Enabling the King(s) of Opera: Institutional Responsibility for Sexual Misconduct

“They’re not going to fire him—they’ll fire me,” young mezzo-soprano Patricia Wulf recalled telling a colleague in 1998, after enduring repeated sexual harassment by Plácido Domingo behind the curtains of Washington Opera. In the wake of #MeToo, some of the opera industry’s most distinguished leaders faced allegations of sexual misconduct from within the operatic community. These survivor narratives were preceded by years of whispered warnings by industry members of known predators, fears and accounts of retaliation, threats, and gaslighting, as well as a lack of confidence in the competency and moral compass of operatic institutions. While some of these men are now facing consequences for their abuses of power, the opera world has yet to fully reckon with the important issue of institutional and structural responsibility for these patterns of behavior. Applying Liz Kelly’s conducive context framework to the American opera industry, I examine how institutionalized power and gendered authority contribute to a climate wherein sexual misconduct is enabled, sustained, and protected and (2) how gendered authority and institutionalized power are relatively unencumbered in their (ab)uses of that power. My research reveals the gross (mis)handling of sexual misconduct by the operatic industry, including its protection of and belated accountability for the actions of powerful men, by accentuating the brutal, hegemonic realities of power, oppression, and the cultural cultivation of fear and silence within the industry.