Creating probably more disquiet than audience disappointment, a Cambridge student opera has been added to the cultural cost of existing conflicts. In this case, that between Hamas and Israel. “Whilst it may seem Cambridge is a world away,” wrote the director, cancelling a production of Handel’s Saul, “there are people who live in our colleges and households who are facing unimaginable difficulties as they watch the situation unfold.”
While, if the relevant production were an opera inescapably connected with the current bloodshed – The Death of Klinghoffer, for instance – this might have been persuasive, the case for cancelling an English oratorio first staged in 1739, seems less clearcut. Freely derived from the Old Testament, it follows the downfall of the Israelite people’s first king, Saul, believed to have led them, until his defeat by the Philistines, about 3,000 years ago. In brief: Handel’s account, with words by Charles Jennens, begins after David, initially Saul’s favourite, has killed the giant Goliath with a pebble. It ends – albeit on an optimistic note – after Saul has brought death and defeat on himself, his family and his people.
We meet also an impressive sorceress, the Witch of Endor, who, on Saul’s orders, summons up his dead mentor, the prophet, Samuel. Barrie Kosky’s magnificent production of 2015 added to this wild tale a debauched and dancing Georgian/Saulian court.
Saul has fascinated – well, fascinated outside Arts Council England – for Handel’s transformation of this remote, often absurd biblical content into psychologically complex tragedy. In an all-family implosion that echoes – or originally, prefigured – King Lear’s, he becomes insanely jealous of David, a giant slayer with a sweet, lyre-playing side.
So it’s not obvious, even given the current horror and the (sporadically) heightened sensitivities characteristic of much academic life, what “parallels” (to quote the Cambridge University Opera Company, CUOS) between art and life were so obvious as to demand comprehensive community protection.
Its director, Max Mason, says, not wholly enlighteningly: “We came to the unanimous conclusion that our production was not in the place to fully confront the issues that have striking synchronicity with the ongoing Middle East conflict.” Striking, that is, to Mason and his team. Though if the final rallying cry of the Israelites to “Go on” – also understood as an expression of Georgian ambitions – is considered central, you can see how Saul could be narrowed down to something geopolitically resonant. For the “synchronicity” between today’s and Saul’s Middle East to be unmissable suggests, however, that what the CUOS cancelled was not so much Handel, as its own interpretation and, by the by, the understanding that artistic expression can and sometimes should disturb. In an interview with Varsity magazine, Mason explained “that by exploring a Jewish identity narrative he plans to bring this baroque opera ‘kicking and screaming’ into the modern day”. The loss to Handel enthusiasts is all the more incalculable.
Not only in respect of this Saul: how safe are Handel’s other oratorios featuring unpalatable scriptural content? Soon, the Royal Opera House will stage another biblical piece, Jephtha, in which Handel again made the mistake of not anticipating 21st century responses to a victorious prehistoric Israelite (although it may help that he defeated the Ammonites, not the Philistines).
Already advised, by the Arts Council’s boldly opera-resistant chief executive, Darren Henley, that established companies must change (ie, disappear) so the art form can “become exciting and meaningful”, its surviving creators may note, from artistic self-censorship in Cambridge and elsewhere, that enough exciting meaningfulness is as good as a feast. Where, on the continuum between too safe and too synchronous, are they advised to alight?
Irrespective of audience sensitivities – in fact, even if Handel and his collaborator had decided in 1738 to make Saul more of a teachable moment for audiences in 2023 – isn’t this what trigger warnings were invented for? Or has their usefulness in Cambridge diminished after over-application on literature, including Little House on the Prairie? If so, maybe a simple announcement, offering refunds alongside warnings of this particular Saul’s intentions would have allowed artistic expression for the CUOS, while protecting the nervous from something presumably more distressing than the news.
That is if warnings are in order given how many students now appear, contradicting what proves to be a wholly unfair reputation for fragility, to be infinitely more robust, or demanding of robustness, than much of the wider population. Certainly, when student bodies debate whether or not Israel should be erased with annihilating intifada, older civilians may wonder if improvements like trigger warnings, no debate, safe spaces, sensitivity readers, a proper understanding of rolled eyes and other micro-aggressions, and the repeated exhortations to kindness learned from academic communities, always came with an unspoken exclusion where the feelings of Jewish people, of whatever affiliation, are concerned. Either way, should most of this advice be retired, being evidently outdated and/or ineffectual?
In Cambridge the oratorio’s cancellation happened the same week that a student union debate urging Palestinian solidarity featured calls for “a mass uprising” along the lines, one speaker explained, of “the first intifada”.
That it comes, also, after Ukraine’s request for the boycotting of Tchaikovsky and other Russian composers, after a non-Russian’s novel set in Russia was self-censored, and after the Frankfurt book fair cancelled an award ceremony for a Palestinian-born novelist, identifies the CUOS’s cancellation, which was nationally reported, as a more than parochial student tangle.
While it’s increasingly familiar to see the virtuous suppression of art excused – due to blameless motivation – any unfortunate resemblance to censorship by monocultural tyrants, the Cambridge students drift further still from creative integrity, cancelling Saul because it might be, you gather, allegorically dubious. Saul is not actually about Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas, but it kind of might be, mightn’t it? Or be, as CUOS put it, pre-cancellation, beneath a content warning (“may contain spoilers”): “a work of eerie prescience and political insight”. Enough, anyway, to get you cancelled in Cambridge.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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