A tale of two opera houses

Plus, John Williams's most challenging composition yet.

This weekend I had the delight of seeing Shanghai Grand Theatre’s two-day-only engagement at Lincoln Center of Lady White Snake, a story ballet inspired by a Chinese folk tale. I anticipated technical excellence—which the dancers neatly executed—but I was enthralled by the inventiveness and seamless design of the production, which incorporated dynamic sets, video effects, and an effecting, modern plot. Directed by former San Francisco Ballet principal Yuanyuan Tan, Lady White Snake is a standout example of what a contemporary story ballet can be. Thanks to

The Dance Lens

for the recommendation!

I neglected to mention last week that I also saw The Frick’s new show, Vermeer’s Love Letters, which is on view through August 31. It’s a very modest exhibition, with just three paintings on display, but these three works are well worth the concentrated focus (and, of course, there’s the whole rest of the recently remodeled museum to explore).

Joan of Arc by Jules Bastien-Lepage (1879)

There has been a lot of discussion over the past week over the relationship between politics and culture. One of the biggest stories, I’m sure you have seen, is that Republican lawmakers, at Trump’s behest, have approved an amendment to a spending bill that would name the Kennedy Center’s opera house after first lady Melania Trump, the New York Times reported. Last week, Republican congressman Bob Onder also introduced the Make Entertainment Great Again (MEGA) Act, which proposes to change the name of the Kennedy Center—which, obviously, is named after President John F. Kennedy—to “the Donald J. Trump Center for Performing Arts.” Onder said in a statement: “I cannot think of a more ubiquitous symbol of American exceptionalism in the arts, entertainment, and popular culture at large than President Trump.” The congressman should should probably read this newsletter then!

President Eisenhower authorized the Center in 1958, when he signed the National Cultural Center Act into law. President Kennedy, a great supporter of arts and culture, helped move the project along, and in 1964—the year after his assassination—the Kennedy Center got its official name. President Johnson broke ground on construction that year, and in 1971, the Center opened. “After 171 years, the public finally heard the sounds of music tonight in the first proper opera house ever built in the capital of the richest nation on earth,” the New York Times wrote at the time of the Center’s opening performance of Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass”—a piece commissioned by Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Tickets, on that first night, cost between $4 to $15 (donors attended a more formal opening night three days later).

The Kennedy Center’s opera house is not currently named after any person. Its theater is named for President Eisenhower.

A few months ago, we discussed the complexity of naming rights: it was a plot point in Étoile (RIP), and it came up when Extinction Rebellion protested at New York City Ballet’s spring opening night. (ICYMI: NYCB performs in Lincoln Center’s Koch Theater, which is named after the deceased billionaire David Koch, a climate change denier, who, through money and power, supported the advancement of climate change denial). This can be a tricky thing to untangle: arts institutions need money, but where they get that money from can lead to unintended consequences. Both acceptance and denial of funds carry their own risks—and the Hamburg State Opera, for one, has weighed that decision and decided to accept a private benefactor to fund the construction of its new $394 million space. That benefactor, Klaus-Michael Kühne, is an 88-year-old German billionaire whose family business directly benefitted from Nazi rule and abetted its persecution of Jews: logistics firm Kühne + Nagel played a key role in the transportation of looted goods stolen from Jewish people who were sent to concentration camps or forced to flee their homes, the New York Times reported. Much of the company’s paperwork documenting this line of business was destroyed during the war and Kühne has pushed against further investigation.

The Hamburg State Opera’s general director, Tobias Kratzer, hopes that a new opera house will, at the very least, be a net benefit; the city’s culture ministry also said that before accepting Kühne’s money, it ensured that his family’s company “acknowledged its work for the Nazi regime” (like thousands of other German businesses, Kühne + Nagel has donated to the Holocaust remembrance fund, Remembrance, Responsibility and Future Foundation).

The 45-year-old Kratzer has a knack for driving younger audiences to the opera and plans to put on new versions of older works; he’s also keen on bringing context to operas that may not have aged quite so gracefully, pairing, for instance, “Madame Butterfly” with a panel to discuss its colonialist storyline.

I’m curious how artists might feel about this funding. In the U.S., for instance, countless artists, such as soprano Renée Fleming, have stepped away from the Kennedy Center since Trump’s takeover. Pianist András Schiff refuses to perform in the country because of Trump, just as he refuses to perform in Russia because of Putin and in his native Hungary because of Orbán. Musicians, he recently told the Financial Times, are “part of a society, and when the message is that we don’t care and the show must go on—what kind of message is that?”

You may have also seen that artist Amy Sherald—who you may know for her portraits of Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor—canceled her upcoming show at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. She said the museum considered removing her portrait, “Trans Forming Liberty,” from the exhibit in order to prevent pushback from President Trump. Reporting by the New York Times suggests that there may have been a misunderstanding between Sherald and the Smithsonian, but Sherald’s instincts were right: Lindsey Halligan, a special assistant to Trump, put out a statement after Sherald announced she was withdrawing her show, saying that “Trans Forming Liberty” took a “divisive and ideological lens” and “fundamentally strayed from the mission and spirit of our national museums.” The Smithsonian expressed its regret for Sherald’s withdrawal, while a White House official praised the cancellation of the show.

You do have two more weeks to see Sherald’s exhibit, “American Sublime” at the Whitney Museum, as it runs through August 10.

The Whitney is also facing pushback of its own. More than 100 artists and academics have signed an open letter defending Dr. Sara Nadal-Melsió, associate director of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program (ISP), who the Whitney dismissed in June after she put out her own open letter denouncing the museum’s cancellation of “No Aesthetic Outside My Freedom: Mourning, Militancy, and Performance,” a performance piece about Palestinian mourning. The museum also canceled the ISP, which was founded in 1968. The open letter calls for both Dr. Nadal-Melsió and the ISP to be reinstated, ArtNews reported.

In her own letter, published in late May, Dr. Nadal-Melsió wrote that the work of ISP, “has always been unapologetically engaged with the politics of its times. The ISP began amid the revolutionary energies of May 68, the movement against the Vietnam War, the state violence of Kent State massacre and fully coalesced around AIDS activism two decades later. Today, this means participants in the Program continue to think for themselves and provoke thought in others about contexts including but not limited to fascism at home and the relentless genocide being carried out in Gaza. And sadly today, this means that we also face unprecedented censorship and a threat to our foundational independence because of our pursuit of the very dialogue that makes the ISP what it is.”