Speaker 1 (00:00:00):
Coming up on Art Palace, 

Speaker 2 (00:00:02):
It would be a sadder story if we could just take Cezanne's off the wall 

Speaker 1 (00:00:06):
And 

Speaker 2 (00:00:06):
Just remake them as we wanted. But we get to do that with this field, and I think that that's really important that we engage with the material and we build new things out of it. 

Speaker 1 (00:00:29):
Welcome to Art Palace, produced by Cincinnati Art Museum. This is your host, Russell Iig. Here at the Art Palace, we meet cool people and then talk to them about art. Today's cool people are the panelists of Cincinnati Opera's opera rap that took place at the museum on May 31st, 2018. The topic this evening was bad behavior, great art, and the conversation was moderated by Evans Rags, the Harry t Wilkes artistic Director of the Cincinnati Opera. 

Speaker 3 (00:01:08):
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome. Thank you for braving the weather, which has been variable to say the least today. I dunno if any of you got caught in that downpour this afternoon. Luckily, I was inside watching Sideways Rain come across the front of Music Hall. I'm Evans Rags, the Harry t Wilkes artistic Director for Cincinnati Opera. And this evening we're engaging with a topic that's very important to us, particularly this summer. As you know, we are presenting an opera by Rickard Wagner, the Flying Dutchman, and we are also presenting the US premiere of an opera called Another Brick in the Wall, which is based on the iconic Rock album, the Wall by Pink Floyd. Both of those operas have baggage, as you know so well. In 2010 when we presented Wagner's the Maister Singer, we had a similar wonderful engagement at H U C with a very, very lively discussion about a topic similar to what we're going to be discussing tonight, which is how do you distinguish between great art created by flawed people? 

Speaker 3 (00:02:10):
How do you engage with something that is iconic and is universal? And yet you know that the creator of that work is a deeply flawed human being? So we've been very fortunate to invite an incredible cross section of lively people with great expertise, my friend and our dear friend, rabbi Ken Cantor. Ken and I did a wonderful program a couple of years ago called Jews on Broadway, and Ken started out his life as actually a theater and a musical theater director. And although he is now a rabbi of many years standing, he's still a Broadway baby and is famous throughout the United States and elsewhere for the talks he gives on American popular culture. Sarah Weiss, a new good friend, the director of the Holocaust and Humanity Senator here in Cincinnati. I had the great good fortune and honor to work with Sarah this past fall and into January as the Center brought to Cincinnati, an amazing project called The Violins of Hope Instruments that were rescued from the Holocaust and have been given life again by a great father and son team of ERs in Israel and those instruments traveled around the world and continue to educate us as to the imperishable power of music even in the worst of times. 

Speaker 3 (00:03:24):
And Stein longtime Cincinnatian journalist, polymath, and also former Chorus girl for Ken Don't, maybe they'll tell that story and I'm not a good friend and also a dear, dear friend, from the day I set foot in Cincinnati, both you and your husband, our newest acquaintance here is Zach Whitaker. Zach came to us just a few years ago when we did our very first Baroque Opera Lato by Francesco Cavalli in the SS C P a. And Zach at that time was acting as choreographer for this production, which as you may remember, had an incredible amount of dancing working with Ted Huffman. Zach very quickly was already spreading his own wings as a director and went on to direct an amazing production of Lato at Julliard. And then his directing career took off and we're very fortunate to invite him back to direct our production of Coronation of Pope, which began rehearsals yesterday. 

Speaker 3 (00:04:23):
And so we, as a matter of fact, we had three operas rehearsing in music hall today. Triviata is well into rehearsal in the new beautiful Harry Wilkes studio, which is our second rehearsal hall Coronation. Pope started its second full day of rehearsal in what we used to call the large, because it's a large rehearsal hall. It's now called the May Festival Rehearsal Hall, and the chorus for the Flying Dutchman, at least the men were rehearsing upstairs in the Gar. So it was like Ives today, different music coming from every corner of the building, and it's an exciting time to be alive. What I want to ask each of our four panelists is to begin by engaging with the topic from their own particular area of expertise of someone deeply versed in theology and theater. Someone who engages with the whole concept of holocaust and humanity and the broadest philosophical topics, a very broad-minded journalist who has written on everything from the arts to politics, to nature to humanity, and to a very gifted young director who has a performer must engage with this topic. So if I may start with you, Ken, how do you engage as an intellectual, as a scholar when you are confronted with great art created by deeply flawed human beings? 

Speaker 4 (00:05:45):
Well, let me answer that question after I straighten out the Ann Arnstein being a dancer in a chorus girl, let's, let's be honest here, 

Speaker 3 (00:05:55):
I'm nothing if not provocative. 

Speaker 4 (00:05:57):
You have set this audience on the corners of their seats to find about this. When Anne and I were both in college and I was directing a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta at Harvard when I was undergraduate, Anne was gracious enough to come from one of the other great schools in Boston to audition for our production. And of course with the talent that you all know her as a writer and reviewer, she was in our chorus of Ilan, the Gilbert and Sullivan Operetta, and we have been friends ever since then. So yes, she was a chorus member. I don't think I would describe her as a chorus girl because that carries all sorts of other colorations that I don't think she ever intended. So let me just say start off with that. So to answer your question, and Anne is breathing a sigh of relief. I got her out of that mess. 

Speaker 4 (00:06:53):
Anyway, some of you have had the opportunity to see some of the things that we've done that Evans and I did a couple of years ago about Jewish contribution to American popular music, specifically Broadway. And my field of scholarship obviously be outside of the Rabbinet and education has been in this field of American popular music. And as Evan said, I've had the opportunity to lecture and concertize all over the world with the theme of these American popular songs. One of the things that becomes very clear is that there are songs that were written by songwriters all of, and these songs are relatively singable in 2018, even though they were quite popular and broadly accepted in 1918 or 1912 or 1920 something. And so I'll give you a perfect example. I was lecturing a number of years ago at the university level for the state of Georgia. 

Speaker 4 (00:08:02):
They brought in all of their professors of history and music and culture into one summer of a four or five day workshop. And I gave a talk on the music about the South written by songwriters who had never been there. And in fact, we began with some of the iconic songs about the South that you all know. And to recognize that in some of them, the language, the caricatures in these songs were so problematic in 2000, I think this was 2012, instead of when they were written that the songs were so problematic that some of the people got up and walked out. Even though at the beginning I had apologized. I'm telling you the history, I can't rewrite the history, but this is what Showboat said in 1927 with Oscar Hammerstein or This is what So-and-So wrote. And so the reality is that the music that we often see as American popular songbook, you've all heard that phrase, I'm sure also has to go through the sensibilities of 2000 eighteens world. 

Speaker 4 (00:09:12):
We were talking earlier, just to put another one into perspective, this is an ancient story. This isn't a hundred years ago. This is tonight. If you were in New York City, you would see a revised version of my Fair Lady in Carousel, two of the greatest pieces of American Broadway musical theater ever written because the idea of Henry Higgins and my fair lady picking up a young girl off the street and taking her, I mean into his home is a fairly awkward thing for us in the gender sensitive world. We live in the same thing with Carousel, where Billy marries and beats his wife, and yet she says, oh, even though he beat me, it was as if it was just air passing by. And we're saying, wait a minute. We cannot minimize that kind of experience in that relationship. That just is an example of albeit 1950s musicals being done in 2018. Same thing with 1912 songs and 1920 songs in 2018. So that's just kind of a start for us to begin in our talking, Sarah, 

Speaker 3 (00:10:26):
The Center for Holocaust and Humanity is about to have an enormous move and a great new space at the Museum Center. 

Speaker 4 (00:10:33):
We're all wishing you 

Speaker 3 (00:10:35):
Well for what I know is a mammoth task, but as a scholar and leader of a very important institution, how do you engage with this? 

Speaker 5 (00:10:45):
So let me preface it with, I don't want to say I'm an expert or scholar in anything, just a learner, an explorer in Holocaust education. So thank you for including me. And tonight's topic is actually really relevant to the work we're doing right now. So obviously the Holocaust and Humanities Center deals with a lot of bad people, right? In general, and the question is, but sometimes it's very clear, sometimes it's very black and white. We know certain individuals who were Nazis were bad. That's clear, right? Maybe that's clear, but there's a lot of gray within it. So if somebody was a bystander and didn't speak up, are they bad? If somebody advocated against somebody but didn't take action, are they considered bad? So I think one of the questions I have as it relates to the question of bad people and good art is how are we defining who are bad people We know, especially when we're talking about humanity, that humanity is flawed and art itself in our work plays a significant role in understanding the history and understanding what's happened and understanding people's perspectives leading up to the events of the Holocaust during the Holocaust and after the Holocaust. 

Speaker 5 (00:12:04):
Both fine arts, performing arts, visual arts, they all have a place and a time. And in terms of bad people, I think the sort of defining line for us is, are the bad people creating art that's propagating bad things and propaganda. Propaganda 

Speaker 3 (00:12:25):
Well 

Speaker 5 (00:12:25):
And bad behavior, and not necessarily, maybe it's propaganda, but are these ideas to foster this bad in others? And that's a question that we're asking ourselves constantly. And also as Ken just pointed out, these issues of the question of separating people from art or separating people from other things they've done are happening in real time in our day today. And similarly yet different, we're facing questions of people that we want to share stories of who have done great things in their life, but we also learned that they've done some pretty crappy things in their life as well. And so does that mean that you can't talk about them, that you don't talk about them, that you don't talk about their great things? And to me, again, art is an opportunity for discussion. And so I think if there's an opportunity from art to create discussion even about controversial issues, then it's an opportunity for learning. It's an opportunity for growth, it's an opportunity for engagement, and that's really key in all of this. As I think through that question of great art, bad people, is it bad people, bad things, whatever. However, we're framing it in this discussion. So there's a lot of questions actually, I have versus definitive answers. 

Speaker 3 (00:13:59):
Thank you. Ann, you cover a wide range of topics in your writing and your public speaking, and just as an intellect, how do you engage with this topic? 

Speaker 6 (00:14:11):
Well, as I've been listening to Sarah and Ken and in our pre-talk, I was thinking louder. Louder, okay, I've got to talk into my mic. As I was listening to Sarah and Ken, and I've been thinking, I've been writing for a long time, and if I've made choices on what to cover or what to 

Speaker 6 (00:14:36):
Write about based on the creator, I probably wouldn't have much of a writing career and I wouldn't be going to anything in the arts. And I think we can all agree it's one of these, I don't want to say truisms, but I just said it, that great art is usually created by some pretty awful people, and we are all such flawed human beings. It does not mean that we are not capable of great creativity, of transcendent kinds of works. And I think that I have to try to understand as best I can, what's behind the creation of these works, and then it's up to the people who are interpreting it. When I go to an opera and I go to see something by Pacini who I find very troubling, it's the music and it's what someone like Zach does with it and what the performers do with it that will make it transcendent for me and maybe help me see it in a new light. I see it, as you said, as a learning opportunity. I think it's up to all of you up to our publics to take on the responsibility of educating themselves too. 

Speaker 6 (00:16:05):
That's part of my job as a journalist, although the platforms are shrinking, but that's the way I try to address it. 

Speaker 2 (00:16:15):
Zach, you will sooner or later in your emerging directing career engage with the music of Wagner, let's say as an example, and other composers whose work, as Anne has pointed out, it may come to you to direct a production of Lucia di Lamore or Madame Butterfly or any of the other countless misogynist operas that are part of the canon. How do you as an artist begin to think about approaching a work that is a great transcendent work, let's say by Wagner, or a work that has a flawed view of humanity as part of it? Yeah, I mean, I think jumping off from what you were just saying, for me, when I approach a piece, it has a lot less to do with the person who made it than what the ideas are inside of it. And so a piece like we were just talking about, Tristan for me is one of the most transcendently sublime meditations on the three most important things in life of sex, love, and death. 

Speaker 2 (00:17:18):
And it is in its first chord, literally obliterating everything that we believed in from the Renaissance. This is a huge contribution to the cauldron of global ideas. And for me, I get to wear it. I mean, one of the great things about engaging with historical objects is that we get to study them and no one says when we find a neanderthal jawbone who caress, and not only with an opera, do we get to find those things and study them, but we get to put them on and live our lives. And sometimes it's actually more confusing when you have a piece by a good person about bad people. I mean, the coronation of papaya is, I mean, Monteverdi seems like a pretty normal person, and it's like one of the most, every single person on that stage has literally, as we've been talking about, it's like an inverted morality tale blur. 

Speaker 2 (00:18:15):
Anyone who has any shred of integrity is banished, forced to commit suicide or murdered, and everyone who is disgusting and just full of ambition and lust and greed gets literally everything they want. And for me, that's actually more problematic than engaging with one of Wagner's operas. And again, it allows the opportunity to take a sort of leap of learning to try to, for the actors in the show, to figure out a way to wear those people in their own bodies. And that takes a lot of studying. And it also is an act of empathy and understanding, which I think is a contribution to we take outside of the studio, we take outside of the theater into the bigger discussion, which I think theater is generally about, which is like how do we pay attention? What do we listen to and how? Who are we doing this for? And is there a greater sense of justice and democracy that we're working towards? Thank you. 

Speaker 3 (00:19:16):
When we present another brick in the wall as our last production of the summer, to put the piece in context for you, it's based on inspired by the 1979 album by Pink Floyd called The Wall. It follows on from their other huge success that immediately preceded at Dark Side of the Moon. To date, the wall has sold somewheres in the neighborhood of 25, 20 7 million copies and is still selling. It's never left. The catalog, Roger Waters, who is one of the co-creators of the original album, it's either Waters or Dave Gilmore who wrote either the lyrics or the music, or both to all of the songs that comprise the Wall, created a narrative. We had a wonderful conversation a couple of weeks ago with a great scholar, Scott Lipscomb, who traced the idea of the development of art rock, as he called it, where rock and roll, particularly by the time you get to the late sixties and early seventies, certainly with the advent of the story albums of the Beatles, particularly Sergeant Pepper and to an Extent Abbey Road, where the creators of popular music were looking towards the larger forms of classical music to help them tell a story as opposed to just another 32 bar, 64 bar pop song. 

Speaker 3 (00:20:36):
And the Wall is probably one of the best examples of what art rock became. And when Roger Waters and Dave Gilmore wrote the album in between 1977 and 1979, it was essentially the story that could be the story for any opera. A child is born into relative obscurity and poverty is abused as a child, discovers that he has a great talent that lifts him out of that poverty, up to the absolute heights of rock and roll stardom, where upon he begins to abuse that power in sex, drugs, and rock and roll eventually goes mad and has a mad scene as big and as good as anything in any belcanto opera is judged, even though it is, I think it is partly the trial is in his adult mind and in the end, his judgment is to tear down the wall that he has created around himself to find some small measure of redemption. 

Speaker 3 (00:21:42):
So it's an opera just waiting to be as it were re-imagined. Where we find ourselves here in 2018 is that the creator in 1979 lives unlike Wagner who died in 1883 and whose music was appropriated by the Nazis waters lives among us today. He's touring as a still performing musician all over Europe this summer, and in the last certainly 15 years, he's very obviously and overtly espoused political views that he has then grafted on to his public presentations. He still has performed the wall and has glossed onto his performances of the wall, his current political views. So I want to ask a question of the panel. From your own personal opinion and engagement with this story as it were, what does it mean to you that waters now has inimical political views to what any of us might believe in? And is the wall now a different piece? Has it changed? Has it become what waters the creator is now or is it still the piece that was written in 1979 that has been turned into a genuine opera and should be viewed apart from the person who is now still living and who helped create the piece and who has changed and who's trying to actually co-opt his own work for his current political views? Anyone want to take a stab at the idea? 

Speaker 7 (00:23:24):
One of the things we talked about 

Speaker 3 (00:23:26):
Is that we cannot look at these works of art, be they songs or theater or any kind of nonrepresentational art, because to me, that's a different issue of a painting or a sculpture. But let's talk about the cerebral arts, so to speak, the 

Speaker 4 (00:23:44):
Arts that are not plastic but are Right, exactly. That only can survive by performance. Exactly right. Well put, and I think we all agreed in our earlier conversation that we cannot look at this music without looking at the frame of when the pieces and the music or the plays or whatever were written originally and what was acceptable when they were written. They may not be the sensitivities or sensibilities that we have now years later, but in the time these things were written in 1970s, there was an acceptability to the Pink Floyd and to the wall and so on in my field of earlier American music, the immigrant experience, it was not looked upon as antisocial or somehow derogatory to write music about your own ethnicity or about even other ethnicities, because Jews wrote about Italians and Jews wrote about African-Americans and Italians wrote about Jews. 

Speaker 4 (00:24:49):
And I mean, this was just kind of the mix of the American world. And many of the songs, you're shocked to know that like Irving Berlin as an example, one of our most famous songwriters was writing songs that were quite in our point of view today, anti-Jewish. Not that he hated Jews, he was making fun of his fellow Jewish community, but he was also writing about African-Americans. Now forgive the language, but a term of the music of this period, which was many times written by American, Italian or Irish or German or Jewish songwriters was referred to as Kon songs. And this is a whole genre of music that is very difficult to sing now, but it was very popular in the day, excuse me, and acceptable even in the culture of the day. And we could go on with other ethnic songs of every ethnicity and even the language used in those songs was acceptable apparently, but it's not acceptable now, Sarah, 

Speaker 5 (00:25:58):
So slightly different kind of thinking through this, but when I first heard that the opera was bringing this, I didn't know much about it. I know actually much more about Roger Waters, what I consider anti-Semitic behavior and statements these days. And I'll tell you that at first from a, I've kind of taken a journey in understanding what this is, what's being brought to our community and where I am when I first heard versus where I am today is quite different because in my mind, couldn't separate the two because he's touring, he 

Speaker 4 (00:26:37):
Still lives 

Speaker 5 (00:26:38):
And he's touring the wall and actually co-opting his original lyrics and changing them for his political views, which again, 

Speaker 6 (00:26:47):
From 

Speaker 5 (00:26:47):
My perspective crossed the line. So I was 

Speaker 6 (00:26:50):
Like, oh my 

Speaker 5 (00:26:51):
Goodness, I can't believe this. But then once I understood this is actually the original piece adapted into an 

Speaker 6 (00:26:57):
Opera. 

Speaker 5 (00:26:58):
Yes, he was on the creative team behind it, but this work was created in 1979. It's part of our popular culture in that time period. So to just say, well, we can't, it's not acceptable because today I don't agree with his political views is problematic. But even for me, I had to take a little bit of a journey to 

Speaker 6 (00:27:22):
Get to 

Speaker 5 (00:27:23):
Where I am and it doesn't make me more comfortable with Roger Waters. 

Speaker 6 (00:27:29):
But 

Speaker 5 (00:27:30):
I do think, again, at first I didn't think we could separate it, but I think we have to. 

Speaker 6 (00:27:38):
Well, I think that the work that Roger Waters is taking on the road is definitely not what we're going to see. And when I went back to listen to the Wall, and it's been a while, but I went back and pulled it out and I'm thinking, there's nothing wrong with this. There's nothing, what's the big deal? And if anything, he shows himself to be coming down on fascism and all of the horrible things that were done in the name of Fascist leaders by grafting his anti-Zionist ideology onto the wall. He's making a very pointed political statement, and he is co-opting his music, but it's for his own political purposes. But he's the creator, he's the composer, and like it or not, that's his prerogative, that's his work. We may not like it, and composers are always doing that sort of thing. I don't think that operatic composers did that to the same extent. There may have been some political verity fought all kinds of political censorship, but I don't think he was quite as overt as what Roger Waters is doing. 

Speaker 3 (00:28:59):
As a matter of fact, one of the things that I've begun to realize again in this production that we have of Ravita is actually I've had sort of a penny drop in that Verity was quite a feminist actually. Viol Valeri is one of the greatest creations of operatic character development in any period. And she lives, I mean, she goes through her journey. She's treated incredibly sympathetically by the composer and given one of the greatest rules that he ever created for any voice. So it's fascinating. I don't want to get off topic. Well, I don't 

Speaker 2 (00:29:40):
Think that's off topic. Actually. I was going to say that one of the great things about having work that we can deal with, unlike, I mean maybe we should be able to do this with visual art too, but it would be a sadder story if we could just take Cezanne's off the wall and just remake them as we wanted. But we get to do that with this field, and I think that that's really important that we engage with the material and we build new things out of it. What's interesting to me is that when I think about the opposite, that is also very true, which is that in traviata often it's interesting to hear that you think of that as a very feminist character, which is very, well may be, but most of the time I don't see that. And it may have been actually much more radical in the time that it was written than it is now, which is a travesty of its own kind. So we are all entitled to take on this material and to screw with it. I mean, I think that when I think about working on pieces from Monteverdi and Ali, these are things that we know very little about how they were actually done. And we also know that what they were doing was a lot of improvisation in performance, which is not something we do very often anymore. And it allows the opportunity to create music much more like jazz than anything else we have in an opera house. 

Speaker 3 (00:31:03):
One of the things that you both brought up was the idea this, and I started by the sensibility of what waters is today, is the idea of art being co-opted. And of course the most hideous example of that is Wagner. And you made a very good point, Ken, in our conversation before we started that Wagner, Wagner was dead for 40 years before his music was then adopted by the National Socialists. And what we tend to forget, and this is not an alogia, it's simply a point of information, is that the other composer adopted and revered by the Nazis was Beethoven. And what has happened in the post-second World War time? Because Wagner, because Wagner's own views, horrible, antisemitic views, the Tu Mik is one of the most disgusting things I've ever had to read in my life. But I did because I had to understand what I find fascinating is that we have, as it were, because Wagner himself was a horrible person and expressed antisemitic views and that his music was used by the Nazis. There's been some sort of unholy marriage. We decoupled Beethoven immediately because Beethoven didn't. We have no antisemitic writings from Beethoven. We don't know Beethoven's views on Jews or anybody for that matter, right? Actually, Beethoven's 

Speaker 2 (00:32:35):
Music is not just adopted, but adopted by fascist worldwide, actually. I mean it was owed to Joy was one of the only things allowed during the cultural revolution in China. I mean, this is like, wait, so it's an extreme co-opting of that music, and you're right, and we decouple it immediately. So please, 

Speaker 6 (00:32:57):
And the other thing too is that while Wagner was alive and his views were well known, who were the biggest adherence, who flocked to vi Roy Jews? Jews were among his biggest supporters. He and Mahler worshiped him. Mahler absolutely worshiped him. So there's this kind of tension, tension, tension. There's tensions, absolutely tension. 

Speaker 2 (00:33:26):
The conductor of the most Christian opera ever written Parsifal was Herman Levy who was Wagner's favorite conductor of the last 20 years of his life. 

Speaker 6 (00:33:35):
His best friends 

Speaker 2 (00:33:36):
Were Jews cliche, though that is, it's also true and it's also part of the incredible tension that exists around this music. 

Speaker 6 (00:33:44):
And I think I was a participant in the panel Evans mentioned about Meister Singer. And what struck me about that panel because that was a much more meister singer is a much more charged work for those of you who've seen it, it ends with this huge double chorus expressing the hopes for a German art. And anybody from the outside had better watch out. And when we talked about that, people in the audience were shocked. They had no realization of this, or even for that matter of Wagner, the extent of some of Wagner's writings. So I think that's why it's important to be aware of it and not let it stop, but not let it stop us because there's so much that we lose if we allow that to stop us because the creators are human. And I think as you were saying, the good people, when you have operas about good people, it's kind of boring. And I still struggle. I still struggle with Puccini operas. I have to have a long talk with myself and often with Rick about how are we going to get through this, especially Sir Angelica. And so it's a constant source of tension, but I think we need to be keeping that kind of discussion on our minds. 

Speaker 2 (00:35:24):
Ken, it's remarkable that Evans organized this function and that Roseanne Barr helped him out because I think we've got another side 

Speaker 4 (00:35:37):
This question, and that is leaving out the political or religious or ethnic or gender 

Speaker 3 (00:35:45):
Issues, 

Speaker 4 (00:35:46):
Forget gender, I shouldn't have said that. The political issues, the Wagner people, the waters. We also have another challenge today, and that is great art done by people whom we find personally reprehensible. And that's a whole nother discussion. I don't know where it fits to the title and the subject of what we've talked about, but if we look at great artists who have had 

Speaker 3 (00:36:12):
Very 

Speaker 4 (00:36:14):
Personal lives or great performers or great songwriters or great anythings, great novelists who have lived lives of despicable acts and yet their novel, their song, their play, their whatever, is still a great piece of work. Do we cancel out one because this other thing is so reprehensible. 

Speaker 3 (00:36:37):
We talked a little bit about this, and this is a very touchy subject, even particularly here in Cincinnati in the fact that the conductor James Levine is being erased by the Metropolitan Opera because of the scandals surrounding his past actions. The Met has chosen to remove his recordings from their shop, remove his performances from their MET radio broadcast and Sirius xm. And it strikes me as almost Soviet how, because I live through the time when Mrs. La Rostropovich as a political dissident, which is a far more noble thing, of course, but the Soviet Union expelled him and made him in their famous term, a non-person. And I'm not embracing, endorsing or condemning the actions of the Metropolitan Opera, but it also is a fascinating and troubling thing to witness an artist, however, flawed and however terrible his actions might have been being as it were, a lifetime of work being annulled and denied. It raises all sorts of questions in my own mind that I would love for any of you to chime in and engage with is to do we Now, if we discover that Carava Jo was an abuser of young boys and a murderer of his rivals, do we remove his works from the museums all over the world? He's dead, of course, and has been dead for hundreds of years. How do we engage with this enormous body of art that has been done by horrible people? 

Speaker 4 (00:38:27):
Well, I worry we're going to be left with no 

Speaker 5 (00:38:29):
One. 

Speaker 4 (00:38:30):
I mean, the reality is because of the flaws within 

Speaker 5 (00:38:34):
Us that I think though we have to be willing to confront it. But I think erasing somebody, and this is not the same by any means, but I think a lot about this in the separation of good art, bad people of what the Nazis did in banning art and art forms, 

Speaker 5 (00:38:58):
And to me to erase or to ban or whatever, while it's different circumstances is still a similar kind of tactic. And to me, that's not going to move the needle forward on even the issues that we're trying to address by erasing somebody, right? It's complicated. I don't know the right answer because I mean, this is such a big issue right now, and it's happening not just with James ine, but with so many people we're seeing. And I think we can't ignore it. We can't say that these people didn't do horrible things, but I also think we can't just then erase them or their work. I think there's also something about, 

Speaker 2 (00:39:49):
I mean, I obviously don't think that erasing someone is a good idea. I do think that we are all able to make our own decisions about what we engage with. So I think it's perfectly fine for, I would prefer that the Met Opera have James Levine's recordings in the store and have very few people buy them. What's interesting to me is that either way the conversation opens up a space and that space is now being filled with people who we haven't listened to for a long time. I mean, someone whose work I've been paying attention to a lot more than I ever did is Kendrick Lamar after winning a Pulitzer Prize. And this was totally unthinkable. And you know what? He might be the most important operatic composer that we have today, and that is someone that I don't know that it's you have to, James Levine has to get thrown off the pedestal in order for Kendrick Lamar to rise. But I think the questioning and conversation around this very subject matter is something that allows space for other people's voices to be heard, which I think is really crucial for being a progressive society. 

Speaker 3 (00:40:58):
Patty and I have had lots of conversations about what's happening in our world of operatic production today with the whole concern about cultural appropriation. And you mentioned Puccini earlier. Madam Butterfly has now become a very, very controversial opera, not just for the misogyny of its story, but also because of the sensitivities towards this East meets West written by an Italian composer based on a play by an American playwright that has, and the only aspect of it is sort of the Kad, ura, cherry blooms kind of music that pacini weaves into the score and that to present Madam Butterfly. Now in our country in particular, by the way, our European colleagues see none of this, I took account after a conversation I had with Patty about this about six months ago, and there's a wonderful website for opera producers called Opera Base, and I counted in that week because I'm a nerd, and I did it for once, that there were 20 opera houses in Europe that were producing Madam Butterfly that week, and yet here in our own country, because we are living in a different world now, Madam Butterfly has become a problematic work to produce. 

Speaker 3 (00:42:18):
So the world has changed. How much do we embrace that change and 

Speaker 2 (00:42:23):
Become 

Speaker 3 (00:42:23):
Sensitive to this? 

Speaker 2 (00:42:26):
Well, I mean, the European question is really an interesting one to me about opera. And this might be a little bit of a tangent, but I've worked a lot in Europe. And something that's really interesting to me is the way that in America, we've always been so good at screwing with stuff, as I've been saying. And one of the things that's interesting to me about opera is that it's not ours at all. If there is an apotheosis of music and text in American culture, it's the musical. It's not opera. We have totally adopted it, whereas Europeans have had it forever. And so I've come up with this theory, which is called the Roche Bois Theory. Does anyone know this store? It's like a terrible store for really ugly furniture. And every fancy Parisian person goes straight to Roche Bois and orders their entire gorgeous apartment with beautiful moldings and crystal chandeliers, and they just chuck it all out when their daughter gets it or whatever. And in comes the most hideous furniture imaginable. And when I was living in Paris and I saw this, I was totally baffled because as a New Yorker, it's like if I have a pre-war apartment, it's like I have hit gold. Whereas these people have been living in these apartments for hundreds of years and it's just inconvenience. The bathroom doesn't really work and sinks over there and it doesn't make sense anymore. And it's the same with opera. 

Speaker 2 (00:43:49):
They've just been breaking it over their knee for so long because it has been there forever. Whereas when we took it on, we became sort of nostalgic for something that we never owned, and we haven't quite ever really, I don't think, broken it over our knees in the same way. I mean, it's a very interesting thing that in America opera is more generally conservative than it is in Europe. I mean, that's a weird thing. So while I totally think it's strange that Madam Butterflies being performed 20 times in Europe in this week, I also know that having seen Madam Butterfly at the Stot Soper in Munich, I mean it was like, I have no idea what was going on, but it certainly was dealing with things that are very different than how the gazes that we are applying to it here. And I think too, 

Speaker 6 (00:44:41):
I think not sure if this is picking me up. 

Speaker 2 (00:44:44):
Okay, here we go. 

Speaker 6 (00:44:46):
I think that American culture is going through such difficult times now, and we want to be politically correct even as there are so many more forums out there that are spewing the kind of language and invective that we don't we're trying to avoid. So it becomes, so there's more sensitivity to everything from Butterfly to, I mean, you could say the same thing for men, onco, you could say it for Triviata, these women who are essentially cortisols prostitutes. But again, I think it's important to look at the works themselves, to look at the artistry that it takes to convey these roles, and it's your gift and the gift of the directors to break it over the knee and to give us a different way of looking at it. I think that we just cannot, our minds are being forced to close. I feel that our minds, there's this pressure to close our minds and it's up to us to resist that and to push back and to accept the fact that creators can be really flawed human beings. 

Speaker 6 (00:46:17):
I'm deeply saddened by this erasure of James Levine when I go to the Met HD broadcasts and suddenly his visage was gone from the opening credit. I thought, well, that's that. And he has done so much. He raised that orchestra to one of the finest orchestras in the world, orchestra's period. He launched the careers of many, many people. Do I condone the behavior? No, of course I don't. And I don't know, I wasn't there. But I think that there are, you can't, to just totally erase that record of work for almost a half a century is I think criminal. 

Speaker 2 (00:47:10):
One of the things that I find fascinating about Wagner's the Flying Dutchman which we're presenting this summer is it's basically the story of an outsider, someone who has cursed God and has been in turn cursed by God to wander the earth forever until someone, 

Speaker 3 (00:47:29):
A woman, of course will redeem him from his eternal torment. It's about as universal a plea for understanding as you could possibly ask for by a composer who when he was writing it, he was, it's a fascinating work to listen to because Wagner is actually becoming Wagner, meaning that the operas around this time have one foot still in the conventional, so what I would call numbers opera except for the music of the Dutchman in particular where we hear ton as it were in the making. And so you have a piece of artwork that is universal and redemptive, not unlike another brick in the wall written by a composer who was, as we have discussed this evening, deeply flawed. But what I think is for me, even in the short time we have been talking together is if we engage with these pieces, the most important thing we can do is have the discussion. 

Speaker 3 (00:48:35):
Because even works of art that are controversial, particularly works of art that are controversial, allow us to engage in discussion, allow us to have forums. I wasn't here in the run up to Margaret Garner in 2005, I saw the final performance, but what Patty and the rest of the Cincinnati opera team told me, they spent a year preparing this community for a story that was about this community, a deeply, deeply troubling story that actually takes place just across the river and in Cincinnati. And it made this incredible experience a community engagement experience from the get-go. It also happened to be a pretty good opera. And for me, one of the things I am already wanting to take away from our conversation this evening, and as we look forward into future seasons of Cincinnati opera, especially with the things we're doing in what we're calling CO Next, which is a new initiative on the part of the company to engage with important social topics, not present a point of view because that's not what we're about. 

Speaker 3 (00:49:40):
Art by its own very nature, the pieces will have a point of view, but we are beginning a journey that started with our presentation in 2002 of Dead Man Walking where we are engaging with controversial topics that need to have discussion because that, as you mentioned, goes right back to Greek theater. Ancient Greek theater was about teaching the citizens of Athens how to be better citizens through tales of morality. Yes, there was comedy, there was always two tragedies in a comedy in a Greek festival. But one of the things that is fascinating to me about where we find ourselves right now is that we have the opportunity for discussion. We have the opportunity to engage as opposed to taking sides and shutting down. But it takes brave folks to articulate these dissonant sentiments in the spirit of Let's get smarter, let's try and have a better understanding. So I mean, we're almost at the end of our time together, and I do want to open it up to the audience, and since we are recording this for later broadcast on the website of the museum at least, and maybe even on our own website, I'd like to open it up to the floor. We ask that if you raise your hand, you wait until Kemper brings the microphone to you so that your question can be properly heard and recorded. So could we ask Sir and Kera will come to you right away. 

Speaker 8 (00:51:09):
The problem I have with Roger Waters in this specific case of Roger Waters and in what's happening today, it's gotten very hard to separate people from performers specifically from the ideas or that they express because in the world we have now of the internet and Twitter and Facebook and all that, the promotion of the person and the promotion of the person's works become almost interchangeable or the same thing. So the question is, if you have someone like a Roger Waters who in my opinion has crossed the line from legitimate criticism of a government, which to me is respectable, I mean with which I do not necessarily disagree into antisemitism, how do you separate that from, say, taking Roseanne Barr's show off the air because of expressions that she made that were clearly bigoted and an extreme or stopping the production of Mel Gibson's movies for a number of years because of statements he made refusing to go to Woody Allen's movies? 

Speaker 8 (00:52:42):
Not because they've become pretty crappy, but because of the image of Woody Allen. I mean, Roger Waters has used and uses his, I have no trouble with the work, but he's using the work as a platform to promote his ideas. And from what I have read of the press coverage when this was premiered in Montreal, he was there and he used the production as a platform for promoting his ideas at that time, which I think you've wisely avoided giving him the opportunity to do. It's one thing with Wagner's been safely dead for as long as he has, but if Wagner was alive today and espousing his ideas, would you feel as comfortable with performing his works? Although they're undoubtedly of genius, it's one thing to say that something is troubling because attitudes have changed since the time they were ridden. I mean, you can do that with Shakespeare, with Joer, with Henry Adams, with all sorts of people. They may not have even been terrible people in and of themselves, but they expressed attitudes and views that we no longer accept with Roger Waters. It's all about the self-promotion, and that's the problem I have. I don't know if there's a question in there, but I guess the question is how do we distinguish from contemporary people who are using their art as a springboard to promote ideas which are not artistic, but are political, social, and which are, in my view, despicably prejudicial? 

Speaker 3 (00:54:36):
You're right. There's no real question in there other than 

Speaker 4 (00:54:39):
Brilliantly 

Speaker 3 (00:54:40):
Summing up. 

Speaker 4 (00:54:40):
Exactly what 

Speaker 3 (00:54:41):
We've been discussing this evening 

Speaker 4 (00:54:43):
Is, please Ken, I know you're going to find this as by the way, my sitting on this panel is almost the new definition of chutzpah, which is a lot of nerve in the presence of genuine artists and people who have do profoundly wonderful things in this city, which is my colleagues up here. But I want to put a thought in your opportunity to contemplate what we just talked about even in popular songs, but certainly in theater, musical theater, there are people with clear political points of view who have written that point of view into what we consider as kind of general milk toast musicals. I'll give you a couple of examples, but the most famous one is Oscar Hammerstein, who in virtually every musical he wrote was there was a political commentary of a very liberal man. Now I'm happy with it. I happen to agree with his politics. 

Speaker 4 (00:55:43):
If I were someone who found those problematic, I'd be very offended. But if you look at his work in Oklahoma, his work in King and I, his rewriting of Carmen of Biza, and to Carmen Jones as an African-American opera, just go one by one by one, you will find a man who had a very powerful and very intense personal point of view. It got him in a lot of trouble near the end of his life, but this was a man who wrote his songs that way. You've got to be carefully taught to be a racist from South Pacific. I could go down the list. I think we are not bereft of people who have points of view who are writing it in a way that maybe we find comfortable because we agree with the point of view, but it's still there even in theater that we see as rather kind of All American. Just as a little bit to think about. Another question. We have time for one or two more before we adjourn this evening. Is there another hand going up? Yes, sir. I was wondering if you knew somebody personally who had been abused by James Levine, say a child or a relative, would you feel the same way about his erasure? That's a very good question. 

Speaker 6 (00:57:09):
That's a good question, and I dunno how I would think of it because it's something that is very, very painful to even consider just having a child be abused by anybody. And you think of the thousands, if not millions of people who have been subject to abuse and who've had to stay silent for so long. There was just a story in today's New York Times on the front page about this legendary horse trainer who has been dead for 25 years and now people are coming. These young girls who were victims were routinely abused and were afraid to speak out. So I dunno, that's something I can't really answer unequivocally. 

Speaker 4 (00:58:05):
Zell, and wait for the microphone, please. 

Speaker 9 (00:58:11):
There isn't one answer to what we're talking about this evening, but the most important thing that I think that needs to come out of sessions like we're having this evening is that we need more sessions like this, more opportunities for people to express themselves, not from just political voice, but from the theatrical part, from the musical part, from the artist's part. We don't always hear that end. We only hear the other side. We need more opportunities in the schools, in the high schools, in the colleges, in the communities to have opportunities like this where people can come together and hear many different views of where we are and how we can handle and look at these types of situations in a way that we can be more understanding so that art in itself can have its place where it needs to be, not where we think it needs to be. 

Speaker 6 (00:59:21):
Thank you, Zoe. 

Speaker 3 (00:59:22):
We have time for one more question. Yes. Thank you for waiting, Mona. 

Speaker 10 (00:59:33):
Oh, Mona, you're here. What will the Cincinnati opera's response be if Roger Waters decides to hold a rally in Washington Park and do something outrageous? I have no idea, but are we planning ahead? Should we be? Should we not be? Do we stay quiet? I just wonder, is that really the crux of what we're talking about tonight? 

Speaker 3 (01:00:13):
I don't think that's the crux of what we're talking about tonight, and you raise a very interesting question. He happens to be on tour in Europe for all the summer. I would consider it very unlikely that even if he wanted to come, he would, if I remember right, in Romania and in China for much of the summer, we have not invited, but he has not been invited. Yes. He'll not invite. No, no. Let me, I think as a point of clarity here, Mona, that you have given us the opportunity. Roger Waters was engaged, meaning he was approached by Pierre Dufour and the team that Pierre Dufour created to receive permission to take the story and some of the music of the wall and make it into an opera because it is his intellectual property in the first place. Roger Waters needed to be given his permission and enter into contractual relationship with the creators of the new work. 

Speaker 3 (01:01:16):
That is the extent of his involvement in another brick in the wall. He's not part of the production team. There is no production agreement that says, and Roger Water shall be coming to your town to offer him himself up for three days of promotion of the work. The creators sought his permission, not unlike we would seek the permission of any original author to turn their work into an opera for which we would then hire a librettist. I'll give you a bittersweet example. I think many of you know the name of the composer, Kevin Putz, who wrote the incredible opera we did in 2014 called Silent Knight, which is actually based on a film, and those rights were very easy to obtain, but the holy grail of so many younger American opera composers is to kill a mockingbird. They all want to turn to kill a mockingbird into an opera, and the estate of the author adamantly refuses. 

Speaker 3 (01:02:18):
They got burned with the movie, and they will refuse to as long as any of them is alive to grant any composer the right to turn it into an opera. That's the extent of water's involvement. His permission needed to be achieved and a contract needed to be created with him that he would sign away his limited rights as it were, to have the work turned into an opera from there on, and he's not involved. The work is a wholly new creation by Julian Belo Do who, as I said, has streamlined the plot and made it much more linear, and it is a creation theatrically of the team from Cirque du Soleil that created so many amazing shows that have created the actual production of the opera. But as Patty Beggs has said, we are not inviting him, and I think he's going to be very busy in Europe this summer, 

Speaker 5 (01:03:10):
And that's why I'm where I am, because at first I thought this was all him and his connection, and that was my concern. But his name is all connected to the opera 

Speaker 3 (01:03:22):
To be, it has to be because he is the creator of the original story. It's a little bit like, no, it's not like the Gershwin's Forge, but I'm trying to think of another operatic treatment of the last a hundred years or so where the original creator's name is always attached to. It happens fairly frequently. I'd like to close by asking each one of you one more question, which is, in your own intellectual and emotional engagement with the world around you when it comes to art or politics or education or religion, how do you engage with something that is controversial when you are presented with a son or a daughter or a friend or a relative who espouses a very different point of view from your own? How do you engage with that? Ken, you want to start? Oh, go ahead, Sarah. 

Speaker 5 (01:04:26):
I think with a conversation and questions, I think it starts with a question and ends with a question, and I think that's where the opportunity is in growth and learning. I mean, I think it is where I started from in this conversation, and I think that we're so afraid actually of doing that right now, of having a conversation with somebody who doesn't view things the same way we do, and yet the most beautiful things come out of it. Well, sometimes it's messy too. No, no, no. 

Speaker 3 (01:05:03):
Ken, I was just, my thought was when I was a little child, there were three television stations and public tv. You had three networks in public tv, and if you were going to watch the news on 

Speaker 4 (01:05:17):
Of the stations, you would get a mix of perspective because of the particular news reader or the news the writer for the TV show. Now we live in a world where you can make sure you only watch the kind of TV station that espouses your opinion, or you may choose to watch the other one and watch your blood pressure go up. But we can choose to only pay attention to the things with which we agree, the power of religion, the power of art, the power of all the things you just mentioned is that it challenges us to hear things with which we may not agree. And if we ever get to the point where there's no way to hear those other perspectives than we failed as a society, I work with young people every day at the Hebrew Union College who are somewhere along a linear perspective on what they believe of God, of faith. 

Speaker 4 (01:06:09):
Pick any of your views. And part of what we try to do is to help them learn what it is they actually believe and where they fit on that continuum, on that continuum. That's religion. That's why there are multiple religions. That's why there are denominational differences within religions, right? Because there's all these points of view. If we ended up that it was only the one we agreed with or only one, it's a whole different set of challenges. And I think that's why we all love the kind of art or the kind of work that we do. And truly, while Sarah's work with the Holocaust Center and the New Museum and all those things wouldn't be called art in the immediate sense of the word. It truly is art in the sense of how it impacts the world because 

Speaker 3 (01:06:58):
It obliges us to engage. 

Speaker 4 (01:07:00):
And same thing with what Anne has done in so many genres and so many fields, and obviously one can't talk about opera and dance and music and theater and being a creator and so on, without recognizing that all of it. Art Ann 

Speaker 6 (01:07:17):
Think, as Sarah said, it's an opportunity. And from conversations with my sons, with my husband, and with other artists, I think it's necessary to take a deep breath and want to engage. Because what I find, especially with people with whom I sometimes have some very deep disagreements, is that I've discovered that we actually don't, we're not such antagonists that we actually share a lot in common. That in some of the best discussion arguments I've had are with theater critics and they hated a production and I loved it, or I hated it and they loved it, and we were able to communicate why. And sometimes my views changed. Sometimes I was able to see, well, I didn't see that you're right. I did not notice this particular aspect of the production. But when it comes to more difficult issues, it's difficult. It's so hard to listen. 

Speaker 6 (01:08:33):
And as Ken said, because we are getting bombarded by so many different platforms, and we can easily tune them out or not listen at all or not read at all. I think I want to end with the fact that yesterday, one of my sons sent me a link to an interview that Harry Belafonte, who is 91 years old, did just a couple of weeks ago in New York, and he said he's very discouraged by the current climate. This is a man who has been an activist throughout his career. As much as he's been an actor and a performer, he has been an activist. And he said, I'm discouraged, but there has to be hope. And as long as I can, I'm going to speak out. And I think it's incumbent on me to speak out when I see wrongdoing or when I perceive bad behavior in elected officials and in even in artists is to call it out and then to engage in discussion. Because without that, we don't have dialogue. And if we lose out on dialogue, then we are really in danger. So I think it's incumbent on everyone to keep your minds active, to keep that conversation going and to hone your listening skills. That will help a lot. Zach? 

Speaker 2 (01:10:08):
Yeah, I was going to say listening and also remembering that people are humans. I think so much of where we are right now is for lots and lots of different reasons that we really don't. We other people, we stop treating other people like humans. And I think that's where a lot of violence comes from. I think that's where a lot of problems in our world come from. And I love this thing that Peter Sellers says about how the Greek theater was like the amphitheater was the architecture of an ear on a hill. Its entire purpose was to have a place where one person could stand in front of 5,000 people, all of whom were given tickets to the theater after voting, which I wish we did here. And those 5,000 people went to listen to a story that that community was not able to talk about in any other forum. 

Speaker 2 (01:11:11):
You were not really allowed to talk about it with your, you weren't allowed to talk about it with your friends. And that is a world we still live in if we choose to go to the theater, if we choose to make theaters in our backyards, if we choose to make art or engage in conversation. And I think that's why I do what I do. And I think that art and theater is a beautiful place to do that. And there's something deep about listening because it is actual waves that move through air and shake every bone in your body. It's a physical thing, and I think we need to listen and we need to be responsible and feel complicit in what is happening. And hopefully people leave with ideas and more conversation. 

Speaker 3 (01:11:57):
I want to thank all four of you. I want to thank every single member of this audience for taking the trouble to come tonight and engage with us in this important discussion. And I've learned a great deal this evening, particularly in the need for us to keep these dialogues going because we will continue to present art as an opera company that not just only entertains for which there is great therapeutic value, but also stimulates and stimulates conversation, discussion and sometimes dissent. But that's what art is about, and that's why we all strive to continue to do this work. Thank you very much, and I hope we see you often in Music Hall and in the SS C P A this summer. Thank you for coming. 

Speaker 1 (01:12:53):
Thank you for listening to Art Palace. We hope you'll be inspired to come visit the Cincinnati Art Museum and have conversations about the art yourself. General admission to the museum is always free, and we also offer free parking. The special exhibitions on view right now are Ragner Denson, the visitors and scenes from Western culture and Terracotta Army legacy of the First Emperor of China. If you'd like to hang out with me in the galleries, come to my gallery experience on June 24th at 3:00 PM for a free discussion about plus artists in the collection. For program reservations and more information, visit cincinnati art museum.org. You can follow the museum on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and also join our Art Palace Facebook group. Our theme song is FRA Music by Balal. And as always, please rate and review us on iTunes. I'm Russell, and this has been Art Palace produced by the Cincinnati Art Museum.