Glyndebourne came to the Royal Albert Hall last Wednesday with Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro (semi-staged, sung in Italian, with English surtitles). The opera also came, so I’m told, with a health warning, or rather, what is known as a “trigger warning”. The Marriage of Figaro depicts unwanted sexual advances, and aggressive behaviour. Don’t say you weren’t told.
Such premonitions can rouse feelings in the audience ranging from mild amusement, to unabashed hilarity; from irritability, to frank outrage. It’s health and safety gone mad I tell you. What a snowflake society! But such warnings are not new. For as long as I can remember, the BBC has advised that some programmes “may disturb those of a nervous disposition”. Quatermass and the Pit.
Still, perhaps the opera world has gone a little far on this occasion. The Royal Opera House is warning the Tosca audience, not that Puccini’s opera depicts torture and execution, which it does, but that the interval bell, summoning people to their seats, is frightfully loud. And apparently people can be threatened by the sound of applause. It is suggested that clapping be replaced by silently holding one’s hands in the air and gyrating them, a procedure that would certainly scare the hell out of me.
I’m not unduly exercised about trigger warnings. I knew, and respected, somebody who would never listen to Mozart’s Cosi fan Tutti because the opera seems to encourage infidelity. It never bothered me. But then I can’t speak Italian. But if the truth be told, when it comes to opera, I’m completely philistine. The plots are frequently such a tangled web as to be unfollowable; and besides, they last for ever. I really can’t see me going back to hear Götterdämmerung again. I sat in agony in a very uncomfortable seat in the gods of Glasgow’s Kings Theatre for five hours. Five hours! Life’s too short. Give me an orchestral concert every time. Ninety minutes of music, with an interval.
And I don’t really “get” recitative. It’s the classical world’s version of rap. It’s there to advance the convoluted plot, if you can be bothered. I’d rather the cast just spoke the dialogue, as in Beethoven’s Fidelio. Listening to recitative on the radio you can hear all these hackneyed modulations on the jangling harpsichord, against the background of thumps and bumps as people galumph about the stage. I don’t think Ralph Vaughan Williams cared much for the harpsichord. Didn’t he describe it as the sound of two skeletons copulating on a tin roof? Or am I doing him a disservice? But I shouldn’t be this dismissive. Some opera I deeply admire. Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle (tellingly, only in one act). And I love Madame Butterfly, but I might hesitate to go to see it again. It’s just too painful. You see, it really needs to come with a trigger warning.
I remember the late Sir Terry Wogan could be very dismissive of BBC announcements commencing, “If you have been affected by issues raised in this programme, you can seek advice and counselling by calling this number…” But then Sir Terry was a national treasure and therefore could be as politically incorrect as he liked. You might argue that issuing a trigger warning goes against the element of surprise that might be crucial to the impact of a play or a film. Think of the notorious shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho. The only advanced warning at the time was that the film was rated “X”, which meant it was horrific, or carnal, or both. Psycho depicts a brutal murder made all the more horrific by the scything downbows of Bernard Herrmann’s string orchestra, sul ponticello, resembling the repeated stabbing actions of a knife attack. What on earth would have been the reaction of the first audiences, who had no idea what was coming? One can only imagine the voluble response of a community of people taking moments to digest and process what they had just seen, and then trying to settle down again. Hitchcock must have anticipated such a reaction, because he allows time for the audience, with a series of silent shots focussing on Janet Leigh’s inert body on the shower floor, the bloodstained water trickling away. It’s curiously beautiful. A catharsis.
Something similar is evident in the Roman Polansky film of Macbeth. Now there is a film that really ought to have come with a trigger warning. It is a depiction of absolute evil, and when I recognised early on in the film that that was what it was going to be, I had to make up my mind whether to get up and leave, or stay the course. I stayed the course. I’m glad I did, because I think that I garnered some inkling of what Aristotle meant by “catharsis”, the purgation of pity and terror. Towards the end there is a lightening of atmosphere, literally. The outdoor sets acquire greater natural light.
I wonder why the daily news doesn’t come with a trigger warning. After all, especially these days, it’s pretty bad. Granted we may be pre-warned about some particularly graphic piece of television footage of an act of violence, or its aftermath. But the newsreader does not say, “You may not wish to hear about the overnight attacks in Kyiv, or the relentless bombing of Gaza City.” The facts are allowed to speak for themselves. That is not to say they are not sometimes concealed, no doubt more often than we know, for political reasons.
So I guess trigger warnings have a place. But you may easily see how they could get out of hand, and lose potency. Like crying “wolf”. The second movement of Haydn’s Surprise Symphony contains a surprise. You have been warned.
jamescalumcampbell 