A North Carolina public-radio station plans not to air this season’s Metropolitan Opera broadcasts of seven contemporary works, four of them by Black and Latino composers, all of them touching on socially hot-button themes.
WCPE, based in the north central Piedmont region of North Carolina (including Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill) and billing itself as “the classical station,” is opting not to broadcast:
– Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking,” which opened the current Met season. The opera is an adaptation of the Catholic nun Helen Prejean’s memoir of working with death-row inmates in Louisiana.
– Terence Blanchard’s “Champion” and “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.” The former, staged by the Met in April, is a treatment of the life of Emile Griffith, a gay boxer; the latter, which opened the company’s 2021-22 season, is based on Charles M. Blow’s memoir of his life as a Black boy in rural Louisiana. (Blanchard will lead a concert version of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” on Nov. 12 at the University of Richmond’s Modlin Arts Center.)
– Anthony Davis’ “X: the Life and Times of Malcolm X,” a recounting of the life of the controversial Black Muslim activist, who was assassinated in 1965.
– John Adams’ “El Niño” (“The Baby Jesus”), a Nativity opera-oratorio, in which Jesus is born in Southern California to a homeless Mexican migrant.
– Kevin Puts’ “The Hours,” based on a biography of the British writer Virginia Woolf.
– Daniel Catán’s “Florencia en el Amazonas” (“Florencia in the Amazon”), the story of an opera singer in search of her lost lover, with a libretto in the “magical-realism” style of the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez.
The North Carolina station’s general manager, Deborah S. Proctor, told National Public Radio that she rejected the operas because of their provocative subjects, explicit language, scenes of violence, or their being unsuited to the station’s classical format. “El Niño,” she said, is “unbiblical.”
Proctor said that not airing the productions was supported by 90 percent of about 1,000 responses to a questionnaire mailed in August to about 10,000 WCPE contributors. She added that if the station receives 2,000 responses from its supporters, it will re-analyze the results and may reconsider the bans.
She told NPR’s Anastasia Tsioulcas that the station aims to be “a safe refuge from the horrors of life.” In deciding what to broadcast, “I have a moral decision to make here,” Proctor said. “What if one child hears this? When I stand before Jesus Christ on Judgment Day, what am I going to say?”
http://www.npr.org/2023/09/29/1202425600/met-opera-wcpe-north-carolina
(via http://www.slippedisc.com)
Benjamin Dolle, the radio programming manager of VPM (Virginia Public Media), which airs Met broadcasts in Central Virginia and other regions of the state, writes in an e-mail: “VPM has always aired, and will continue to air, the Met Opera season as available to us in its entirety. Should the Metropolitan Opera change their broadcast schedule, that is beyond our control, but we do not plan to skip or alter any provided programming this season.”
The Met’s 2023-24 season of Saturday afternoon broadcasts is scheduled to run from Dec. 9 to June 8.
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