[Dresden, August 23. Image via Getty]

DRESDEN, GERMANY - AUGUST 23: One of the first of may guests arrives for a performance of the ballet 'Giselle' at the Semper Oper opera house on August 23, 2009 in Dresden, Germany. Dresden is becoming an increasingly popular tourist destination. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

The Telegraph actually has two pieces about opera singers and weight today, apropos of a supposedly thinner crop of singers at this summer's Salzburg Festival. One article, by Andrew Hough, is a relatively sober analysis of today's "sleeker, sylph singers." While it has some infuriating bits — like "slimmer" singer Danielle de Niese blithely claiming that, "In opera we needed this breath of fresh air [...] We could not go on being elephants on stage" — it can't match White's for sheer obnoxion. White writes,

Yes opera is about the magic of the voice: an aural power that can create its own reality and make quite normal people, not in thrall to curious fetishes, find sexual allure in 20-stone Isoldes and Brunnhildes. But at the same time, opera is theatre. And for at least the past 30 years it's been ruled not so much by conductors as by stage directors who think that seeing as well as hearing is believing.

Yes, even "normal people," who would ordinarily hate fatties, can be turned into "curious fetishists" by the power of music. But maybe not enough. White also writes about a production of Turandot starring Jane Eaglen and Dennis O'Neill:

it's not unfair to describe Jane Eaglen as one of the big ladies of her profession. And when she made her entrance in this Turandot, wheeled on in what the Covent Garden stagehands call the Sweet Trolley (in honour of a former occupant of similar dimension, Sharon Sweet), enveloped in a white silk smock that got progressively voluminous as it cascaded down, she looked distinctly like a three-tier wedding cake.

Meanwhile, waiting for a bite of her in the consuming Sturm und Drang of reckless love was the diminutive Mr O'Neill, staggering around in moonboots obviously designed to add three inches to his modest stature but bestowing the appearance (and the gait) of an arthritic gnome. They sang, eventually, of grand desire. Of mutual passion. When the White Queen in the Alice stories boasts of her ability to believe six impossible things before breakfast, she speaks without experience of such a scene.

A little man in love with a fat lady? Ridiculous! But White goes beyond mere fat-phobia into an analysis of appearance in music and theater that's as reductive as it is depressing. He briefly examines the possible musical benefits of high body weight (benefits disputed elsewhere), but then concludes that "for every significant singer of beached-whale size, there have always been others of more modest proportions singing just as well." He also pays lip service to the notion that opera is supposed to be about singing, and not necessarily about what the characters look like, but he does it in a strange way:

We've [...] learned, for perfectly good reasons, not to be put out when operatic Russian generals come with Afro-Caribbean faces or if Mary Stuart looks a touch Chinese. We listen for dramatic truths beyond the colour of the singer's skin. And in the modern world that must be right.

I truly could be misreading a certain British use of the helping verb here (UK readers, enlighten me?), but that "must" seems like a strange choice to me. It almost sounds like doubt, like "gee, I guess it must be okay for a Chinese woman to play Mary Stuart, since so many of them are doing it." Regardless of such small rhetorical concerns, though, White is basically saying that it's a shame we care so much about musicians being hot, but that's just how it is. He bemoans the fact that "bimbette instrumentalists, short on talent, technique and skirt, bounce their way to instant stardom," then says, "It's depressing. It's unjust. But presentation counts."

White says television would never ask viewers to believe that "some wobbly-waisted pensioner is actually a young, romantic new boy on the block." Of course, TV and film routinely present that "wobbly-waisted pensioner" as a fitting mate for a young, romantic new girl, but White does point out a real difference — opera is one of the few performing arts in which casting has little relationship with looks. At least, that used to be the case. Now, as they struggle economically, opera companies apparently think the solution is to act like pop music labels and play up the sexuality of their stars. And of course, sexuality = skinniness. As White points out, Deborah Voigt (pictured) was reinstated as the lead in Ariadne auf Naxos when she lost weight through gastric band surgery.

White writes that opera and opera promotion "have their own laws. Probably they shouldn't, but they do." White would probably say that evolution, or the human heart, or some other popular stand-in for personal taste, makes these laws. But really, people do. People like music critics. It's a shame when one of their number, who should be promoting opera for its own sake, embraces looksism instead.

Fat Lady Sings Her Last Song As 'Thinner Opera Divas Take Over Centre Stage' [Telegraph]
Do Sexy Opera Singers Sound The Swansong For The Fat Lady? [Telegraph]

Earlier: Opera Singer Is Rehired After She Loses Over 100 Pounds Through Gastric Bypass

[Munich, June 16. Image via Flynet]

[Bregenz, Austria; June 17. Image via Getty]

BREGENZ, AUSTRIA - JUNE 17: A woman stretches prior to performing a stunt in front of a gigantic foot of the Statue of Liberty during a rehearsal for AIDA at the sea stage on June 17, 2009 in Bregenz, Austria. The premiere of Giuseppe Verdi's opera takes place on July 22, 2009. (Photo by Miguel Villagran/Getty Images)

While many industries are feeling the pinch, ballet dancers are taking the recession especially hard. Says the Washington Post,

Among the larger companies, New York City Ballet has let 11 dancers go, Miami City Ballet has laid off seven dancers in addition to getting rid of live music, and San Francisco Ballet has laid off six dancers. American Ballet Theatre is not laying off dancers; instead, its dancers union agreed to substantial contract concessions.

Of course, cultural institutions across the country are suffering, largely because donations are down, with many big spenders presumably in extremis. The Metropolitan Opera's once-healthy endowment is down by two thirds, and the company's cutting salaries and productions. The New York City Opera, meanwhile, is operating on a shoestring budget and a skeletal schedule. Opera companies and orchestras around the world are employing new tactics and cuts to keep their heads above water in a time when entertainment is often one of the first luxuries people cut.

Ballet dancers are at even greater risk, however, because the windows of their careers are shorter to begin with. It's a youth-oriented profession in which dancers are recruited right out of their teens and a young performer can't afford to lose the most fruitful years of a career in which she and her family have invested thousands of hours and dollars. Like professional athletes, dancers are at the whims of health and luck, and must balance a single-minded focus with the ever-present knowledge of the profession's precarious nature. Unlike athletes, though, professional dancers don't pull down an enormous salary, and except in the case of real stars, don't have the same kind of economic safety net.

But the jobs just aren't there. Unless one's at an institution like the School of American Ballet, the job market is as bleak as in any profession going, leading many of them, as the article states, to turn to whatever freelance dance work they can pick up - or another career path altogether. One imagines that along with physical discipline, dancers are tacitly taught to accept the pain, rejection and vagaries of the job. But usually there's an expectation that this will at least come from dancing. It is either heartening or depressing, then, to know that a ballerina just won Australia's So You Think You Can Dance.

Dancers Face A Tough Time to Land On Their Feet [Washington Post]
Board Eats Endowment, Gloom Deepens At City Opera [Bloomberg]
Royal Opera Recruits Domingo To Ride Out Recession [Reuters]
Metropolitan Opera Faces Cuts, Its Leader Says [NY Times]
Talia Fowler Wins So You Think You Can Dance Australia [News.com.au]

A Wall Street Journal interview with soprano Jessye Norman, who is heavily involved in a festival called "Honor! A Celebration of the African American Cultural Legacy," talks about the challenges of integrating the African American experience into the Classical Music world, and its fractured history. The story of Marion Anderson's 1939 barring from Washington's Constitution Hall - and subsequent concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial - is only one well-known example of a common phenomenon. Says the Journal,

The participation of African-American singers in classical music is perhaps one of the less-studied chapters in the history of American race relations. Unlike popular music, which with its danceable rhythms was considered the natural territory of black artists, the Eurocentric world of classical music represented the white establishment. It is telling that many African-American singers in the first half of the 20th century had to focus their careers around the concert repertoire, since they were barred from opera stages. Opera, with its pantheon of heroines and gods and the special adulation that divas seem to invite, was one of the last musical bastions to remain segregated.

The writer might well have been talking about Anne Brown, who died Friday at the age of 96. Gershwin personally selected Brown for the lead role in his opera Porgy and Bess. Although she'd been a star at Juilliard, operatic roles were nonexistent for an African-American opera singer at the time, and this was twenty years before the Met would cast Marian Anderson in an opera. Although the role was a plum one, it must have been a mixed blessing for Brown to learn that the only operatic lead she was allowed to interpret was one in a "black" opera by white men, however well-intended. Indeed, the Times says that in Brown's audition with Gershwin, she felt pigeon-holed: " When he asked her to sing a Negro spiritual, she blanched. She considered the request racial stereotyping, but finally sang "A City Called Heaven" without accompaniment." Despite her success in the role - Gershwin expanded the role for her, and agreed to let Bess sing the showstopper "Summertime" - Brown ultimately found American racism too much to bear and lived the rest of her life in Oslo.

As in all such things, it's not a matter of merely congratulating ourselves on how far we've come. Artists like Brown did difficult work of groundbreaking, and she was one of the fortunate ones. Says Norman:

"There was a wonderful speech that Dr. Martin Luther King made in Berlin for the opening of the jazz festival in 1964. In that speech he said that long before essayists and scholars had been writing about the problems that would develop out of a multiracial society, jazz musicians were already talking about this. They were already demonstrating that their voices were every bit as valid as any classical-music composer and speaking to the social ills of the time...And there is a poem by Arthur O'Shaughnessy called 'Ode.' In it, he talks about artists: 'We are the music-makers/[And] we are the dreamers of dreams,/ . . .Yet we are the movers and shakers.' I love that part.

In Praise Of Those Who Showed That Great Art Has No Color [Wall Street Journal]
Anne Brown, Soprano Who Was Gershwin's Bess, Is Dead at 96 [New York Times]

Though Maria Callas famously ruined her voice when she lost a lot of weight, Voigt's voice, while changed, has not worsened. "Some opera buffs and critics detect a slight loss of warmth in her sound. Others counter that her voice has gained brightness and shimmer," the Times notes.

Voigt has said that she wanted the gastric bypass for health reasons (knee problems, high blood pressure), but before she lost the weight she was a longtime advocate "of the principle that body size does not determine whether an opera singer can be dramatically compelling," the Times says. In addition, she admits that she got the gastric bypass when she did because she was humiliated by her public dismissal from Ariadne. Knowing Voigt's history with the role, it's hard to feel that her return to Covent Garden is a complete triumph; it feels more like a prolonged case of Stockholm Syndrome.

Second Date With A Little Black Dress [New York Times]
Deborah Voigt: The Return Of The Little Black Dress [Youtube]
With Surgery, Soprano Sheds A Brünnhilde Body [New York Times]