancelled.
No, wait! It was not cancelled! It wasn’t even on their season in the first place! And besides, it is now being reported that, after cries of censorship and other such outrages, the government is going to allow them to do Carmen after all. Score one for the good guys, right?! Or wait, score one for smokers? Score one for the arts? Who are the good guys actually? Should we be glorifying smoking onstage? Should we just chillax and not worry about things written hundreds of years ago? What is the answer?!
This is a problem that is not just about smoking, of course. The fact of the matter is, society had very different standards for a lot of things back in the day. So when we are confronted with something that used to be okay, like, say, smoking or slavery, we have three options. The first option is to ban it outright. Song of the South, I’m sorry. Your “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah” is very catchy, but we cannot allow anyone to watch you anymore. You are too racist. I don’t care how beloved you once were. You’re out!
Option two is that we just let it slide on account of artistic merit, and we can always use it as a conversation starter with the kids. “Yes son, back when they made Dumbo people were super racist, and this explains those crows. Don’t be racist kids.” Or even, “Yeah, when Carmen was written people didn’t know that smoking was inconsiderate, rude, dangerous, and lethal. No, I don’t know how they thought inhaling ash and soot into their lungs was a good idea. I think they just liked getting high off of things they found in the woods. Don’t do drugs kids.” This second option seems to be the most popular option in general, probably because it is less work for the media (and more work for the parents, but we are already doing that work anyway).
But if you don’t want to ban something, and you can’t abide letting your children see it because of a few deal-breaking bugaboos in it, then you have option three, which is to go back and change it. This is what smacks of censorship to some people. And yet it happens all the time! Most of the hymns we sing in church these days have been modified to conform to “inclusive language.” You see, the world used to be a far more male-oriented place (and it is still a male-oriented place today, so think how bad it must have been back then!), so many of the old songs refer exclusively to men. Nowadays we think this is bad, so we go back to the words that an author or lyricist wrote, and we edit them a bit. Do we care what the original writers might think about this? No we do not. Those guys are all dead, and we are here singing the songs, so we want to do them the way we want to do them, so eat it, 18th Century hymn composers!
I wrote a little bit about this disturbing trend once before, when I noticed that the politically correct police had changed a lot of the words to many of the children’s songs I had grown up with. But I get that when you want people to participate in something you need to keep it current, fresh, and socially appropriate. Opera is not, however, a participatory event. It is a performance. It is like a live-action musical painting, hanging on the stage for people to enjoy. You might just as well photoshop the Mona Lisa to give her a thigh gap as take the smoking out of Carmen. Because do you know what opera people care about? They care about what the composers would think. They write books about it. They argue about it. They will passionately debate, for hours on end, whether that dynamic marking was put there by the composer, an assistant of the composer, or a later editor. And the answer matters. We cannot suddenly set Carmen at a bubble gum factory. This would make everyone explode.
Or would it? Why can’t we change things for modern times? Is that opera’s problem? Is it stuck in the past? Does it take itself too seriously? Or is that what actually makes it great? Maybe the very fact that it has such high standards is what makes opera so grand, and so… so opera! If we start compromising on one little thing, then before you know it we’ll be just like everyone else! We must keep the smoking in the opera! Except for that it’s bad. It’s bad, but the opera treats it as though it is good. Ah, there’s the rub. There are plenty of horrible things in opera, but we know that they are horrible. Opera doesn’t glorify killing, or tragedy. It examines them, and lets us see the horror through the lives of others. But the smoking thing, I can see why you might not want to take your children to see a show full of happy cigarette workers, no matter how great the music is. I guess I kind of understand both sides of it.
What do you think? Should art from the past be changed to fit the morals of the present? Or should we appreciate it as a relic from another time? And, more importantly, why isn’t anyone mad about the opera featuring the far worse practice of bull fighting? Shouldn’t PETA be up in arms? I don’t want my kids learning that it is okay to stab bulls.