If you were following the news in the opera world over the past week, chances are you came across the story of Georgian soprano Tamar Iveri, who was happily preparing for a show with Opera Australia when suddenly somebody noticed that she had posted a letter online last year that referred to non-heterosexual persons as, among other things, fecal matter. For some reason this seemed to upset everybody, although she didn’t seem to quite understand why, and when people started calling for her head on a silver platter, she clarified that her husband wrote the letter, broke into her Facebook account, and posted it under her name, and she had little or nothing to do with it.
As you can imagine, this reasonable explanation calmed everyone right down and they stopped posting death threats on her profile picture. Ha ha! Just kidding! Obviously what they did was dig up an interview wherein she stated “(My Husband)’s opinion coincides with mine. He is a religious man and a truth teller.” And those opinions that they share include the fact that they have tons of gay friends, and have no problem with gay people, other than that they are vile, repulsive, disgusting, and should stay out of Georgia. So there’s that. Cue the apologies and damage control, but it was too late. Opera Australia’s biggest corporate sponsor was rumored to have threatened to pull out, and the masses were furious. She has now been sacked, and will no longer be performing in her contracted role for Opera Australia. Not only that, but Brussels has fired her in advance as well, so her upcoming work slate is quickly becoming non-existent. And the whole thing makes no sense, and therefore ought to have an opera written about it.
I mean, a homophobic opera singer?! How is that possible? It’s like being a Republican opera singer. It’s insanity! I know there are a few Republican opera singers out there, but seriously. Come on. I used to work at the Washington Navy Yard with a bunch of old retired military grumps, and they would get very angry at me for voting Democrat, but what else was I supposed to do?! Obviously they couldn’t vote Democrat. If you had to choose a party that was going to support the military industrial complex, give them all raises, and guarantee their jobs for a few more decades, that would be the G.O.P. But if you want to guess which party is going to increase arts funding, well you’d have to go in the other direction. On a purely selfish and economic level, you cannot be an opera singer in the U.S.A. and vote Republican. Because it makes no sense! It would be like trying to vote yourself out of a job! And in a similar vein, you can’t be a homophobic artist! How?!
If I was going to try and get rid of the non-heterosexual fecal masses that are currently involved in the arts, ummmm, well, let’s just say that a big chunk of the arts would be missing. I have worked many jobs in my life in which I did not come into contact with a gay person, or at least an out gay person. But none of those jobs have been in the arts. Every opera I have ever sung, every chorus I have been a member of, every poetry reading, art show, dance recital, and community theater event has been brought into this world with the help of people that apparently ought to keep their pride parades out of Georgia. How you can work in this vibrant world, and be a happy human being, while hating LGBTQ(and more letters that I am probably forgetting) people is beyond me.
Of course Ms. Iveri says this in her comments. She is happy to work with gay conductors or singers, as long as her home country is free of their ickiness. And the people don’t like this. They told her employer that they would not buy tickets to the show if she was singing in it. This is reasonable. It is hard to separate the art from the artist. She may have a beautiful singing voice, but how can you appreciate it when every time you hear her you are remembering that she thinks gay people can be cured of their disease? It’s like how I used to enjoy Tom Cruise movies, but now when he is onscreen, all I see is Oprah’s couch. I get it. And the company is in a rough spot. They need people to buy tickets to their shows. Contracts be damned, they need corporate sponsorship. So in the end it is simple supply and demand. She supplies hate, and the people demand that she go away. This has happened.
On the one hand, it kind of sucks that you can’t say or do anything these days without the internet telling everyone about it, don’t you think? Haven’t we all said stupid things that we wished we could take back, or are glad nobody else heard? I know I have. Pretty much daily. So it’s a little frightening to think that we live in a world where our opinions and our mistakes can cost us our livelihoods. On the other hand, there is a difference between mistakes or slips of the tongue, and letters to the president of your country spewing intolerant hatred toward a certain group of people. Remember when Justin Bieber made those awful racist jokes that got released recently? People were a little mad at him, but Usher gave him a talking to, and now he’s cool again. He said those things out of youthful ignorance, but now that he is an adult, which happened a few minutes ago I believe, his views have evolved, and he does seem to feel pretty badly about what he’d said. Ms. Iveri, on the other hand, seems to be riding the fib train to Panic-ville, not because it seems like her opinions have changed, but more like as if she wants to not get fired so much.
Look, I don’t know her. I have never worked with her. But I will say this: she has consistently worked for many years in the opera business, which means she must be at least tolerable to work with, and does not spew hate at her co-workers on a daily basis. But now that we know about the hate and fear that she harbors in her heart somewhere, the best response might not be to spew even more hate onto her. Don’t buy tickets to her show if you don’t want to support her, and let the opera company know why you are making that decision. But going online and telling her to kill herself doesn’t give you the moral high ground in this situation.
I thought that by the end of this post I would have some conclusions to share with you, but I got nothing. This whole thing just makes no sense to me. How can you work with people everyday in a friendly way, and then think of them as fecal matter? Why do we live in a world where you can get fired from your job for having an unpopular opinion? What does posting hate comments do to break the cycle of intolerance? Can terrible people make beautiful music? Why? I don’t have any answers, but as long as opera is in the news, can we just agree for now to call it a win? Cool.
And does having an unpopular opinion = being a terrible person?
Yes! Exactly! I may or may not agree with her, but at what point are we allowed to have opinions that differ from the mainstream without it affecting all areas of our lives? I do think there is a difference between saying “I enjoy peanut butter and pickle sandwiches,” and “homosexuals should be kicked out of the country,” but it is a slippery slope to be sure, once we start policing opinions publicly.
We don’t know what heinous attitudes some of our great musicians have held over the years, and we don’t require that in order to respond their music. But when we do know…. I always loved the Mamas and Papas, without judging them for their profoundly druggy life. But then it came out that John Philips had a regular sexual relationship with his daughter Mackenzie — it makes their songs way harder to listen to, though I don’t block it when one comes up on Pandora. I listen to it, and then suddenly flash on the fact that creepy Phil Spector is the one who made it sound like that. And I still listen to it, as sickening as the whole panoply of personal lives is.
Similarly, it was unfair for the Dixie Chicks to get, well, Dixie Chicked because of their (rational) remarks about the president, and it was just as unfair for Hank Williams Jr. to get Dixie Chicked for his (paranoid, insane) remarks about the subsequent president.
So I think that learning horrible things about artists’ lives shouldn’t affect our appreciation of their work, but that it probably will at one time or another.
This reminds me a bit of the controversy in Christianity with regard to whether a priest who had committed some terrible sin could still effective function sacramentally. Did the prayers of consecration over the host and chalice count if the one saying the words was, in reality, a terrible person? The church came up with the answer: Yes.