Questioning the ‘classics’

Radio: The Blue Woman

BBC Radio 4

Programmes such as The Blue Woman are so valuable in equipping creators and audiences with the tools to view works of art in a critical way.

I have always loved opera and it never occurred to me to question it. So listening to The Blue Woman, where female opera creators and scholars discussed misogyny in opera, made me reconsider my attitude.

Thinking back, I always liked the parts of opera where women were portrayed as confident, strong and/or happy, but I accepted the parts where something awful happened to them (e.g. sexual violence or femicide) without thinking about the way the women were portrayed. Of course art is not there just to portray positive issues. Awful things do happen; the challenge is to highlight them without normalising them. This can be achieved by creating fully-developed, realistic and relatable female characters as Director Mathilde López in her recent production of Bizet's Carmen.

Thinking of my musical education and wider societal attitudes in Greece, 'classical music' was almost worshiped, which might explain some of my attitudes. I even remember being told that women cannot be as good musicians and composers as men. Having never written music despite having studied it for 16 years makes me really admire the Opera creators depicted in The Blue Woman. Psychologist Maciej Karwoski has suggested that strong creative self-concept is responsible for motivating people to be creative, and that was to the fore here. 

I loved the extracts from the new operas, as well as the explanation behind their creative choices; using the richness of opera to vividly illustrate psychological reactions to trauma, for example the chorus of breaths that depicted emotions in response to violence. This is important – musicologist Luis Velasco-Pufleau has written about how music can be a very effective vehicle for reinforcing simplified narratives.

I wonder what the enablers for innovation were for these creators, and what role education and the wider cultural climate played in it. Programmes such as The Blue Woman are so valuable in equipping creators and audiences with the tools to view works of art in a critical way, rather than simply accepting them as 'classics'. Being critical about cultural artefacts and putting them into their cultural context could help potential creatives from different backgrounds question the extent to which they can relate to the artefact, dare to imagine themselves as creators and even create things that are authentically relevant to themselves. I cannot wait to watch these operas one day, as well as yet-to-be written operas that might be inspired by this critical outlook.

Reviewed by Dr Aspasia E. Paltoglou, Manchester Metropolitan University