Opera, Ballet and Chalamet

“There is something almost perfectly emblematic about our generation in the manner in which the recent backlash over Timothée Chalamet’s remarks on ballet and opera has been handled by the media: which is to say, it was not handled at all, but it was consumed. Articles and comments born of frenzied and short-breathed excitement, jostling for position appeared in a matter of hours, all of them producing a (slightly) different variation on the same essential question: what was said, how dare he say as much and what does the internet think? All the while, the more interesting question and the one which might have, under better circumstances, animated a thousand earnest column inches went unasked. That question being: is he right? Chalamet is an actor of evident talent and considerable cheekbones who has appeared in a number of genuinely celebrated films. He is not, so far as one is aware, a musicologist, a choreographer, or a cultural critic. That his views on ballet should have generated the volume of noise they did tells us considerably more about the pitiful state of our cultural discourse than it does about ballet or opera. Matters have been arranged such that “the celebrity” is the prism through which many see culture refracted, and this has been done so comprehensively and thoroughly that when a genuine controversy about the vitality and future of an art form briefly flickered into view, the press and commentators instinctively swatted it aside in favour of the more comfortable sport of criticising a famous face’s opinions. And yet the question refuses to go away, precisely because it is not really a question about Timothée Chalamet at all. It is a question about us. What do people actually value when we claim to value opera or ballet? Are these art forms truly in decline, or have we simply made the category error of confusing declining audiences with declining worth? Attendance figures are a poor guide to the necessity of art. The critic’s proper task, one might have thought, was to make that case; to explain not merely that these works exist but why they matter, and why the loss of them would be a loss of something irreplaceable in the human record. These are the art forms which artists chose to ask their largest questions, about love, mortality and the gods. That this case goes largely unmade tells us as much about the state of criticism as it does about the state of the art. Opera, to speak candidly, is not dying. It is, perhaps, being disfigured – with great efficiency and considerable self-congratulation – by a particular strain of producer who has decided that the way to save these works from “irrelevance” is to make them mean something different from what they once meant. We have seen, in recent decades, a peculiar orthodoxy take hold in the great houses – the orthodoxy of the Concept, the Director’s Vision, the bold reimagining – which proceeds from the assumption that an audience’s intelligence is best served by being told, repeatedly and at great expense, that everything they thought this piece was about was wrong, and that the real Parsifal is, in fact, a metaphor for impotence, best conveyed by a set consisting entirely of rot and costumes depicting aged nakedness. The genius of these works, of Wagner or Verdi, which have outlasted every social upheaval, every shift in taste and every confident declaration of their obsolescence lies precisely in their completeness. They were conceived whole, and they do not require rescue, least of all by being placed in a brutalist housing estate, and the suggestion that a work requires such relocation in order to remain “relevant” to contemporary audiences is a profound insult both to the composer and to audiences. It implies that beauty, without the mediating hand of novelty, cannot speak for itself. This is false, and has always been false, and the audiences who continue to fill houses when these works are portrayed with love and intelligence rather than (and often in spite of) condescension know it to be false. The public backlash to Chalamet’s remarks was, at least, evidence of something heartening: that people care. The fury, the counter-fury, the passionate defences mounted on social media by those who adore these art forms and resented their apparent dismissal – all of this suggests that the audience is very far from extinct. It is, perhaps, simply waiting to be trusted, and waiting, it might be added, for a critical culture less enamoured by novelty and more willing to advocate for these works on their own terms rather than apologising for them. What does the future hold? That depends, I think, on whether we can recover the confidence to believe that great art requires nothing from us except our full attention; not our updates, not our reimaginings, not our famous actors’ hot takes, and certainly not our pity. The art is not dying. It is we who lack the patience to listen.

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