Twenty years ago, the American musicologist Susan McClary made what seemed like an unthinkable suggestion. In an essay about Puccini’s Madama Butterfly she wrote: ‘I look forward to the day when we can pin this opera up in the museum of strange cultural practices of the past.’ The idea that one of the most popular operas of all time should be discarded would have struck most audience members as eccentric and most opera companies as commercial insanity.
By the late 2010s, however, operas set in non-western locales were routinely becoming the targets of activist ire. Since then, companies have worked hard to present such works sensitively, providing ‘contextualising’ events and commentary, firmly outlawing offensive make-up, taking production advice from members of the community depicted, even removing geographical specificity from a production. The operas continue to be staged, although in 2021 The Times’ opera critic declared himself persuaded that Madama Butterfly should make way for works that ‘better reflect our age’.
Flash forward to 2026 and the Telegraph has reported that the Minack Theatre in Cornwall has withdrawn a production by Surrey Opera of Delibes’s Lakmé after a complaint from one Rajan Zed, the president of the Universal Society of Hinduism. Zed, being based in Nevada, was perhaps unlikely to be attending the show but argued that theatre ‘should not be in the business of callously promoting appropriation of traditions, elements and concepts of “others”’. The Minack declared: ‘We do not condone racial or religious intolerance or misrepresentation in any form’ and expressed satisfaction that the matter had been resolved. Other companies and venues will have been watching with unease.
Operas have long been subjected to censorship. Nineteenth-century censors regarded themselves as guardians of public morality – and protectors of the powerful – and had immense control over the sorts of subjects that could be depicted. Verdi ran into trouble with Rigoletto (1851), an opera that criticises a corrupt and licentious ruler. It was commissioned for Venice, then under Habsburg control, and Verdi and his librettist Francesco Maria Piave were ordered to present the libretto to the authorities for approval. A verdict was returned that this was a work of ‘disgusting immorality and obscene coarseness’ and Piave was forced to revise the text.
Despite Verdi’s vehement objections to this affront to artistic expression, the work was eventually approved, but censorship rules varied regionally and some theatres presented bowdlerised and sanitised versions. In Naples, Rigoletto was transferred to Scotland, renamed Clara di Perth, and featured a hired assassin who did not kill the heroine but merely scratched her arm. Many of the ‘sins’ the censors discerned in the work – a body in a sack, the use of the word ‘angel’ – seem preposterous to modern eyes.
Nowadays, opera productions often feature representations of extreme violence and sexual depravity, generally at the whim of an ‘edgy’ director. In 2024, Florentina Holzinger’s opera Sancta, which included live sex, piercings and one performer having a slice of skin cut from their side (then eaten by other cast members), led to audience members in Stuttgart having to be treated for severe nausea. But if you take exception to gratuitous stagings, the theatre will simply state that trigger warnings were provided.
A rare instance of a provocative production being pulled (though later reinstated after a backlash) was when Hans Neuenfels’s version of Idomeneo for Berlin, which featured a representation of the severed head of Muhammad, was deemed to pose a public safety risk and cancelled on police advice. In a rather different scenario, London’s Hackney Empire called off a Music Theatre Wales production of Peter Eötvös’s The Golden Dragon upon learning that Chinese characters were to be sung by Caucasian singers. Here it was the theatre’s own reputation that was at stake: the casting, it said, compromised its position as a diversity champion.
John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), about the hijacking of the Achille Lauro liner in 1985 and the murder of a disabled Jewish passenger by Palestinian terrorists, has been repeatedly mired in controversy and several of the original co-commissioning theatres have never staged it. A 2014 global HD simulcast planned by New York’s Metropolitan Opera was cancelled after protests from Jewish organisations, but the stage performances still went ahead. A compromise agreement was reached between the Met and the Anti-Defamation League, the latter explaining that its biggest concern was the prospect of the opera being broadcast in countries where antisemitism was pronounced.
The sensitivities surrounding this work are easy to understand. The abhorrent events depicted were virtually current affairs at the time of composition, and the opera deals with the murder of a real person, Leon Klinghoffer, whose relatives have had their distress compounded by Adams’ work. The themes covered were inflammatory in 1991 and remain so today, with some arguing that this is an opera that legitimises terrorism. Yet despite all this, there seems to be a general consensus in the opera world that banning Adams’s work would be going too far, and it was revived in Florence just last month.
Sometimes there are scenarios where modern society will rightly expect a line to be drawn in terms of public decency – and Sancta seems to come very close to that line – or safety. The Death of Klinghoffer raises real and understandable concerns in depicting a real-life person with still-living relatives. But the case of Lakmé is entirely different. This is an instance of a previously uncontroversial core repertory work being ‘cancelled’, seemingly on the basis that, to quote the Minack: ‘it was composed in 1883 and reflects colonial and social attitudes prevalent in Europe at that time’. If an opera can be deemed unperformable on these grounds, it will be curtains for Les pêcheurs de perles, Madama Butterfly, Turandot, Thaïs, Aida, L’italiana in Algeri, Otello and many other favourites.
The precedent that has been set by the Minack is a concerning one, particularly as the decision to cancel has been prompted by a demand from a single complainer who has form. (Zed has also objected to performances of Lakmé in Monaco, Belgium and the US and the ballet La Bayadère in Norway.) There is no reason why this individual, or any other, should be given a right of veto over a company’s programming, and to cancel vast swathes of the operatic repertory in order to placate activists or mischief-makers would be utterly unacceptable. Other companies must hold their nerve.
