Maren sits down with singer and musicologist Lily Kass to talk about the relevance of opera in today’s society, oppressive structures that have been baked into the industry for generations, and what we can do to shift the paradigm.
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Dr. Kass’s article about La Traviata in the time of COVID: https://www.operaphila.org/virtual-learning/dress-rehearsal-program/la-traviata/public-health/
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Transcript
(orchestra tuning)
Hello and welcome to The Bodice Ripper Project, an exploration of sexuality, feminism, and the journey to self-empowerment through the lens of…a vulnerable artist.
I’m Maren Montalbano, opera singer, coach, and writer.
In this episode, you’ll hear me speak with Lily Kass, a singer and musicologist whose work is all about making opera accessible and inclusive. We get into the nitty gritty about the oppressive structures baked into the opera industry and what we can do to change it.
So make yourself comfortable, loosen your bodice, and let’s begin!
(intro music plays)
Hello, hello! I am back for season three. I have to admit, it’s been kind of nice to have a little bit of a break, but I am glad to be back and doing this podcast. I’ve really been thinking a lot about what I want this podcast to do, how I want to be reaching people, and why I’m doing this in the first place. I mean, honestly, if I don’t have an answer to why, and I tell my clients this all the time, if I don’t have a clear answer of why I’m doing something, then there’s really no point in doing something, right?
So for me, my “why” has changed. In the first season, it was really all about getting momentum and trying to point people towards the actual performance of the Bodice Ripper Project. And in the second season, there were still more stories to be told, and I really wanted to explore the idea of talking to other creatives. And I liked that interview style so much that I decided for season three, it’s all about the interviews.
So my intention this season is to offer some perspective on the creative world, kind of as a way to inspire those of you who are working on your own creative projects. You know, there are so many different ways to make art and all of it involves vulnerability.
And I think that that’s really the heart of the Bodice Ripper Project. Ripping open that bodice and letting your true self out is a true act of vulnerability. And it’s also an act of love for yourself and for the world. So that’s what I’m focusing on this season.
I don’t want this intro to go on too long because we’ve got a really great interview coming up. So, I will let it go at that and we’ll go straight into the interview.
Interview
Maren: I am so excited for our next guest. Dr. Lily Kass teaches music history courses at Temple University, as well as Johns Hopkins University through the Peabody at Homewood program. She earned an AB in Literature from Harvard University in 2010, and a PhD in Music History from the University of Pennsylvania in 2017 with a dissertation on Lorenzo da Ponte’s work as an opera translator in 1790s London.
Lily is passionate about making opera accessible and inclusive, and she’s a frequent collaborator with Opera Philadelphia’s education department, giving lectures to patrons and writing educational materials for school children.
She’s also a trained coloratura soprano and is a Marian Anderson scholar artist with the National Marian Anderson Museum. Lily, thank you so much for joining us.
Lily: Thanks so much for having me.
Maren: All right, let’s get right into this cause I feel like we’ve got a lot to cover. First of all, why don’t you kind of introduce yourself a little bit. Tell us about your story and how you got interested in translation and opera in particular.
Lily: Thank you. So how I got into translation was um, I didn’t realize while I was getting into it. I only realized it in retrospect but, I’m Jewish and I grew up going to synagogue with my family. And we would recite, we were conservative Jews, we would recite prayers in Hebrew and most of the prayers are sung in that tradition. And so I would be singing in Hebrew but looking at a prayer book that had facing pages, English and Hebrew. And so I’d be kind of reading the English while singing in Hebrew and noticing things didn’t always match up, or thinking about how the music went with the words and things like that. And I think that’s really what got me started about kind of comparing languages, and what can get lost in translation and kind of relating that to music.
So my journey to opera was separate. It was kind of born out of my lifelong love of musical theater. Even as a little kid I was like running around the house singing Les Miserables when I was like seven years old, and it totally went over my head had and was not appropriate for me, but I loved it so much. And I memorized all of the soundtracks to all of these Broadway musicals. And I wanted to be on Broadway, that was my greatest dream was to be on Broadway. And so I went to an arts camp, a day camp on Long Island called Usdan, and I auditioned for all of the shows in the theater program, the music program. And they always told me like, “You almost got the role, but you know your voice is a little bit too operatic for this style.” And I didn’t even really know what opera was but finally I was like, okay maybe I should try that. Maybe I should try singing opera.
I was lucky enough to be living in New York, and I auditioned for LaGuardia High School, which is the high school of music and arts and performing arts. And I got in as a vocal major and they had a whole course of training for vocal majors and classical vocal performance. And I got to take the opera workshop elective, and I was hooked. It was everything I loved about musical theater but fit my voice more and, I had a love of languages that I mentioned earlier with the Hebrew, and it just kind of all clicked into place.
Maren: That’s awesome. You know, it’s funny because I feel like that was sort of how I found opera too. Like I love musical theater first, but got introduced to opera and it just seemed like it was a much better fit for me. So, yeah but you know there’s always a special place in my heart for musicals, of course. What was the first opera you ever saw?
Lily: Um, I think that it must’ve been, my family had a VHS cassette of Ingmar Bergman’s Magic Flute, and I think it must’ve been that. But I don’t think I ever like thought of it as an opera. I think I was just like, “Oh, this is a video that we have.” And I only really feel like I consciously attended my first opera performance, and definitely my first live opera performance, when I was in high school, as I said at LaGuardia, which was very conveniently located across the street from the Metropolitan Opera House. And one day my upper workshop teacher said, “Hey, who wants to go see a dress rehearsal of La Traviata starring Renee Fleming, like tomorrow?” And I was like, “yes!” And so I went to see that. So I think of that as my first real operatic experience.
Maren: Wow, what was that like? Like just sitting in the audience and taking it all in?
Lily: It was amazing. I remember very clearly that someone, I don’t know who it was cause I wasn’t familiar with the Met at the time, I worked there later. But it might’ve been the general manager or just someone came on stage and said, “Ms. Fleming will be not singing full voice today to save her voice, she’ll be marking,” and kind of like apologized in advance. And then she started singing and it was so amazing. And I was like, if this isn’t full voice what is? It just kind of like blew my mind that they had to apologize for that singing. That if they hadn’t said anything, I would’ve thought it was, you know, top-notch. So yeah, and I was just completely enthralled.
Maren: I feel like that is something that not a lot of lay people realize, is that operatic singing is actually quite taxing. It’s a very physical activity. And you do have to save your voice. You have to make sure if you’ve got a dress rehearsal and like, a performance the next day then you really don’t want to sing all out on the dress rehearsal because the performance may suffer from it if you do. So I know that a lot of times during dress rehearsals they do say that. They’ll come out and say, you know, “some of the people will be what we call marking” and you just have to know that that’s happening.
So I just, actually that kind of brings me into some of the stuff that we were, I was going to save until later but, I feel like there’s so much that the general public doesn’t really understand about opera. What do you think would be like a really good way to make people more aware, or get like a better feeling about it that it’s not as elitist? Something that I had written down was a lot of people think of opera as like tuxes and fancy dresses. You know, it’s like all the spy movies when like the guy goes in and he’s watching an opera and then somebody gets killed, you know? Whatever. With you, if you could make a movie that had an opera scene what would that look like?
Lily: That is such a great question, and such a good way to look at it. I mean, like I have had that experience of going to the opera house and it being- I don’t think I ever wore a gown to the opera house, but you know some people were, and people were definitely dressed up, and it was an occasion. And again, I’m going to the Metropolitan Opera House which is kind of my home. As I said I was introduced to opera there and I ended up working for the Metropolitan Opera Guild, so I spent a great deal of time in the upper house. It’s visually stunning and you know, lots of gold and red and like sparkling chandeliers everywhere. And I wouldn’t like, take away that experience, I don’t think it’s wrong. That’s some people’s experience of opera, or it’s sometimes has been my experience of opera. So I don’t think those depictions are necessarily incorrect, but I think you’re right that it does kind of give this elitist view of opera that isn’t necessarily true everywhere in all opera houses, and opera can be lots of different things.
And it’s also not a historical conception. It’s not like opera has always been elitist. Opera at different times and in different places has been elitist, and it’s also been like totally for the people and everyone can come and see it and understand it. So if I were trying to show kind of another view of opera what I always think of is when I worked for the Metropolitan Opera Guild I used to give backstage tours sometimes, and I trained volunteers to give backstage tours. And I think about the backstage and how we often don’t think of what goes into an actual production. And for me the backstage is more magical than the production on stage even though I love that too. But it’s just so amazing to see everyone working together and just the productive collaboration that happens backstage and like all of the small details coming together to create this multimedia experience for the audience.
I remember once I was taking a group through and we went through the prop shop and there was someone putting, placing individual eyelashes on a pig sculpture that was going to be used for Nixon in China. There’s a scene in Nixon in China near like a pigsty. And the prop person was talking to us and saying this pig has also appeared in Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, like knew the performance history of this pig and was giving it a make-over for this particular opera. And it was like the audience will never know that someone stood here and put individual eyelashes on a pig, but it will be part of the impression of the whole thing. So that’s what I like to think about, it’s like different kinds of artists and technicians and all of the people involved in the making of opera. So maybe if it was the movie scene I would have some sort of like montage or something. Opera is not one thing and it’s not just the performance. It’s a lot of different pieces together.
Maren: Totally. Yes I totally agree. I feel like the backstage is the most magical place and that’s why I love being there, you know? And I definitely think that, you know maybe part of the issue of people seeing opera as elitist is that they only see the front, that’s already completely polished and magical, you know. So they think in their heads, “oh, well these people must wake up in the morning and be able to just sing like this right away.” You know, there’s like all these different steps that go into it.
There was one time when I was talking to, it was many years ago, but I was talking to a jazz musician and telling him that I was an opera singer and you know, saying like it would be really kind of interesting to do some sort of collaboration. You know, jazz-opera would be, I’d like to see what that could look like. And all he said, all he did in response was send me a clip of Diva Laguna in um, what is that Bruce Willis movie, The Fifth Element. And when she sings, I think it’s the Norma aria.
Lily: No it’s not, it’s Lucia.
Maren: It’s Lucia, yes that’s right. I’m just sort of like, “No no, if you see me as a big huge blue alien then we’re not going to.” Okay let’s see, so if you were going to recommend like a starter opera what would that be?
Lily: So I think about this a lot because I always see lots of these recommendations, like lots of times even opera companies put them out. Like, “if this is your first opera choose one of these.” And I think it depends so much on who you are and what you’re going to the opera for, why you’re going to the opera. Because I feel like some people go for the music, and people like all different kinds of music, right? And some people go for the drama and like suspense, and some people go for the spectacle. Like how many people can you stuff on stage? Or animals being led across the stage, and like the scene changes in two seconds and like that sort of thing, special effects.
Some people go to see like avant-garde cutting-edge art being made. And some people go because they want to see what it’s like to sit in this opera house with all of these people and they’ve never gone before, right? So people go for so many different reasons that I don’t think that it’s right to say this is a one-size-fits-all starter opera. So if someone tells me that they’re going to the opera I kind of ask them a few questions and then I can kind of customize an experience for them.
But one starter opera that people often say is The Magic Flute, and I understand why. It’s like a fairytale opera and there are even children on stage, so it’s good for like bringing children to and all of this stuff. But it also is so problematic, and that’s one of the things that I’m writing about right now, is the problematic nature of The Magic Flute. There’s so much misogyny there’s so much like blatant racism. There’s violence against women and acted on stage. Like I wouldn’t, I just don’t like the idea of a starter opera being an opera that you can go and just like, experience the joy and love of opera without critique. It’s just hard to find an opera like that because opera is just so complicated and it has such a complex history and there’s so much going on. So the idea that there’s one opera that everyone can just like enjoy unproblematically I think is mistaken.
If someone just asked me this question and didn’t want to hear my whole spiel I’d probably think something like The Barber of Seville or something like that. Like bouncy music and like fun characters and lots of hi-jinks ensue and it’s pretty enjoyable for most people I think. Yeah.
Maren: Yeah I think Barber of Seville is good. You know I also like Marriage of Figaro. I think sticking with the whole Figaro storyline is great. I completely agree there are all sorts of different operas for different people and every single one of them has some sort of problem with it. I think that that’s okay. I mean you know you said opera is complex. Opera is also very simple too, you know? In fact some of the really great operas have like super simple plot and then it’s just all about the music, you know?
But then I wonder actually if by putting yourself into a box in saying like, “well you know we have to have”- like if I was an opera company for example. If I was trying to say, “okay, well I’m trying to attract as many audience members as possible so I want to be able to get something that’s quote/unquote ‘accessible.’” You know, and something that’s easy to understand and will really bring in the masses. So there are some operas that are very, you know, they’re done often. They’re very recognizable. The music is recognizable. Do you think that that’s why there are so many opera companies that just recycle the same 10 to 12 operas you know over like a five-year period?
Lily: Yeah, I think about this a lot. I think there are so many reasons for kind of the standard core operatic repertoire and these same pieces being performed year after year after year. Like if you look at the statistics they’re really shocking. There are some pieces of music that are just always in the top 10 operas for like decades.
Maren: I imagine it’s probably like La Bohéme, right? Carmen, um Traviata, uh Tosca. Like that’s
Lily: Magic Flute.
Maren: Magic Flute. Yeah, yeah.
Lily: Marriage of Figaro, Barber of Seville. Yeah yeah, the fact that it’s really easy to guess shows how pervasive these operas really are. And these are like worldwide statistics, so not just in the United States, worldwide. So yeah, it’s really interesting.
I think there’s so many different reasons. I mean first you could look at the economic side and say like, “okay well if we performed an opera last season and the audience really liked it we still have the costumes, we still have the scenery. Like, we don’t have to build anything else. We don’t have to hire the stuff, we have it in our warehouse. Let’s just use it again.” So just kind of economy of resources.
There’s also just learning the music takes time, right? For orchestras and rehearsal time it is really, really expensive. So if there are a few pieces that like every singer knows, and all of the orchestras know and all of the choruses know it makes a lot of sense financially and in terms of time to keep on programming those pieces because then you don’t have to spend valuable resources on rehearsal, right? So there’s that kind of like a very, very practical side.
But then I think there’s also the idea that, you know, these works are masterpieces and like everyone must hear them, and the fact that audiences have gone to them before and liked them means that they will go to them again. And they’re just like so good, and geniuses wrote them, and they’re masterworks and you know, they just should be performed all the time. And along with that is just kind of inertia, right? If you have that mindset for long enough then people are going to start to expect that. And then audience members can be like, “wait, you’re not doing La Bohéme this season? But I always go to La Bohéme, and how could you take this away from me?” And then you get donors angry and then it goes back to the economic side where you need funding and you need the audience to be happy to buy tickets, but more importantly to donate large sums of money, right? I think it’s all of those things are very interconnected and it’s really hard to get out of that cycle.
Maren: Yeah, and yet we have a big, big problem in this industry, which is that we’re performing and where we’re continuing this cycle, performing music by dead white men. And we’re in, right now we’re in this huge paradigm shift where we are able to kind of see like look, there are other options here. We don’t have to program stuff by dead white men, you know? Not that that stuff isn’t great. But hey, there’s all this other stuff that’s also great that nobody gets a chance to hear, you know?
And it’s like what’s a good way of – I mean, this is a problem that I’ve been struggling with, you know, as I’ve been educating myself about diversity, equity and inclusion, you know. Which is that you’re inevitably, when you start having these conversations, you’re inevitably going to bump up against white fragility and a very large sort of sense of defensiveness. You know that like, well… and it’s never like I don’t want to program this because I’m racist. It’s more like I don’t want to program this because there are these risks involved and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, you know? And I’m worried about the money or, you know whatever. And I guess the question, I mean I don’t know if you have the answer. If you have the answer this will be great. The question in my mind is how do we expand that conversation so that more and more companies, more and more artists, it doesn’t even have to be companies, are open to the idea of programming different things?
Lily: Yeah, that’s such a great question and I think the things you brought up are really germane to the issue. I think, one, it’s just kind of education, this is part of what I’m doing in my work as a professor. I teach opera history classes. I also teach kind of general music history classes, and just trying to expand the repertoire that’s being taught to young musicians. And I sometimes teach music majors, sometimes teach just your general education courses where people are, you know, biology majors in my class or whatever. But thinking of expanding what is being learned in the classroom I think is one of the first steps. And I get students when they’re like 18 and older, usually. So even earlier would be even better but so many people just know, you know, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms. Those are the recognizable names, Mozart, Beethoven, and don’t know anyone else. And so we spend a lot of time talking about why. And I think it’s really important to talk about why, and the issue of canon that we just discussed here together.
But also the issue of like, why do we know Mozart’s operas from this time period and not other operas from the time period? Well, Mozart had a lot of support. He had family support. His father happened to be a musician and so he got like very early musical education. His father could like write down his earliest compositions, so could his sister. His mother was willing to travel with him. In fact she died in Paris on one of their trips together. Like, and that’s just his family, right? So much social support, educational support. And if we’re thinking in today’s terms of like privilege, and of course he had white privilege as well, and male privilege as well. From all accounts his sister was just as talented but she couldn’t have a career. So even if we just think about Mozart and his sister Nannerl, why do we know one?
Maren: Wolfgang versus-
Lily: Wolfgang and not Nannerl? Because he was male. And then if we kind of extrapolate from that one story and think how much music got thrown out or wasn’t preserved throughout history like Mozart’s music was, Wolfgang Mozart’s music was, because of racism, because of sexism. Because of just not enough social support for whatever reason. Economic support, geographic area, things like that. And how much music was never written because of those things. Who had a musical mind like Mozart but never got near an instrument, right?
And if we think about these things then we see like, okay well Mozart’s still in our textbook and he’s still worthy of study and we can still like his music, but it’s really sad that there aren’t more people to study and more diverse people to study and more diverse musics to study. And it’s because of these mistakes that we’ve made in the past and history, and how can we now… We maybe can’t go back, I mean unless we have a time machine we can’t go back and be like, “no, Nannerl write more music,” right? But we can go forward and say like, what systems are we putting in place for musicians and composers now? And what systems can we put in place for music that still exists now but might not exist in a hundred years if we don’t work to perform it and preserve it now, and then try to kind of do what we can by recognizing history.
Maren: This is exactly why I love doing new music, because there’s so much of it and a lot of it just completely flies under the radar. And, you know again, when you talk about people who have very stereotypical ideas of what new music is they think about what I like to call squeak and fart music. The avant-garde, you know, sort of like very strange noises from all over the place. Which actually, you know, I love, but it’s not for everybody. But the funny thing is that they don’t really make the connection that like, actually there’s completely tonal music that could have been written in the 18th century but it’s just being written right now that are, is being performed. Like it can be performed. It’s out there. Yeah so that’s one of the reasons why I like new music.
Lily: No, it’s so important to perform new music and to perform music, which is happening right now, the resurgence of trying to seek out like, what music do we have from the past written by people of color. What has been preserved? Recognizing that it’s a very small percentage of what could have been preserved or should have been preserved, and kind of taking that forward with us so that they don’t get further buried in the repertoire.
Maren: Yeah, and when you talk about like all the problematic things about the operas that are being performed right now, that are popular. Let’s talk a little bit about, I know you’ve been working, you have a great article out about La Traviata which I want to kind of touch on that in a second. But I’m actually really interested in going into more depth about The Magic Flute, because I remember, when I was a kid I was in The Magic Flute, I was one of the spirits. So I’ve known The Magic Flute for a long time. But I’ve always thought of it as like half fairy tale and then half like, what the heck is going on here?
You know? It’s like all sorts of like weird Masonic rituals, and then there’s this whole long very boring part in middle where Sarastro starts singing, you know, bless him. You know? There’s a lot of moralism. And the thing that always struck me when I was a kid was like, everybody loves the Queen of the Night but she’s actually a bad guy. You know she starts off seeming to be like, you know sort of like the triumphant queen, the beautiful queen, everything like that, and she ends up actually not wanting the best for her own daughter, you know? And it’s a, it’s a real twist. And her most famous aria is very dark. Also yeah there’s, as you say there is some racism which a lot of people don’t even notice. So do you want to talk a little bit about that?
Lily: Sure, yeah. Well the plot of The Magic Flute, I mean, you’re right to be confused. And so many scholars have written about this, and some people even think that it’s kind of just like a bad libretto. Like, it’s kind of shocking to say that about a so-called masterwork, but you know. Some of the stories around the creation of The Magic Flute libretto go kind of like: they started writing it in one way, Schikaneder started writing it with the Queen as a good guy and Sarastro as a bad guy, and then like halfway through it was like, “Oh no, I want to do the opposite.” But like, then didn’t change the beginning, didn’t go back and change the beginning, and that’s how it reads, right? So you can think of it as a bad libretto, and then it’s just kind of disappointing. Or what I, how I find more productive is to think about like how much ambiguity is in it, and how it means you can play it in so many different ways. And I think this is part of the reason why The Magic Flute is one of the most performed works is that it can be interpreted in so so so so so many different ways because of this total plot reversal and character reversal. Then the characters are really fun to play because they go from being good guys to bad guys and vice versa.
In terms of the racism in The Magic Flute it’s mostly with the character of Monostatos, who is like a Moor, a Moorish slave. And there are a few other slaves, there’s a chorus of slaves that are curious as well. And the reason why you might not notice this is that this side of the opera is a lot of times minimized in performance either through cuts, like taking out lines that the slaves say for instance, or through other kind of manipulations of it. What I write about actually, the project I’m currently working on, is translation in reference to this. And lots of times Monostatos will be singing an aria in German on stage, like the singer will be singing in German, and one of the lines in this aria is, “because a black man is ugly.” Yeah. Right. “Because the black man is ugly.” It’s a black man singing about himself, “Why can’t I find love? Because a black man is ugly.” And later it goes on to say, “White is beautiful, I must kiss her.” Referring to Pamina who is white. He is black, he wants to kiss and maybe probably do more to Pamina as well. And lots of times audiences don’t know this because he’ll be singing that in German and the translation will say something like, “because I’m ugly,” and kind of take out the blackness. Or even say something that keeps it but kind of minimizes it like, “because I’m black and ugly.” Like I’m black and also I happen to be ugly and not, “because a black man is ugly.” But on the other hand the, “white is beautiful,” line is often preserved, because that’s not as problematic.
Maren: Oh my god. It’s definitely problematic!
Lily: Apparently. So it’s this idea kind of whiteness as an unmarked state, as whiteness as like kind of the norm, and like what’s wrong with saying “white is beautiful.”? So that’s what my research is currently addressing, in translations of The Magic Flute, and especially subtitled translations of The Magic Flute where we still have the original German. It’s just that a lot of the audience can’t in fact understand that and is getting their understanding from the English instead. We have the original German, but the audience is getting this English that is distorting the original German hiding the racism, and so audiences are shocked when they find this out.
And this is helped along with costumes and makeup and other things that oftentimes um- there’s a regrettable history of playing Monostatos in blackface, because there were not black performers singing opera at the time. So if you had a black character you had to paint his face with makeup. But more and more in productions Monostatos is being staged as like kind of cartoonish, or like, different kinds of animals. I’ve seen him as a vampire. I’ve seen all different sorts of things that kind of set him apart. Monostatos means “stands alone” so he’s supposed to be apart. His main role is to be an outsider, but take that in a different direction and have it not have to do with race, but while still singing about race in the German. So it’s very complicated, and it’s not just the character of Monostatos who comments on it in the full Magic Flute without any cuts.
Sarastro, who is supposed to be this enlightened ruler, at least by the end, right, says one of the most racist lines in the show, “your soul is as black as your face,” basically. So equating evil with black skin color. So having this enlightened, so-called enlightened ruler making a racist proclamation like that, can see why lots of opera companies cut it. Although I think it started being cut just because of time constraints. A lot of The Magic Flute was cut because of time constraints. But these cuts and these manipulations through translation, through makeup, costuming, things like that, have really disguised the really powerful racism in The Magic Flute and kind of swept it under the rug. And I’m trying to look at, you know, the ethics of that really, and what can be done about that. Should The Magic Flute still be performed in its full version? Should it still be performed in an abridged version? Should it be still, you know as we said before like, oh like “child’s first opera, The Magic Flute.” What should we do about this? And this is just one example. If you look at any of the operas in the standard operatic repertoire you’ll see a lot of things like that.
Maren: Well you know, I mean there’s a lot of the Madame Butterfly, Turandot. You know, like there’s a lot of stuff especially when foreign countries are exoticized.
Lily: Yeah. Carmen.
Maren: Carmen, yeah. Right, exactly. So I can see how this is problematic, and it’s so important to just peel back the layers and really, really examine this because if we don’t examine it we won’t know how to move forward as a society. So yeah. So thank you for doing that.
Lily: Sure, yeah.
Maren: Now I want to move to La Traviata because I have actually talked about La Traviata with my audience because I wrote Parisian Pleasures during a production of La Traviata. And I’ve talked a little bit about, you know, courtesans and also the origin of the story, The Lady of the Camellias, and that kind of stuff. But one thing that I’ve always found very interesting about La Traviata is the whole tuberculosis thing, right? She’s got tuberculosis. She’s dying of tuberculosis and she, of course, sings this beautiful high note right before she dies too. And I actually, I read your article and I didn’t quite realize but that was on purpose. That actually is a symptom of people who are dying. So do you want to talk a little bit about that?
Lily: Sure, yeah, so this aria, this article. I said aria, Freudian slip. This article that Maren is referring to you I wrote for Opera Philadelphia for their Sounds of Learning program, which is a really great program that starts to, like, educate surrounding the operas that Opera Philadelphia puts on. And Opera Philadelphia is one of these companies that, we’re talking about La Traviata now, they perform standard repertory but they’re also working really hard to expand the repertoire and tackle all of these issues that we’re talking about today. So I’m really thrilled to be associated with them and be writing with them because I think if we’re thinking of like ethical operatic practices I think they’re really on the forefront of that. So they told me they were going to screen their recorded performance of La Traviata which, was that the one you were in when?
Maren: It is the one that I was in, and it’s the one that I wrote Parisian Pleasures during, so.
Lily: Perfect. So this planned production of La Traviata starring Maren and sometimes Lisette Oropesa, they were just going to put it up on the Opera Philadelphia channel and kind of rerelease the educational materials that they have associated with it in 2018.
Maren: Uh yeah, I think so yes. Yeah.
Lily: 18 I think. Yeah, so they were just going to rerelease that and I said, “Oh, well that’s really interesting, but are you going to recontextualize it for this year?” And they were like, “what do you mean?” And I said, “well, you know a character is dying of a respiratory illness on stage and we have a pandemic of a respiratory illness with people dying.” And they hadn’t thought to really make that connection because of what we were talking about before with this ingrained repertoire and canon of opera is just like, it was on the list. They know their audiences would love it. Their audiences came to see it in 2018. They would have a larger reach this year rereleasing it digitally and it was a great performance. And they just thought it would be great to release.
So this is one of the kind of perils of this ingrained repertoire is that you stop thinking about what the opera is actually about. You think like, oh it’s beautiful, and I love the music and like the costumes are so nice, but like you don’t stop to think about the actual content. And it’s not the only content of La Traviata. I could see how you could miss it. I mean this is a love story, and society, and family versus like amorous love, and you know there’s a lot of things going on in La Traviata.
But one of the things is that over the course of the three acts Violetta is dying of tuberculosis, and the third act is entirely her on her death bed. So it’s pretty emphasized I would say. So I was writing this article to kind of say like, we shouldn’t expect ourselves to watch La Traviata this year in the same way that we watched it last year or the year before. Like not only compared to how it was viewed in the 19th century when it was premiered but also just even last year. We are changing even if the repertoire is staying the same. Even if it’s a performance that was recorded in 2018 and is staying the same that can’t be edited, we are changing as audience members and this therefore changes the opera, right? It changes our experience enormously. So trying to think about the possible trauma of experiencing La Traviata during a pandemic of a respiratory illness and thinking about finding it hard to breathe. Seeing that on stage, a struggle to breathe onstage, and a death from struggling to breathe, and thinking about all of that.
So my article addresses that. It addresses the fact that we don’t see any fear of contagion in La Traviata which is a lot of what we’re experiencing today in the COVID-19 pandemic. And it’s not because tuberculosis wasn’t contagious, it’s because at the time they didn’t know it was contagious. So that’s why that’s kind of absent from the plot and the staging and everything.
But we might see it today and be like, “oh, they’re all together in a room and they’re not wearing masks, oh no!” And like it would have been more useful to them had they been thinking about that. But they often kind of blamed the people who were ill with tuberculosis, and being like, “your lifestyle made you get it, you’re too poor,” or, “you’re associating with too many men,” in the case of courtesans like Violetta, and things like that.
And tuberculosis was seen as a kind of moral judgment in a certain way. So in a way Violetta kind of has to die in the opera because it’s not okay for like a loose woman like that, someone operating outside of the bounds of society sexually like that, for her to just like go off and have a happily ever after. That’s not okay in the 19th century so she has to die. They had to kill her off. So the tuberculosis is really important not just as a disease and as a plot device but as kind of moral judgment on female character and sexuality in the 19th century.
Maren: Well that’s interesting, and you know I didn’t really think about that which is funny, I should’ve thought about that. I mean now I’m thinking about all of the major female characters like Tosca, who has a lover and she ends up killing herself, you know. And Carmen who gets shot by her lover, you know, or not shot, stabbed, stabbed. But you know.
Lily: Yeah that’s all violence against women kind of enacted on stage. Carmen, Tosca to some degree, she kind of has to jump, like she has no more options. But then there’s Violetta, Mimi, and Manon all have tuberculosis, and all have like questionable sexual activities throughout the opera. Questionable in terms of the norms of the society at that time. Yeah, there’s also Antonia in Tales of Hoffman.
There are so many tubercular operatic characters, which is so bizarre as I mentioned briefly in my article, because you need to breathe in order to sing, right? But there is a kind of a separation between body and like mind and soul or whatever in this opera, that we have to kind of suspend our disbelief for most of the opera, that they are able to sing through this respiratory illness. And it kinds of makes them seem very powerful in a certain way, that like they’re dying and they can’t breathe but they’re still able to sing this beautiful music, and I think that’s part of the power of these operas.
Maren: Yeah. Yeah I totally agree. It’s, part of the reason is honestly I think it’s part of their charm, right? Like, this is completely ridiculous. It would never happen in real life but I am riveted, you know? All right here’s a question that I ask everybody. When I talk about bodice ripping I use the bodice as a metaphor for something that’s holding us back, that’s restricting us, and we rip it open to let our true selves out. What is your metaphorical bodice?
Lily: Wow. Well, I’m thinking about this conversation. I’ve been thinking a lot about kind of opera’s metaphorical bodice if you will, and kind of how to let opera out, how to let opera breathe and live, and not be restrained, and kind of encompass more than one thing. Get out of the elitist straight jacket if you will, and really be able to be in communication with modern society and with history at the same time, which I think are both very important for operas as an art form.
And as I was thinking about that and preparing to talk to you today I was thinking about it kind of in terms of me personally as well, and I’ve always struggled with a drive to be like one thing, but I don’t know what that one thing is. And as you said in my, in your very kind introduction of me I am a professor. I am also like, a researcher. I also try to do more public musicology where I talk to a wider audience about these sorts of things. I also edit stuff. I’m also a mother, to an almost three-year-old, I can’t believe it. Like I do so many things in my life and I split my time that I have very complicated schedules to get all of these things done. I’m sure as you know Maren as a freelancer yourself of sorts. And so many of us are doing things like that.
But I’ve been struggling with kind of the preconceived notion that like I should just be something. I should have like a career drive to do one thing and drop all the other things. And instead I’ve been trying to think of maybe the metaphorical bodice I need to rip off is that kind of preconceived notion. And that I should just think of these things as puzzle pieces in my life that I can like put together and rearrange when the configuration doesn’t fit, but like continually rearranged them in ways that kind of fit what is meaningful to me and hopefully meaningful to more people as well so that I can contribute. So I’ve just been thinking about that, kind of going away from like monoliths and into kind of more of a multiplicity and variety of identities for opera and for me.
Maren: Wow, I’m so- that was such a great answer Lily, thank you so much for that. You know, cause I know I’ve struggled with that myself. I know other people have struggled with it. I’ve had lots of conversations with people saying well like, especially during the pandemic, “if I’m not a singer, what am I?” You know? What am I going to do? Am I going to start from scratch? Am I going to go work at Starbucks and like, that’s going to be my life for, who knows how? You know there’s so much, so much of ourselves can get caught up into one identity. When in truth we are just many, many different things, and we’re many different things to many different people, but we’re all the same person, you know? So I love that I’m so glad that you’re embracing that. I think we all need to embrace that.
Lily: Yeah and I will thank you Maren and plug your coaching business because it was through a conversation with you a few weeks ago that I began to, I had the seeds of this idea. But it began to feel like a more productive endeavor to think along those lines than just kind of confusion in my head, so.
Maren: Awesome, yay. Well thank you. Well this has been such a wonderful conversation and is there anything else? If people want to get ahold of you or have like questions or something like that can they find you online?
Lily: Yeah um I’m on LinkedIn. I’m also on you know, probably if you Google me you’ll find my Temple and or Johns Hopkins addresses. Or you can find me, my name is spelled L-I-L-Y-K-A-S-S and that’s my email address to multiple places, so I should be relatively easy to find. And I’m always happy to talk about this sort of thing with anyone who’s interested because I feel like it really takes a community to build change of the sort that we’re talking about today.
Maren: Absolutely. And I will link to the Traviata article in the show notes. And once again, thank you so much for joining us.
Lily: Thank you.
And I will leave it there.
Join me next episode, in which I speak with life coach Ichko Batmunkh.
It’s so easy to compare yourself to others, and it’s so easy to blame others. We all have to think, how is that serving me? What is that bringing me? Nothing. Other than anger. Or frustration, and then you get more angry and it’s not healthy for you.
We gotta be just a little bit of mindful with ourselves. Like what we are thinking, what are we saying to ourselves and how much we are blaming someone else. Really just focus on yourself.
Ichko has an amazing story to tell about how she immigrated to America from Mongolia and went from not knowing any English to thriving as an entrepreneur in less than ten years.
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The Bodice Ripper Project is a production of Compassionate Creative, and was conceived and written by me, Maren Montalbano. It was edited by me and Andrew Carlson. The theme music was also written by yours truly. If you liked what you heard, I invite you to give this podcast a 5-star rating – it helps with the algorithm! – and I’ll see you next time.