National Post (National Edition)
Will opera be rocked by #MeToo scandal?
Domingo won’t be the last singer accused
Opera has always run on a liberal sexual code. Tempers and passions run high in rehearsal, physical contact on stage is intimate and visceral, dressing rooms are provocatively filled with people in various states of undress. All this is an essential part of the creative process, and it would be Pharisaical hypocrisy to claim otherwise. The idea that an end could be put to erotically motivated misdemeanours by instituting “safeguards” is madly unrealistic: one simply has to rely on common sense, good manners and basic respect.
But now this view is being tested by the sorry ruckus over past activities of 78-year-old Placido Domingo. In August, Associated Press published a story in which eight female singers and a dancer stepped forward (all but one of them remaining anonymous) to accuse him of “historic” sexual harassment; another 11 have spoken up since, again all but one unnamed.
Although he strongly “disputes” the allegations, claiming that all his relationships have been “consensual,” and acknowledging like Joe Biden that flirtatious conduct in a professional situation is no longer acceptable, Domingo has been forced to withdraw from several engagements, culminating in his dramatic last-minute withdrawal last Tuesday from a prestigious production of Verdi's Macbeth opening the season at New York's Metropolitan Opera. The press release states that he considers the dress rehearsal for this show to be his “last performance on the Met stage.” After over 700 appearances there, ranking as one of its star attractions for half a century, he must find this devastating. It is a terrible humiliation.
He is not the first tenor, and he won't be the last, to fall from grace. In 1906, Enrico Caruso was arrested for “annoying” a lady in the monkey house of the zoo in Central Park (the bench fined him $10); and Vittorio Grigolo is currently suspended while an incident said to have occurred on tour with the Royal Opera in Japan is being investigated. It should also be noted that in the past it was female opera singers who had the reputation for being sexually voracious — Dame Nellie Melba, for instance, was said to haul stagehands into her dressing room “to lubricate her throat.”
Did Domingo resign or was he pushed? It isn't clear what pressure was put on him to withdraw by the Met's management, which is hypersensitive to any issue relating to sexual harassment (last year the octogenarian British director John Copley was dismissed after claims that he had made a faintly risqué remark to a chorus member).
It is also unclear how many other organizations will follow the Met's suit — after the story first broke, Domingo went on to sing at the Salzburg Festival to great acclaim, but companies in Dallas and San Francisco have dropped him, citing “the need for a safe workplace.” (Was Domingo really a threat to such a thing?)
Covent Garden has, as yet, made no decision about his scheduled performances in Verdi's Don Carlo next summer, and his position at Los Angeles Opera, where he is artistic director, is also in the balance, pending a full report due later in the autumn. Domingo's motto is, “If I rest, I rust” and he is known to have a full diary of international engagements for several years ahead — disentangling him from commitments and contracts will be complex.
Domingo is known in the business as a ladies' man, gallant and flattering, susceptible and seductive in an old-school Mediterranean fashion, while remaining fiercely loyal and defensive of his second wife Marta. Only now, in an atmosphere where women have been emboldened to declare behaviour unacceptable, has anyone complained. Who knows whether we may learn in due course if any of the objects of his attentions may have been, to some extent, complicit.
In these circumstances, any further uninformed comment on the charges against Domingo until due process and fair investigation have taken place would be grotesquely improper, and there is a danger of the hysterical rush to judgment that has weakened the validity of several of the #MeToo and Time's Up exposes. But although Domingo is a stalwart fighter and his desire to keep performing is compulsive (regrettably so, in my opinion, as he is long past his vocal best), his career must now be effectively over. This is truly a tragic way to make his exit, but whatever the outcome, I shall remember him in the prime of his artistry and as one of the glories of opera in my lifetime.