Almost every article discussing the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg discusses her love of opera. I can’t remember when I read as much about opera in news articles. As a big opera fan myself, I have been somewhat unsure about the tone of some of these articles. At times, they read as if her opera fandom was something peculiar, a personal eccentricity, unlike, say, if Justice Ginsburg had been a huge Bruce Springsteen fan or never missed a Washington Nationals baseball game. Those are understandable obsessions. But opera is something else entirely. I think it is fair to say that the vast majority of Americans know absolutely nothing about opera, and don’t know how to respond to it. It remains, I believe, the only sort of music that it is still fair game to make fun of. There’s a commercial making the rounds this summer with the typical opera stereotype, a screeching heavy-set woman. You make fun of rap music, you’re a racist; you make fun of country music, you’re a coastal elite, you make fun of opera, and well, how else are you supposed to respond to opera?
Let’s deal with that stereotype. Opera does sometimes have people on stage that do not conform to our current standards of the acceptable body types for stage performers because sometimes singers with larger bodies have the best voices, and I am always so happy to see them triumphing over our body image prejudices. And opera has generally been a place where, on stage at least, men and women are relatively equal, because an opera without higher voices is leaving out half of the human vocal range. (That is not to say that men didn’t try to keep women off the operatic stage, whether by the use of male altos or counter-tenors, or for several centuries, castrating boy sopranos to keep their voices from breaking. The lengths to which men will go to marginalize women is truly frightening.)
I think this one of the reasons why opera appealed to a young Ruthie Bader in the early 1940s. It’s not just that women are on stage, they often dominate. They are tough, they are powerful; operatic heroines don’t simper, they don’t defer to men; they are priestesses, goddesses, princesses. And their voices often just cut through conventional masculine rationalizations. To be sure, almost the entire operatic repertoire has been written by men. But the Verdis, Wagners, and Puccinis all knew that for their operas to work, there had been a rough equality of the sexes on stage, in a way you did not find in most American films of the 1930s and 1940s.
And there is another reason why a young Ruth Bader was attracted to opera. Jews have long had a determination to make opera, so often seen as the pinnacle of “high culture,” their own. American Jews in the middle decades of the twentieth century refused to be excluded from any area of American life. Entertainment has long been a relatively easy area for outsiders to make their mark; like Jews in classical music in 19th century Europe, and Blacks in 20th century jazz. And this continued in mid-century America with pianists like Horowitz and Rubenstein, violinists like Elman, Heifetz, and Milstein, and opera singers, many of them from New York City, like Jan Peerce, Richard Tucker, Leonard Warren, Roberta Peters, and Brooklyn’s own Beverly Sills. But Jews would conquer opera in their own way; they would do so without falling prey to the snobbery associated with opera, which so often carried with it more than a whiff of antisemitism. The Marx Brothers’s 1935 film A Night at the Opera, with its parody of Il Trovatore’s gypsies and anvils, brings a Jewish sensibility to opera, at once respectful and mocking. Jews, eastern European Jews, were determined to democratize opera. When in 1943 Mayor La Guardia announced the creation of the New York City Opera, the so-called “people’s opera” company, a less haughty rival to the Metropolitan, the era of Jewish-American opera had arrived. This was the era when Ruth Bader Ginsburg became an opera fan.
If high culture was one arena of American life that Jews were determined to make over their own image, another was the law. There has been much written about this, and I suppose it comes down to the fact that excluded minorities seek from the dominant majority fairness and even-handedness, and the law has long been seen as the one institution in any society that has fairness and balanced scales as an organizing principle. There has been written about opera, law, and Justice Ginsburg, and most of it is not very persuasive, but I would say two things. First, as you know there has been a longstanding debate in the law for decades between proponents of “originalism” and “the living constitution.” It is a debate with many aspects, but one of its main contentions is how to treat the law as tradition. Well, I will leave this to the lawyers, but when it comes to opera, there is no debate. Opera must be a living tradition, or it will die. There is a standard repertoire that opera fans enjoy, a sort of cultural stare decisis, but it must be expanded and change over time. This doesn’t only mean new operas, it has meant, in recent decades, discovering older baroque operas, new stagings of familiar classics, as a way of making sure the familiar doesn’t become hackneyed, and innovations extend the tradition, rather than overturn it. And before the tradition can be challenged, it must be embraced. Opera fans, especially Jewish opera fans, must come to terms with the operas of Richard Wagner, one of the greatest of composers, one of the worst of men, who was undoubtedly one of the most influential shapers of mid nineteenth-century German antisemitism. I think Justice Ginsburg came to the law knowing much about the complexities of evolving traditions, and how to think about both embracing and transforming a legal system that was profoundly misogynistic.
And Justice Ginsburg knew that while there often was “poetic justice” in opera, most operas do not have happy endings, and in that way too opera is like the law, and like life. And we are living through a very unhappy ending right now. And the news is too distressing to think about too deeply, and I have been listening to some of her favorite operas with strong heroines, like Puccini’s Tosca. I bet she often imagined herself as Tosca, vengeful and larger than life, taking the law into her own hands, rather than wait for the courts to render, in the fullness of time, their considered verdicts. At the end of the second act, Tosca murders Scarpia, a lecherous, power-mad reactionary in Rome during the Napoleonic era, using the secret police to torture and execute those who dared to challenge him. (But Scarpia is so evil that he manages to kill people after he is dead, like Tosca, but that is another story.) But Tosca has a moment of frightened triumph, realizing the magnitude of what has done, and realizing that she has not only murdered Scarpia, but she has destroyed his aura, his hold over his captive populace. After having stabbed Scarpia, who was trying to rape her, Tosca looks at his dead body, and can only say, “E avanti a lui tremava tutti Roma!” Before him, all Rome trembled. What would Justice Ginsburg want us to do today? To wield our metaphorical daggers wisely. She will not have a vote in the coming election, but we do, and fight for justice, to hope for poetic justice, and to be sure to vote on November 3rd, and make sure that your vote is counted. No more trembling.