ALGEMEINER
by Ben Cohen
June 22, 2014
Here are three operas that won’t get staged at the famed Metropolitan Opera (Met) in New York City anytime soon.
“Omar.” The story of a young Iraqi man who was beaten and tortured by Saddam Hussein’s secret police. Omar’s experience, relayed in the Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya’s superlative book “Cruelty and Silence,” exposes a world in which, as the lead character says, “Words can kill. Words are what got us in the end, not anything we did.”
“A Persian Grandmother in Tokyo.” Based on a short memoir published by a young Iranian writer in a collection entitled “Arab Spring Dreams,” the opera relates the story of an Iranian family reunited in Tokyo, a city that provokes the grandmother to observe ironically, “these infidels have created their own heaven on earth.”
“The Last Days of Hugo Chavez.” Set in Havana, where the late Venezuelan tyrant Hugo Chavez died of cancer, the opera focuses upon the exploitation of Venezuela’s natural resources by the Cuban regime through its depiction of the relationship between Chavez and the Castro brothers, Fidel and Raul.
These operas aren’t coming to the stage of the Met, or any other prestigious venue, because, so far as I know, they haven’t been composed. And even if they had been, who would dare stage them? Wouldn’t liberal sensibilities be offended by a reminder of the grotesque violence inflicted by Saddam’s regime, given that the Iraqi dictator was removed by the hated George W. Bush? Wouldn’t efforts to lift the U.S. embargo against Cuba be compromised by a portrait of the dirty dealings of the Castro brothers? Wouldn’t an opera that tackles the sensitive subjects of Islamism and Muslim identity result in the kinds of angry demonstrations brought about by the publication, in Denmark, of the infamous cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad?
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