The Unsung Stories of the Opera
A sexual misconduct investigation against a faculty member at Juilliard is exposing the unsafe hierarchy of power between students and faculty in opera institutions.
Opera is a work of art. The costumes exquisite, the sets decadent, and the music celestial. For a couple hours, patrons leave their ordinary lives at the door to experience the extraordinary, where one can hear, feel, and see the world at its most vivid. It can bring one to tears. Even the tragedies are beautiful.
But beauty can be deceiving; the proscenium curtain hides the stories that the opera chooses not to sing.
When the #MeToo movement consumed the media in 2017 — where a number of women in Hollywood began opening up about their abuse experiences at the hands of powerful men — the long-existing hierarchy of power between performer and producer was brought to public attention. And opera, too, was about to face its own reckoning.
In 2019, the former music director of The Metropolitan Opera, James Levine, was accused of sexually abusing a number of men — accusations which he denied until his passing in 2021. Around the same time, several women were claiming to have been sexually harassed by Spanish tenor Plácido Domingo — one of the world’s biggest opera icons, who made his claim to fame as one of The Three Tenors alongside José Carrerras and Luciano Pavarotti. Domingo, who has since received further accusations of misconduct, denies all sexual allegations against him.
But the alleged abuses of power are not limited to the stage.
Robert Beaser, the former music composition Chair of 25 years at The Juilliard School — one of the top-ranking performing arts institutions in the world — went on paid leave in December amid a sexual misconduct investigation. The day before Beaser went on leave, the Composer’s Collective began an Open Letter — which now holds hundreds of signatures — calling for Beaser to be placed on leave until the misconduct investigation is completed. Beaser — who has been under investigation for misconduct before — denies all allegations, but agreed to the school’s request of leave to protect and defend his “excellent reputation.”
When performing arts teachers abuse their power of authority, students lose their sense of agency, and in turn, enter the cutthroat industry unequipped to protect themselves. An abuse of power breeds fear — and fear equates to silence. The hierarchy of power in the arts has to be dismantled, and that process must start in educational institutions. Otherwise, students will never feel fully safe or heard.
Juilliard opera student Colin Aikins has felt unheard. “In the past, when I’ve asked about what to do if we encounter these situations in the industry, I’ve been told not to make a stink — just be hush-hush and act professional,” he said. “This is a case in point of one among many of the industry’s deeply-ingrained issues that are seeping into our training.”
The coercion to remain silent is an ever-present problem in the arts, and for students — who have yet to make a name for themselves in the industry — the anxiety of jeopardizing their future career is heightened. An article by VAN Magazine reports that a number of the individuals who came forward with allegations against Beaser were students — many who asked to remain anonymous in fear of professional retribution.
In the corporate world, there are set steps to take and designated people to talk to in any case of misconduct. That is not the case in the world of opera. “In our world, you’re in a company of 30 people, and everyone knows everyone,” said Aikins. “So even if you have someone you’re comfortable talking to about it, they’re probably friends with the person who did it to you.”
Some students feel apprehensive about confiding in faculty because of the apathetic and overly-demanding learning environment that Juilliard fosters. Natalie Lewis — a recent winner of The Met Opera competition — said her transition to the master’s program at Juilliard was extremely difficult. “I had to go on antidepressants when I started… I mean, you get picked to little itty-bitty bite-size — not even bite-size — powdery pieces,” she said. “You’re trying to make your teachers happy, oftentimes compromising keeping yourself happy and healthy.”
However, both Aikins and Lewis expressed that they feel most seen and safe by their acting professor, Mary Birnbaum. “She is the reason I’ve been able to grow at Juilliard,” Lewis said. “She’s not like the other teachers because she deals with you as the person first, and promotes us maintaining our power and dignity in a rehearsal space — it’s not just about hitting the high note.”
“It’s so scary to do what performers do — putting themselves out there and being so vulnerable,” said Birnbaum. The professor, herself, often felt uncomfortable as a student in her own performing arts training. “I try to be the kind of teacher I wish I had.”
The Juilliard professor and director — who has also worked with classical voice students at Harvard, Bard College, Mannes, and the Met Lindemann Program — tries to curate a space where her students feel safe. “We, as a class, make a code and rules for how we engage together that is comfortable for everyone,” she said. Birnbaum is aware of the pressure students are under to please and perform . “I want my students to know that my support has nothing to do with how they do on an individual day — or even in the class at large,” she said. “But I will say that that’s not a usual outlook at Juilliard yet.” Birnbaum has been teaching at Juilliard for 10 years.
The music department is making steps toward creating an environment with more equity and transparency, having hired new Associate Artistic Directors this year who, according to Birnbaum, are trying to bridge the gap between students and faculty. “It’s about the decentralization of power in the department,” she said. “And the only way it will go away is if we start to make it conscious.”
A significant effort to balance the power dynamic and ensure safety in opera school teaching would be to implement more intimacy training into the curriculum. “We want to move away from a world where there’s assumed consent — where the fact that you agreed to come into the room means that, as a performer, you will do anything asked of you — and move toward affirmative consent, where you can establish some boundaries and actually have some choices about that,” said Doug Scholz-Carlson, a certified Intimacy Director who frequently works with the Metropolitan Opera. “Theatre has a hierarchy to it, but it’s really strong in the opera world — so when you get someone new coming into the room who wants to collaborate, sometimes there’s some push-back,” he said. “We’re trying to build a better future with this work, but, you know — change is scary for people.”
The addition of Intimacy Directors in theatrical spaces is definitely a change. In fact, before 2016, intimacy training did not exist at all. This type of work — conceptualized by Tonia Sina, who founded Intimacy Directors and Coordinators — is used to reinforce communication and consent when choreographing imitated intimate acts. Since #MeToo, intimacy training has become the industry standard.
“My job is to eliminate a power dynamic between a director and performer by being a liaison,” said NYU’s resident Intimacy Director, Judi Lewis Ockler. “I’m not there to take a director’s job, or tell them what to do, or even tell them how to do it — but I do have to maintain agency for an actor and ensure their choices are supported and their boundaries are respected.”
This past fall, Juilliard brought in Intimacy Directors — like Scholz-Carlson — to hold talk-backs about intimacy training for the first time. But, according to Lewis, this work has not yet moved into the rehearsal room. “I have never worked with an Intimacy Director on a production here before, and that needs to change,” said Lewis. “We should be developing safe boundaries now, so that we know how to exercise them later.”
Scholz-Carlson believes intimacy training in schools is important because students are more susceptible to surrendering their agency. “The challenge in academia is that teachers have legitimate authority over students, so the power dynamic is even stronger than that between director and performer in the industry,” he said. “In the performing arts, a teacher can push a student into something that feels uncomfortable, but label it as a challenge for an artist — so students sort of learn that whatever their teachers say must be okay and to not trust their own instincts.”
Opera has had a troubled past. But with more intimacy training, Scholz-Carlson can see a stronger and safer opera for all on the horizon. “When opera operates as a collaborative art form where everyone is given a voice to fully express themselves, then we have created a better environment,” he said. “And if we can create that better environment, then we will create better art.”
Lewis believes the traditional hierarchical model in opera is a tradition that needs to be broken.“There’s no need to honor tradition any longer — we’ve honored it to the ground, I swear to God,” she said. “We can do better than this.”
Aikins wholeheartedly agrees. “Sometimes it feels like the world just needs to completely crumble so that we can rebuild it,” he said.
