Outrage, confusion and expulsion: is this opera’s Me Too moment?

[lennygoran]

A friend sent me this article from the London Times by Neil Fisher. Regards, Len

Outrage, confusion and expulsion: is this opera’s Me Too moment?

As Plácido Domingo faces claims of sexual harassment and the tenor Vittorio Grigolo is fired by the Royal Opera House, Neil Fisher investigates a bitter clash of cultures backstage

The Royal Opera House says that Grigolo’s “inappropriate and aggressive behaviour at the curtain call and afterwards fell below the standards we expect of staff and performers”. Grigolo has been sacked from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor next summer; his replacement has yet to be announced.

It is hard to imagine Grigolo will perform in the UK again. Nor at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where he had been scheduled to sing in La traviata early next year. A statement from the Met said: “Following the Royal Opera House investigation into misconduct concerning Vittorio Grigolo and his subsequent suspension from performances there this season, the Metropolitan Opera confirms that he will not be singing at the Met this season..”

The Met also recently parted company with another tenor, the embattled veteran Plácido Domingo, who is facing allegations from 20 women of inappropriate behaviour over the past 20 to 30 years, including grabbing the bare breast of the singer Angela Turner Wilson in her dressing room at Washington National Opera while he was general director of the company (other allegations relate to his tenure as general director of Los Angeles Opera).

A number of performers alleged a pattern of unwanted advances and the offer of professional favours. A dancer told the Associated Press: “People have dropped out of the business and just been erased because of submitting or not submitting to him.” Domingo denies the allegations.

Opera is caught in the thick of the Me Too movement and the resulting waves have provoked everything from hurt to anger, confusion to incomprehension. Just as with other Me Too investigations in the entertainment world, the controversy has also highlighted a disturbing culture of secrecy and cover-ups. And while some welcome the clean-up campaign, others fear the rise of mob justice and a new form of neo-puritanism on and off the stage.

Speaking to The Times on the condition of anonymity, one of the Royal Opera’s performers in that Faust makes troubling claims about the onstage incident in Tokyo and relevant events in the past. She confirmed that it was not a chorus singer that Grigolo had “groped” (as was reported), but a dancer in a nightmarish ballet sequence.

After he grabbed her fake belly during the curtain call, “her immediate physical response was to push him away”, she says. She says a (male) chorus member then intervened to reprimand Grigolo. “But instead of just turning around and carrying on bowing, he grabbed her again and shook the belly, saying, ‘I can touch her like this if I want to.’ ” She claims Grigolo then tried to square up to the chorus member off stage and said: “I’ll meet you outside.” “It was all very confrontational.”

The anonymous performer has come forward partly to correct what she sees as attempts by Grigolo to justify the incident, most recently in an interview on Italian television, when he said that it was “just a very big misunderstanding”. “During the applause,” he said, “I always involve everyone and I brought the dancers down to the front of the stage. Smiling, I smacked the foam stomach of a ballerina.” He continued: “I heard a singer telling me, ‘What are you doing? Can’t you see she is embarrassed?’ And I answered, ‘But what are you talking about?’ All this happened in front of the public!”

This, according to the Royal Opera performer, is untrue and also overlooks what she describes as a repeated pattern of unpleasant behaviour in Grigolo’s interaction with company members. “There had been another incident in rehearsal with a different female member of the cast, an actress feeling uncomfortable with a touch and a comment that was made,” she says. “It was that same sentiment of, ‘I can touch her however I want to.’ He knew that his place as a poster boy meant that it didn’t really matter what he did — until it did matter, because it was on stage.”

While Faust is a “sexually charged opera”, the performer says, the incident in rehearsal “was not done in the way that a director would have done [it]”. And she says that other instances of inappropriate behaviour involving Grigolo and the Royal Opera go back “at least five years”, to when she claims Grigolo assaulted a make-up artist in his dressing room in Covent Garden, biting her arm. “It’s common knowledge in the changing rooms,” she says.

The performer says that she was happy with the Royal Opera’s prompt response after the curtain call of Faust, which she calls “appropriate and exemplary”. Yet she says that neither the alleged assault in Grigolo’s dressing room nor the offstage incident during Faust rehearsals were looked into and that she was not asked to contribute to the company’s investigation; nor was the actress involved in the incident in rehearsal, or any other witnesses to it.

Grigolo did not respond to the specific allegations put to him by The Times.. His manager referred The Times to a statement on his website published after the conclusion of the Royal Opera investigation. In it he says that he is “truly saddened that my behaviour was perceived to be below Royal Opera House standards. I recognise that my personality can be very exuberant at times, and I am willing to make sure that what happened will not happen again in the future.”

In a statement, the Royal Opera House said: “This is the first formal complaint that we have received about Vittorio Grigolo’s behaviour. We responded immediately to the allegations relating to Vittorio Grigolo’s behaviour during a curtain call by suspending him and opening an independent investigation. In the interests of confidentiality and the wellbeing of our staff and artists, we don’t disclose the details of individual complaints.”

A spokesperson added: “We encourage anyone who feels they have been the victim of any form of harassment to come forward safe in the knowledge that they will be supported every step of the way and that the matter will be thoroughly investigated.”

The worrying background to Grigolo’s expulsion from the Royal Opera, with the suggestion that while inappropriate behaviour was kept from the public it may have been tacitly tolerated, follows a pattern in the Me Too miasma. Where do you set the line and who is setting it? And when does bad behaviour become harassment?

A female member of the Royal Opera chorus, also preferring to stay anonymous, says of Grigolo: “He’s a bit of a dick, but I’ve never felt uncomfortable. Principals come in and some of them are dicks.”

The battle lines are being drawn. After the AP news agency’s two investigations into Domingo, the tenor’s career appears to be over in the US. In October he stepped down from his position at Los Angeles Opera, but the company has continued a formal investigation against him, which is being carried out by a private law firm — although it has not confirmed the scope of this investigation or whether its findings will be made public.

Domingo is supposed to be performing next summer at Covent Garden, as the Marquis of Posa in Verdi’s Don Carlo, but the Royal Opera says it cannot comment about the allegations against him before LA Opera’s investigation concludes.

In Domingo’s strongest comments yet on the controversy, he told the Spanish newspaper El Pais this week that “neither the accusations of harassment nor those of abuse of power ever happened . . . It is very easy these days to go against someone you don’t sympathise with, and to disseminate falsehoods.”

Meanwhile, in the rest of Europe the reaction of the opera companies that continue to work with Domingo has been more on his side. If allegations have been made, most argue, they need to be proved. Part of their case is that only two of the accusers, Wilson and another singer, Patricia Wulf, have revealed their identities, others choosing to stay anonymous.

Speaking to The Times in London last month, the intendant (director) of the Vienna State Opera, Dominique Meyer, said, “It’s not my job to ask these ladies to explain what happened — there is a legal system,” and spoke glowingly of a recent Domingo performance with prolonged ovations for the singer.

Meyer’s Austrian colleague Helga Rabl-Stadler, the president of the Salzburg Festival, told The Times at a recent event in London that Domingo was “without airs and graces, one of those rare artists who says good morning, who is always grateful. It would be unfair in human terms and wrong in legal terms to make a ‘final judgment’.”

She said that only a court of law could decide whether Domingo deserved further censure from Salzburg, where he will sing next summer. “Europe,” she added, “is dealing with it in a different way.” On Monday night in the Spanish city of Valencia the tenor’s performance in the title role of Verdi’s Nabucco was greeted with such an ovation that the newspaper El Mundo said it “absolved the veteran singer”.

Those in charge of some other European opera companies take a more nuanced view of what challenges the Me Too storm has presented. One is the inherent volatility of the art form, suggests Mary Miller, the British general and artistic director of Bergen National Opera in Norway.

“There’s something about opera — it has this vividness about the way people talk about it — that perhaps draws attention to the larger-than-life personalities, and there’s an eroticism on stage. One assumes that the woman with the cleavage in the red dress is going to snog the tenor. It is hypersexualised. It’s an erotic, violent world that opera portrays, and one can’t put it tidily in a drawer when you go home.”

For the Australian boss of the Komische Oper in Berlin, Barrie Kosky, who is also a stage director, one danger of reading too much into the news stories about alleged harassment in opera is that “it plays into the worst clichés of the audience and the general public about the art”.

Kosky says that the voices of accusers, even if they have been silent for decades, should be heard, but that lurching into crisis mode would be wrong. “Plácido Domingo is not Harvey Weinstein. There’s a morphing together of all of these men into one monstrous Frankenstein creature of predatory alpha-male macho desire, and that’s dangerous. We must look at this case by case. We cannot have the whole of the performing arts turning into Peter Grimes, where we are lynching everyone as if everything that everyone does is the same. It’s not.”

On the Domingo case specifically, Kosky is startled by some of the reactions to cases that he says have thus far led to no criminal charges. “What do we want to happen? Does Plácido Domingo get dragged through Covent Garden market while we throw fruit and vegetables at him? Should his career be completely wiped off the history books? No, I don’t believe so.”

Domingo, 78, is facing the end of a remarkably long career; in a recent interview with a Spanish online newspaper, in which he defended his behaviour as “gallantry”, he suggested he might throw in the towel in 2022. Inconveniently, however, the case of Grigolo suggests that the problem extends beyond a “dinosaur generation” of Latin lotharios.

It’s a problem that stems in some instances from the imbalances of the star system, Kosky says. “Where the singer is flying in for one or two weeks, and the ticket sales are very dependent on this singer, or this singer has a long career or a huge reputation, then it’s much easier for certain things to go astray.”

And the clash of cultures doesn’t help, Miller argues. “You would not expect a 17-year-old Norwegian girl who might not even live in a city to be able to deal with a Spanish tenor.”

Three years ago Miller had to deal with a serious incident involving under-age cast members and a performer who was subsequently deported to his home country (the incident did not take place at the theatre, but at the performer’s rented accommodation). The case was the catalyst for Miller to reconsider the company’s approach to safeguarding, and procedures were changed. But she also thinks young singers should be given the skills to protect themselves from all sorts of harm.

“Opera studios and agents and conservatoires in particular really do have a responsibility to be training artists for the world they live in. It’s not just about singing Aida, it’s about going on stage and rehearsing Aida, about dealing with everything from the singing, to the sitting in a lonely hotel room, to paying your tax, and dealing with people from different places and different generations, and knowing what to expect.

“People don’t have the toolkit they need. Human nature being what it is, I don’t think people are going to stop behaving like idiots.”

At least in the Anglo-Saxon world, however, opera houses are doing their best to idiot-proof. The Metropolitan Opera requires its artists (singers, conductors and directors) to attend anti-harassment training once a season. It is, the company says, “tailored to the non-traditional workplace of the Met, including what constitutes unacceptable behaviour in rehearsal and performance situations”.

In October the Royal Opera launched a new “values and behaviours framework” to ensure a “zero-tolerance” policy towards “harassment of any kind”. It isn’t quite as regimented as at the Met; those working on each production can expect a formal introduction by Oliver Mears, the director of opera, to explain the policy and how to raise any concerns. Both companies provide access to a confidential support line if artists prefer to report harassment anonymously.

The American tenor Michael Fabiano recently attended his first such session as a Met artist. “I’m glad it’s happening — I’m a little concerned it might go too far,” he says. What would too far be? “To the point that we’re being told that touching in a performance can be difficult.”

Fabiano is a seasoned Rodolfo in Puccini’s La bohème (he sang it when the Royal Opera’s most recent production was premiered) and is a frequent performer of the classic aria Che gelida manina (Your tiny hand is frozen).

“When I’m singing Bohème, I do have to touch the hand of Mimì, there has to be passion. We can’t sterilise our art, and I do fear that would be the result of some of this. Suddenly we’re turning neo-puritan.”

What does he think about the treatment handed to Domingo? “All I have to say is that he was one of my youth icons as a tenor, one of my heroes.. His artistry will stand the test of time.”

The conflict over Domingo is bitter and impassioned. Now that he is nearing his ninth decade and has no positions of authority, could he really be a sex pest if he were hired as a guest artist? What’s the harm?

This month, when Domingo again sang the role of Nabucco in Zurich, a critic for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper felt moved to quote his neighbour in the stalls, who when seeing Domingo’s co-star kissing him at his curtain call, commented: “He doesn’t need to come on to anyone, they come on to him!”

This was a sentiment echoed by Bryn Terfel talking to The Daily Telegraph this year. “He [Domingo] walks into a room and heads turn. What you do with that is up to you. The choice that you have to make is: which position do you put yourself in? Do you make a conscious decision to be closer to him, or to maybe try your luck out getting a role here or there? That’s up to you. You put yourself in that position . . .”

But who holds the power — and who stands to lose more? The performer who saw Grigolo’s Tokyo bust-up says she’s too worried about job security and future bookings to break her cover. Because if you won’t work with a troublesome guy, or you might complain about him, then plenty of others would perform with him and just keep shtoom? “Definitely yes. Particularly within opera, there’s just a few roles for supporting artists — and thousands of willing participants.”

She cites a “massive inequality, in many ways, within what is on the stage. Within the chorus, they have a sense of family structure, but then the lead star is just plonked in and acts within their own moral boundaries. The people who aren’t named in the programme . . . they’re obviously not making as many demands as the divas, so they’re less inclined to even think about speaking up.”

When she saw Grigolo’s behaviour, she felt she had to speak up. “It was the audacity of it, to not let it go, to not drop it and move on. Everyone on stage experienced that, and that was the shocking part of it.”

But Faust made a pact with the Devil, and the Devil promised him the world. For Grigolo at least, the world has got a lot

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/outr ... -rrl9zd3z8

[maestrob]

Insightful article. Thanks, Len.

I wonder if Domingo's USA experience will change his behavior at this late stage of the game? Certainly it's no longer tolerated, and that's a good thing. Opera may be a sexually charged world, but so is human interaction in the corporate boardroom. Power itself is a great aphrodisiac, and that exists everywhere, so I don't think opera is unique in that way.

[absinthe]

My, my.....How the pendulum swings.

[Belle]

We had a presenter at our music group about 4 weeks ago who used to sing in the chorus for Opera Australia when she was younger. She recalled having to slap the hands of men standing behind her in the chorus as she sang - and she made a huge joke of it in telling us by singing the famous Valkyries chorus, ramping up the vocalizing to demonstrate what she was doing whilst flicking away the unwanted attention!!

[maestrob]

We had a presenter at our music group about 4 weeks ago who used to sing in the chorus for Opera Australia when she was younger. She recalled having to slap the hands of men standing behind her in the chorus as she sang - and she made a huge joke of it in telling us by singing the famous Valkyries chorus, ramping up the vocalizing to demonstrate what she was doing whilst flicking away the unwanted attention!!

Yes, that's one way of HANDling it! Fortunately, it's not a joke any more, and in the future young women will be more respected.

We have a niece who joined the Navy before the turn of the last millennium, who was propositioned and then raped by her recruiter. Unable to report the incident, she had to deal with her personal feelings without any support from her colleagues (I didn't find out about this until decades later.). Nowadays, the Armed Forces are still struggling to deal with situations like this, but things are better, as soldiers and sailors are made to watch training videos on sexual harassment, all while being encouraged to report incidents. It's a never-ending battle to improve our society.

[Belle]

If they're going to have both sexes in the armed forces then it stands to reason that a benchmark of behavioural expectations is established. My biggest concern about females in the defense forces is if they're captured and imprisoned!

Up until quite recently it was nearly impossible to prosecute a charge of rape - which is an absolute outrage. The tide has fortunately turned and I note the execrable Harvey Weinstein on news footage last night with the requisite limp and physical impairment which screamed out to me "victim" and "vulnerable". The very first place which needs to be reformed is the legal system!!!

[david johnson]

Grigolo: “I’ll meet you outside.” - confrontationally. He had best be careful with that. Someone mad enough will take him up on it and leave the guy stretched out in the alley.