Kasper Holten, the outgoing Royal Opera House’s director of opera, is going back to Denmark after a six-year stint running London’s most prestigious opera company.
But not before recounting his problematic recent experiences using trigger warnings in productions. In an interview with The Times, Holten said he was inspired to experiment with trigger warnings after the backlash to a rape scene in a Royal Opera House production of Rossini’s William Tell in 2015 which was jeered by audiences and subject to vociferous online criticism.
Holten said: “I didn’t think the scene was offensive. In showing a woman abused it was trying to show what society William Tell lived in, but had I known how offensive some people would find it, I would have done some tweaks in advance. In hindsight I should have asked colleagues.”
Holten was sufficiently scarred by the experience that a year ago he had the Royal Opera House issue a trigger warning about sex and violence in Katie Mitchell’s production of Lucia di Lammermoor.
It wrote in an email to ticket buyers: “The team’s approach will lead to scenes that feature sexual acts portrayed on stage and other scenes that – as you might expect from the story of Lucia – feature violence. As a result we have updated our website about this.”
At the time, acclaimed classical music blogger Norman Lebrecht wrote on Slipped Disc: “A kind of censorship is setting in.”
Holten now tells The Times of the decision to issue the trigger warning: “It was not well handled by me. It was a little bit damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”
He added that opera audiences are becoming increasingly sensitive, to the point that he even received objections about the explicit content of Carmen, George Bizet’s classic 19th-century opera about the fiery exploits of a Spanish gypsy: “I had a complaint from a woman who said, ‘I took my teenage daughters to Carmen and I was shocked by all the sexual content.’ You do think, well it’s Carmen, surely you have a bit of responsibility for reading up on it.
“And, frankly, if you take your daughter to Carmen and are offended by her showing her thighs in the second act, what about when she’s killed in the last act—surely that’s worse? So it’s very hard to know what triggers different people. Once you start down that route any opera would need to have 20 warnings.”