In October 2023, an official responsible for programming at North Carolina public radio station WCPE rejected broadcasting several operas being produced this season at the New York Metropolitan Opera.  An article, now scrubbed from the net, entitled “North Carolina Public Radio Station Rejects Contemporary Operas” explains that the programmer cited her Christian faith and viewpoint that the operas are vulgar and inappropriate for children as reasons for declining to broadcast them.

The viewpoint intolerance and anti-Christian cultural fascism of NPR and institutions such as the N.Y. Met are fanatical.  It was intolerable that a single dissident public radio station would be allowed to decline to broadcast opera believed to be disrespectful to the Bible.  There was a firestorm of outrage against the station official, and her decision was quickly reversed.  From a National Public Radio (NPR) article:

WCPE’s protest came at a time when the Metropolitan Opera is eager to showcase its commitment to recently written operas and works from outside the traditional canon of music written by white men. Three of the operas that WCPE planned to reject in the 2023-24 season were written by Black or Mexican composers. This past April, WCPE also refused to broadcast another Met-produced opera written by a Black composer that included LGBTQ themes.

This victory lap paragraph encapsulates the cultural ignorance, bigotry, and stupidity of the progressive mind and why NPR should not get a penny of taxpayer money.

The first point of ignorance is that race and sexuality are “contemporary” themes.  Race and sexuality are the oldest hats on the rack of American culture.  These political fixations have been choking the life out of American art and culture for fifty years.  Consider the so-called smash hit Hamilton.  Its initial casting call was pure racism — no whites could try out.  Is there memorable music from Hamilton?  Of course not.  But the racialist Hamilton was the must-see for the American sheeple because of mindless obeisance to left-wing race dogma.

Furthermore, it is understandable that non-European Americans would commit cultural appropriation upon the life of Alexander Hamilton.  Only Europe could have produced such a visionary of freedom and constitutional law in the 1700s.

Regarding the assertion that the anti-moral deconstruction perpetrated under the gaslighting letter-salad LGBT is “contemporary,” one can only assume the writer has not watched television, gone to a movie, or seen a play for fifty years to regurgitate such senselessness.  Endless sexuality dogma is deadening to art because sexuality in itself cannot be made profound or artistically interesting.  A line of drag queens a mile long is still artistically one inch deep.

I was recently at the Frist Museum in Nashville, Tennessee.  Like hundreds of museums across America, it has sunk into the quicksand of left-wing political tedium.  The featured exhibit, “Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage,” will soon be changing to “Art of Imperial Expansion, Conquest and Colonization in Spanish America.”  Ironically, any African- or Hispanic-American artist of exceptional talent would be passed over unless he were exploring political themes of racial identity and oppression.

Human beings are not LEGO people formed in white, yellow, red, brown, and black.  Recombinant DNA and human interaction with emergent reality create a staggering range of individual differences, wherein lies the glory of artistic creativity.

Victor Davis Hanson has said the worst thing Obama did was to revise the unique, successful struggle of African-Americans into a formula of every race against “whites.”

The left-wing project of shoving Americans into monochromatic race-color categories and starkly defining the “white” perpetrator/non-white victim dynamic fosters enmity, irresponsibility, and weakness in America.  Its deepest purpose is to absolve people, especially young people, of service to our nation.  Why should you protect and preserve a racist nation or its racist Constitution?  If Anastasia Tsioulcas can be pleased with herself for preferentializing the race and sexuality of opera composers, she doesn’t have to make any real sacrifices or selfless service for anyone.  How convenient for she/her/hers.

The second fallacy in the NPR gloat is the puerile belief that it is positive for opera to replace “white” men and “white” culture through race and sexuality affirmative action for composers.  Racializing art is destructive to all forms of creativity.  But in grand opera, it is absurd.  One hundred percent of the works in the Operatic Canon, beloved all around the world, were born of European civilization.

“White” civilization does not exist.  Every opera offered by the Met this season is based in European musical traditions of composition, singing, and theatricality, including those in which singers are acting roles of African-American, Mexican, and homosexual characters.  There has never been a “white” opera, or a “white” composer creating the “white canon.”  Referring to people as “white” is a dehumanizing political construction used against Europeans and American descendants of Europeans.  Regarding grand opera, it is denigration of genius.  The morons at NPR don’t grasp that an opera set in Egypt is not an Egyptian opera.  An opera composed by someone who has some African ancestors is not a “black” opera.

Great opera arises in civilizations with stable, written religious, moral, and cultural traditions; positive recognition of creative genius; and love of composition, orchestration, singing, acting, and dance.  Only two continents in world history, Asia and Europe, have had the spiritual, moral, and cultural integrity to scale this artistic achievement.

In the winter of 2023, I saw the Shen Yun Opera.  It is a stunning collection of dances, songs, and vignettes based on Buddhism and Taoism, and described as traditional Chinese opera before communism.  The Cultural Revolution, driven by a dictator’s maniacal fear of transcendent beauty and truth, devastated traditional Chinese art and culture.  The United States is also undergoing a neo-Maoist Cultural Revolution, where the symbols and expressions of patriotism and traditional culture are belittled and destroyed.

Here are concepts for two truly modern one-act operas.  One is tragic, opera seria: Ashli Babbitt.  The other is farsa comica: The Biden Family.  An opera about the government assassination of an Air Force veteran would be riveting to the aching hearts of the American people.  The Biden Family would help us laugh at the mess we are in.

One of the most common structures of the greatest operas, especially of the Romantic period, is the inevitable death of the heroine.  Anna Bolena, Juliet, Norma, La Traviata, Mimi of La Bohème, Aïda, Carmen, La Gioconda, Manon Lescaut, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, Dialogues of the Carmelites — all are powerful, doomed heroines.

Many of these operas were banned or suppressed after they were written, but there is no death scene in all of opera more shattering than the government murder of Ashli Babbitt.  It could be staged as a reminiscence by Ashli’s mother, Micki Witthoeft, sung by a contralto, of the seasons of her daughter’s life: Air Force service, deepening concern for America, and death by assassination.

The Biden Family, set in the White House, features the babbling president in his diaper, led around by Dr. Jill, as Hunter and bagman brother James confuse their bags of cocaine and Chinese diamonds.  A cackling Kamala sings to Buttigieg, “I was that little girl.  I know highways are racist, but what are they for?”  From Alejandro Mayorkas’s aria: “The Border is secure/not a single hole/it’s so tight/to not admit a soul.”  From secretary of defense Lloyd Austin: “Transgender soldiers are the best!  Men who dress like women fight better than the rest!”  And through it all, the ghosts of the Obamas haunt every room.

These two operas could be staged together, like Cav and Pag, bringing millions of Americans to feel and heal and laugh and celebrate the supreme inheritance of European opera.

Dr. Stevens invites you to read her essay “Where is Israel’s Andrew Jackson?” on Substack.

Image: Fougerouse Arnaud via Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0.