<i>Rape at the Opera: Staging Sexual Violence</i>, by Margaret Cormier

Margaret Cormier’s Rape at the Opera: Staging Sexual Violence confronts the flagrant issue of staging sexual violence on the operatic stage through the examination of contemporary treatments of canonic works such as Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Strauss’s Salome, Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, and Rossini’s Guillaume Tell. The book is timely, particularly as operatic communities continue to grapple with the implications of the #MeToo movement begun in 2006, a movement that saw—among others—the dismissal of the Metropolitan Opera’s James Levine and operatic countertenor David Daniels over sexual assault allegations. The panel discussion at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, as well as the resulting 2018 colloquy on sexual violence in this Journal, emphasized the significance of naming and confronting the pervasiveness of rape culture in operatic works and in operatic practice more broadly.1 Cormier responds to this call by examining the blatant depiction of sexual violence in operatic productions, questioning the trend in contemporary operatic staging practice to provoke and stimulate audiences through stagings of sexual violence. Through extended and thoughtful analyses of works and productions, Cormier also considers the impacts of witnessing sexual violence on audience members, as well as the possibility for an ethical engagement with rape in operatic performance.Cormier’s analysis proceeds along five critical axes for evaluating representations of sexual violence on the operatic stage: the agency of the characters who are victims of sexual violence; rape myths and stereotypes; portrayals of sexual violence in and as performance; the risks and limits of using sexual violence as a tool of critique; and sexual violence as a metaphor for other atrocities. Drawing on feminist studies of spectatorship, as well as on trauma-based and care-based approaches to operatic practice, Cormier extends Catherine Clément’s work of critiquing the shortcomings of operatic criticism given its limited portrayal of female agency.2Cormier rightfully and uniquely asks audiences to consider the effect of these experiences, thus engaging the work of David Levin and Clemens Risi to explore anew the significance of directorial choices in making operatic meaning, as well as the impacts of these choices on spectators.3 The call to consider audience care more thoughtfully is clearly and repeatedly articulated throughout the book, but it often remains unclear what it would actually mean to revisit evaluating operatic performances and productions with holding care for the audience in mind. Further complicating questions around spectatorship arise throughout the book, including the heterogeneity and mystery surrounding the identity of a group of audience members. How does one account for an audience without knowing more about the individuals who comprise it? Which or how many audience members have witnessed the kinds of atrocities depicted on stage, and how do we understand this without generalizing the complexity and specificity of trauma?I was interested throughout by the question of what opera, as an art form, facilitates in performance to further complicate the presentation of sexual violence. In opera (particularly in Regietheater, as Cormier writes), sexual violence is “routinely understated and obscured by innuendo and ambiguity” (p. 4), something that music abets so easily. But Cormier helps us realize that we should be critical about how far the beauty of the music should and does take us. How powerfully and surreptitiously, in the case of Salome, can dance aestheticize trauma? Director Atom Egoyan describes the shadow play depicting the rape of Salome in his 2012 production as a choice that is a “[making] more lyrical” of this brutality (p. 69). But how can we understand this act of violence in terms of lyricism, a feature we have upheld as one of opera’s most sacred features? What else have we normalized by “glamorizing and fetishizing” (p. 70) violence, by rendering it more palatable, more “lyrical”?In addition to raising uncomfortable but crucial questions about the ways we engage with the operatic canon, the book is lucidly written and beautifully organized. Cormier’s musical and cultural analysis enlivens productions in powerful ways, particularly in the case of her analysis of various stagings of Salome in chapter two. The production photographs throughout are a wonderful addition that amplifies the author’s arguments. The author inserts herself in readings and responses to the operas, demonstrating an authority over the material while also acknowledging that women’s responses to these performances should be given space and consideration. Cormier is unafraid to sit in the complicated nature and often ambiguity of the depiction of women’s agency and violence in these works—for example, Cormier shows that the agency of women can be diminished by directorial choices (in Salome and Don Giovanni), but that women can also be humanized through directorial choices, as she demonstrates through her analysis of productions of Salome.Much of Cormier’s intervention with this book is methodological. By summoning and extending Roger Parker’s crucial work on the operatic text, she bemoans the fact that operatic scholarship and criticism have tended to circumvent or even remain hostile to the visual aspects of opera. Her approach thus questions why this aspect of operatic practice has remained superfluous or somehow immaterial to questions of meaning.4 However, despite Cormier’s brilliant analysis of production choices in amplifying or indeed transforming meanings in operatic texts––thereby shifting traditional musicological obsessions over text and performance to the many other voices that speak in operatic productions––I remain unconvinced that, as Cormier suggests, “production is the best tool we have to explore and evolve our relationship to the canon” (p. 143). For me, the implications of her analysis are that musicologists and those engaged in the opera industry more broadly must think about the real effects of performance on both spectators and performers. Indeed, she expresses her interest in accounting for the “wellbeing of audience members and the health of the social body” (p. 11–12), yet Cormier’s analysis focuses primarily on the texts themselves—whether score- or performance-based. As Cormier demonstrates so brilliantly, these are more than mere texts that produce meaning through various readings, whether written or performed.5 Next steps involve consulting relevant work in reception or spectatorship studies, as well as performance studies. Knowing what we know about trauma, repetition, and the reenactment/production of trauma through performance, as well as music’s ability to harbor traumatic memory, do performers risk experiencing trauma as they engage in repetitive performance of these violent acts? How do they separate self from performed character in these pieces, and what safeguards exist to support them? Might it be possible for operatic stagings of sexual violence to engage in reparative work for those who have experienced sexual violence?6 Another implication, as Cormier mentions throughout in her advocating for intimacy directors, is the significance of operatic training and the safeguards we need to ensure are in place to keep young singers safe and informed, particularly when works such as Don Giovanni are staged so frequently with young singers.Cormier acknowledges more contemporary treatments of sexual violence in opera, but only in passing. Her focus on canonic works is certainly apt, but it also begs an examination of more contemporary pieces such as Du Yun’s Angel’s Bone and Ellen Reid’s p r i s m —both Pulitzer Prize winners—and Kamala Sankaram’s Thumbprint, which raise similar issues to those raised by the canonic operas analyzed by Cormier, though they feature quite different treatments of the topic due, likely, to the lived experience and female identities of their contemporary women creators. It is also necessary to consider ways in which contemporary authors of operatic texts and music build care and consideration into the very structure of twenty-first-century operatic works that thematize sexual violence.7The book opens up myriad questions and prompts compelling future lines of inquiry, making it invaluable to performers, directors, scholars, and teachers alike. Most significantly, the book is written with an acknowledgment of the gravity and potential for harm that these topics and descriptions carry—going so far as preparing readers for particularly graphic depictions of sexual violence in sections of the book. I found this to be a striking demonstration of care, and an extension of the ethical position for which Cormier advocates in her work. For those willing to sit with the answers, Cormier’s book asks difficult questions about why we do what we do in opera, and for whom.