Beyond the Trigger Warning: Teaching Operas that

Depict Sexual Violence

Kassandra L. Hartford

I
n November of 2014, in the midst of continuing debates about trigger warn-
ings on syllabi in a series of articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education,
and just ahead of the now-retracted Rolling Stone article on a violent rape
at the University of Virginia, I went to the Metropolitan Opera’s production of
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.1 I sat in my usual seats—row G of the balcony—and
found myself seated in the middle of a class visit from what I later learned was
a local college. Judging from students’ reactions, I expect most of them were
unfamiliar with the plot of Lady Macbeth. A lively performance featuring the
gifted Eva Westbroek elicited more gasps of horror and surprise, more sudden
movements in seats, and more wide-eyed exclamations beginning with “Holy,”
than I had yet encountered at the Met. These were particularly pronounced in
the infamous finale to Act I, staged in this version as a literal deflowering: a red
rose rising over Katerina and Sergei marked the scene as one of passion. From
conversations at intermission, it was clear that students were stunned not by the
scene’s sexual violence but rather by its—to them titillating—sexual content.
As we left the opera, I turned to the person next to me to ask if she found this
reading strange: after all, in this scene, Katerina exclaims “Let go!” again and
again over a frenetic, violent orchestral gallop. “Well,” she said, “it seemed like
Katerina wanted it, so it didn’t really bother me.”

1. Laurie Essig, “Trigger Warnings Trigger Me,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March
10, 2014, http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2014/03/10/trigger-warnings-trigger-me/;
Sarah Roff, “Treatment, Not Trigger Warnings,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 23,
2014, http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2014/05/23/treatment-not-trigger-warnings/;
Mason Stokes, “In Defense of Trigger Warnings,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 29,
2015, http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2014/05/29/in-defense-of-trigger-warnings/;
Sabrina Rubin Erdely, “A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA,”
Rolling Stone 1223 (2014). The article has been retracted, but can still be accessed online at the
following archive link: http://web.archive.org/web/20141119200349/http://www.rollingstone.
com/culture/features/a-rape-on-campus-20141119?page=7.

Journal of Music History Pedagogy, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 19–34. ISSN 2155-1099X (online)
© 2016, Journal of Music History Pedagogy, licensed under CC BY 3.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
20    Journal of Music History Pedagogy

By contemporary legal definitions, the actions of the last scene in the first act
of Lady Macbeth constitute rape.2 Katerina does not consent: she repeatedly asks
Sergey to leave. She informs him that he is frightening her. When he grabs her,
she repeatedly tells him to let her go. Yet I had just sat through a performance
in which the audience—including a group of college students present with an
instructor—failed to recognize this as a rape scene. Perhaps even more concern-
ing, I actually heard an audience member articulate one of the most damaging
myths about rape in response to the production: that women secretly want it.
As an opera goer and an opera lover, I have no wish to discourage students
from going to an opera or from having the kind of deep emotional engagement
with it that the students attending this performance had. Yet the extraordinary
sensory power of opera—the power of an art enacted in time, live, before us—
gives it a unique power to affect us. It is designed to do so: that is precisely what
Schiller points to in his essay “The Stage as a Moral Institution.” For Schiller, the
stage is not just, as his title suggests, a moral institution—one that “pronounces
a terrible verdict on vice”—but also “a guide for civil life,” one that teaches us
by example about socially appropriate behaviors.3 Few of us in the world of the
twenty-first century expect the theatrical or operatic stage to serve as the kind
of moral compass Schiller imagined more than two hundred years ago. And yet
because of its power, opera can shape the way students think about, respond
to, and feel about contemporary issues. The reactions that I saw demonstrated
that, for at least some audience members, the Met’s production of Lady Macbeth
of Mtsensk perpetuated rape culture. What is “rape culture”? Bonnie Gordon
describes it as an ideology that “normalizes rape as part of a larger system of atti-
tudes and understandings of gender and sexuality.”4 It does so in part by foster-
ing a body of myths about rape that encourage victim blaming and shaming and
that tacitly sanction perpetrators. Common rape myths include the assertions
that a woman’s manner of dress may suggest that she is “asking for it”; that most
women are raped by strangers; that women cannot be raped by their husbands

2. Although states do report the crime somewhat differently, the Uniform Crime
Report’s statistics—those used to measure crimes across states by institutions such as the
Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation use the following definition:
“The penetration, no matter how light, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object,
or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.”
Office of the Attorney General, “Attorney General Eric Holder Announces Revisions to the
Uniform Crime Report’s Definition of Rape,” Jan. 6, 2012, http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/
attorney-general-eric-holder-announces-revisions-uniform-crime-report-s-definition-rape.
3. Friedrich Schiller, “The Stage as a Moral Institution,” in Dramatic Theory and Criticism:
Greeks to Grotowski, ed. Bernard F. Dukore (Fort Worth: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974),
441, 442. The text is reprinted from Schiller, Complete Works, vol. III (New York: P.F. Collier &
Son, 1902). The translator is anonymous.
4. Bonnie Gordon, “Why We Matter,” Women in Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture
19 (2015): 119.
 Beyond the Trigger Warning    21

or boyfriends; and that women say no when they mean yes. If we understand
that Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk—at least in some stagings and without prior
critical commentary—can perpetuate rape culture, what does that mean for
the opera’s place in our classrooms? Must Katerina Ismailova—one of the most
compellingly written female characters in twentieth-century opera—necessarily
be cast aside? And how are we to deal with other canonical works in which sex-
ual violence figures? It is hard to imagine even an introductory class in music in
which operas appear and in which sexual violence, or the threat of it, is entirely
absent. For example, one popular textbook, Thomas Forrest Kelly’s Music Then
and Now, features three such works, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Berg’s Wozzeck,
and Bernstein’s West Side Story; another well-respected introductory text, Joseph
Kerman and Gary Tomlinson’s Listen, features all three and Rigoletto.5
In this article, I suggest that we need not abandon these operas. Rather, I want
to argue that it is possible to teach these works in such a way that we not only avoid
perpetuating rape culture, but also work to transform it—an idea borrowed from
the influential edited collection Transforming Rape Culture.6 The conversation
about trigger warnings in higher education circles in recent years has focused on
the needs of trauma survivors. The purpose of a trigger warning is to alert those
who have experienced trauma to discussions, texts, and media that may cause
them to re-experience trauma, in order that they may better prepare emotionally
for the experience or, if necessary, absent themselves from the discussion. Yet by
their very nature, trigger warnings are issued for those who have experienced
trauma. In confining the way we speak about sexual violence in classrooms to
survivors, we can easily overlook the ways that such scenes affect the remainder
of our students. In essence, that is, we risk failing to reckon with the broader
problem of rape culture when we simply issue a trigger warning—which is why I
propose here that we must think beyond the trigger warning.
I outline here four strategies for approaching sexual violence in opera.
First—and most importantly—sexual violence must be named as such. As I
show, this suggestion is well-supported in both feminist theory and research
in the social sciences. Second, instructors can prepare students for such dis-
cussions and allot classroom time for the reaction to and processing of these
issues. Third, instructors can be cognizant of the ways that particular produc-
tions shape students’ understanding of an opera’s meaning; they must choose
productions carefully and discuss these productions with students. Finally, I
suggest that it is important to identify campus partners among the staff and
faculty and to create dialogues about the best practices in conjunction with

5. Thomas Forrest Kelly, Music Then and Now (New York: Norton, 2013); Joseph Kerman
and Gary Tomlinson with Vivian Kerman, Listen, 7th ed. (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2012).
6. Emilie Buchwald, Pamela R. Fletcher, and Martha Roth, eds., Transforming a Rape
Culture: Revised Edition (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2005).
22    Journal of Music History Pedagogy

those campus partners. By thinking more holistically about the ways that we
respond to operatic depictions of rape, I assert that we can retain important
and powerful works in the courses that we teach, stimulate students to engage
critically with operatic texts and relevant contemporary issues, and work to
change rape culture on campus.

Naming Sexual Violence: Theory and Practice

In Transforming a Rape Culture, feminist advocate Carol J. Adams notes that “in
the absence of naming violence and understanding the dynamics of sexual vic-
timization, it is difficult to believe victims, even though they usually understate
the abuse.”7 For Adams, the goal of naming sexual violence is to draw the issue
out of the shadows in which it hides, and to make it easier both for survivors
to come forward and for them to find advocates who will believe them rather
than dismissing their experiences. Yet naming sexual violence in the classroom
has a secondary purpose: it can clarify what the term means for students. As
psychology professor Renae Franiuk notes, “Consent is the key issue in cases
of sexual assault, and research shows that many people do not fully understand
this term in the context of sexual situations.”8 Franiuk’s claims are supported by
a wealth of new research that locates particular obstacles in gender differences
in students’ understanding of consent and in the fact that even victims tend not
to recognize experiences of sexual assault as such when they do not adhere to
“rape scripts”—that is, a relatively narrow conception of rape that aligns with
predominant rape myths (i.e., rapes happen outside, rapists are strangers).9

7. Carol J. Adams, “ ‘I Just Raped My Wife! What are you Going to Do about It, Pastor?’:
The Church and Sexual Violence,” in Transforming a Rape Culture, ed. Buchwald et al., 80.
8. Renae Franiuk, “Discussing and Defining Sexual Assault: A Classroom Activity,” College
Teaching 55, no. 3 (2007): 105.
9. For example, Jozkowski et al.’s recent research study notes gender differences in hetero-
sexual college students’ understandings of consent: while women indicate that they tend to
grant consent verbally, men tend to interpret consent through body language, a communication
gap that opens the possibility of sexual assault, “as nonconsent that is not recognized and hon-
ored by a partner could lead to sexual assault.” This work echoes the findings of earlier research
by Terry Humphreys regarding gender differences in the negotiation of sexual consent. Cleere
and Lynn have examined the ways in which internalized “rape scripts” have led many unac-
knowledged victims of sexual assault to characterize experiences that met the definition of
sexual assault as “a serious miscommunication.” These results are particularly concerning given
that Cleere and Lynn’s research indicated that acknowledged and unacknowledged victims held
similar levels of psychological distress in response to these events on all measures except PTSD.
Jozkowski et al, “Gender Differences in Heterosexual College Students’ Conceptualizations
and Indicators of Sexual Consent: Implications for Contemporary Sexual Assault Prevention
Education,” The Journal of Sex Research 51, no. 8 (2014): 909–10, 913; Terry Humphreys,
“Perceptions of Sexual Consent: The Impact of Relationship History and Gender,” Journal of
Sex Research 44, no. 4 (2007): 313; Colleen Cleere and Steven Jay Lynn, “Acknowledged Versus
 Beyond the Trigger Warning    23

How might this change pedagogy in music history classrooms? First, we

as instructors must question received wisdom and take a critical look at the
synopses of the operas we teach. The current Grove Music Online summa-
rizes the last scene in the first act of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk by noting that
Katerina “succumbs to [Sergei’s] seduction.”10 Yet Katerina’s text in the libretto
simply does not support that reading: she asks Sergei to leave, she tells him he
is frightening her, and she repeatedly asks him to let go. Musicologists often
refer to the scene as a seduction or as an “ambiguous” scene, but it is a textbook
example of express verbal nonconsent. My use of the phrase “textbook exam-
ple” here is advised: Franiuk describes a strategy for helping undergraduate
students understand the meaning of consent by asking students to rate whether
or not a given situation constitutes a sexual assault. One of her situations—a
date rape in which a woman tells a man she does not wish to have sex, and
he continues despite her protestations—mirrors the scene in Lady Macbeth.11
Franiuk’s undergraduates all correctly identified her date rape example as a
rape, a first-to-fourth degree sexual assault in the state of Wisconsin, where the
study was conducted.12 Confronted with the same interactions in opera, musi-
cologists do not do the same.13 And yet the arguments for reading the scene
as anything but a rape rely upon the myths of rape culture: that women, and
particularly Katerina, secretly want to be raped; that women, and particularly
Katerina, cannot be raped by a man they have been attracted to, and Katerina
has been attracted to Sergei in Act I, scene ii; that women’s—and particularly
Katerina’s—sexual fantasies center around rape; and that Katerina’s desire for
“passionate embraces” should thus be read as a desire to be raped—in short,
that Katerina says no when she means yes.
One might suggest that the simplest solution to this problem is to avoid
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which has generated a host of controversies in dif-
ferent eras. The damning Pravda review that sidelined the work for decades
Unacknowledged Sexual Assault Among College Women,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 28,
no. 12 (2013): 2594, 2604–05.
10. Laurel Fay, “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” Grove Music Online, ed. Deane
Root, http://www.oxfordmuisconline.com/subscriber.article/grove/music/O002507.
11. Franiuk, “Discussing and Defining Sexual Assault,” 105
12. Franiuk, “Discussing and Defining Sexual Assault,” 106.
13. In a review of a 2007 Canadian Opera company production, for example, Herman
Trotter notes that “the handsome hired hand Sergei . . . with only perfunctory resistance beds the
wild Katerina” (24). Arthur Jacobs and Stanley Sadie note that Sergei seduces Katerina “without
much effort,” which one might attribute to the dated nature of the text if it were not consistently
reproduced in more contemporary writings: Charles Osbourne’s The Opera Lover’s Companion,
for example, describes the scene as a “passionate embrace” and notes that the men in an ear-
lier scene are “playfully molesting Aksinya.” Herman Trotter, “Shostakovich: Lady Macbeth of
Mtsensk,” American Record Guide 70, no. 3 (2007): 24–25; Arthur Jacobs and Stanley Sadie, The
Limelight Book of Opera (New York: Limelight Editions, 1996 [1984]), 510; Charles Osbourne,
The Opera Lover’s Companion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 404, 403.
24    Journal of Music History Pedagogy

responded not to concerns about the sexual violence depicted at the end of Act
I, but rather to the obscenity of the explicitly sexual music that accompanied
the scene.14 While Richard Taruskin has described the anonymous reviewer as
“puritanical,” he elsewhere voices his own very different set of concerns about
the opera, pointing to the fact that Katerina and Sergei’s ruthlessness in pursuit
of their own happiness is disturbingly reminiscent of the broader approach
of Stalin’s Soviet state.15 The sexual violence in Lady Macbeth—not only in
Katerina’s rape but also in Aksinya’s sexual assault—might seem like the straw
that breaks the camel’s back, a final fatal flaw that dooms the work to obscurity
(at least within the confines of the music history curriculum).
As I suggested above, however, these issues arise in many of the operas that
we teach in introductory and survey classes. Ironically, these operas become
most problematic when well-meaning authors and editors use euphemisms
that obscure the opera’s content. The well-respected Burkholder, Grout, and
Palisca text provides one such example. It summarizes the opening of Don
Giovanni thusly:

Leporello, Don Giovanni’s servant, laments his sufferings in an opera-buffa

style aria, with a touch of aristocratic horn calls when he declares his wish
to live like a gentleman rather than a servant. He is interrupted by a clamor
as Don Giovanni emerges from [Donna Anna’s] house, where he has tried to
have his way with her.16

By Donna Anna’s own account of that incident, in “Or sai chi l’onore,” she finds
a cloaked intruder in her bedroom at night. She briefly takes him to be a known
suitor, Don Ottavio, but soon realizes her mistake. He makes advances, and she
resists, physically and violently—first by screaming and calling for help, and
then by “struggling, twisting, and turning” against Giovanni’s embrace until
she frees herself of the intruder and pursues him into the night.17 What Donna

14. “Chaos Instead of Music,” in Strunk’s Source Readings in Music History, Vol. 7: The
Twentieth Century, ed. Robert P. Morgan (New York: Norton,1998), 1397–99.
15. Taruskin describes the opera as “a profoundly inhumane work of art.” He continues on
to note: “Its technique of dehumanizing victims is the perennial method of those who would
perpetrate and justify genocide, whether of kulaks in the Ukraine, Jews in Greater Germany,
or aborigines in Tasmania. So, one must admit, if ever an opera deserved to be banned it
was this one, and matters are not changed by the fact that its actual ban was for wrong and
hateful reasons.” Richard Taruskin and Christopher H. Gibbs, The Oxford History of Western
Music: College Edition (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 961; Taruskin,
“Shostakovich and the Inhuman,” in Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical
Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 509.
16. J. Peter Burkholder, Donald Jay Grout, and Claude V. Palisca, A History of Western
Music, 9th ed. (New York: Norton, 2014), 554.
17. The translation is from Burton D. Fisher, ed. and trans., Mozart’s Don Giovanni (Coral
Gables, FL: Opera Journeys, 2002), http://site.ebrary.com/id/10075776. The original Italian is
 Beyond the Trigger Warning    25

Anna describes is not a callous lover who seduces women and leaves them:
she describes an attempted rape, from which she escapes only with consider-
able physical struggle. While the first half of Donna Anna’s exchange with Don
Giovanni happens offstage, there is little reason to doubt her account, which is
entirely consistent with the rage she shows in the opening scene.18 A History of
Western Music is hardly alone in its description of the scene, however. Kerman
and Tomlinson note that Don Giovanni “commits crimes and moral sins—and
not just against the woman he seduces,” a phrasing that draws attention to Don
Giovanni’s flawed moral compass but that covers over his attempts to rape both
Donna Anna and Zerlina.19
With a summary that acknowledges the possibility of seduction or rape,
Taruskin and Gibbs’s account in The Oxford History of Western Music: College
Edition is the most straightforward about the events that transpire on stage.20
And yet even that description, which opens with the possibility of seduction, is
not likely to resonate with students’ understandings of rape in the twenty-first
century, precisely because the opening scene in Don Giovanni resonates so
deeply with the “rape scripts” that students know. 21 To the virtuous noble-
woman Donna Anna, Don Giovanni is a masked stranger and an intruder in
her home; she only later realizes that he is an acquaintance. She struggles with
him violently, even pursuing him into the street once she has broken free of his
grip in an attempt to ascertain his identity. Rather than allowing his identity to
be revealed and facing punishment, Don Giovanni murders her father in front
of her. A summary of these events as a frustrated seduction is at odds with the
campus messaging that students are likely to learn elsewhere in their college
education, feminist writing on rape culture that has made its way into the main-
stream media, and in recent and well-publicized changes in the legal definitions
of rape and sexual assault. Liane Curtis has suggested studying the opera in its
entirety in order to work through these issues in conventional summaries—
an approach that is rewarding but time-intensive, particularly in survey and
introductory-level courses, where there is much material to cover.22 Yet even
the simple and practical measure of filling out our summaries of the opera and
acknowledging sexual violence more explicitly can have a measurable impact.

“svincolarmi, torcermi, e piegarmi.”

18. Further, as Julian Rushton notes, there is little musical evidence to cause us to doubt
Donna Anna’s account. Julian Rushton, Don Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1981), 102.
19. Kerman and Tomlinson, Listen, 196.
20. Taruskin and Gibbs, Oxford History of Western Music, 446.
21. Cleere and Lynn, “Acknowledged Versus Unacknowledged,” 2603.
22. Liane Curtis, “The Sexual Politics of Teaching Don Giovanni,” NWSA Journal 12, no.
1 (2000): 121.
26    Journal of Music History Pedagogy

The power of naming rape and sexual violence in such scenes, and draw-
ing attention to the myths about sexual assault that underpin readings of these
encounters as seduction, is supported not only by feminist thought but also by
research in the social sciences. One research study indicated that while students
exposed to a story depicting rape as an erotic experience had a greater accep-
tance of rape myths, including even a paragraph-long textual debriefing had
a statistically significant effect in lowering their acceptance of these myths.23
This research suggests that taking the classroom time to acknowledge that a
scene enacts rape, and to point out that the real-life consequences are different
from those portrayed in the opera, may have a measurable effect on students’
perception of the myths of rape culture.
To those who might fear that we are judging the past by present standards,
I should note that my suggestions do not preclude a historically informed
approach to understanding the opera’s depiction of sexual violence. A number
of scholars working in Classics have successfully designed projects that asked
students to think critically about the depiction of rape in ancient texts. By ask-
ing students to compare modern and ancient definitions of rape, encouraging
them to think about the etymology and translatability of the term rape, and
focusing attention of commonalities and differences in ancient and modern
understandings of gender and power, instructors in Classics are tackling texts
rife with sexual violence in ways that offer opportunities for deeper intellectual
engagement and greater contemporary relevance in the eyes of students.24
What might that mean for teaching an opera like Lady Macbeth? Musicologist
Elizabeth Wells’s article “The New Woman: Lady Macbeth and Sexual Politics
in the Stalinist Era” offers this kind of historical grounding, contextualizing the
depictions of the sex and violence in this opera in Soviet discourses of its era.25
Wells’s analysis positions Lady Macbeth in the context both of high rates of sex-
ual violence and debates about what the “New Woman” might mean in the early
Soviet era, demonstrating the resonance between Shostakovich’s own ideas and
that of the Soviet feminist Alexandra Kollontai.26 Wells points to historical
details, noting that Aksinya’s assault in Act I, scene ii, was widely understood as
23. Neil M. Malamuth and James V.P. Check, “Debriefing Effectiveness Following Exposure
to Pornographic Rape Depictions,” The Journal of Sex Research 20, no. 1 (1984): 8. While this
is an older study, Malamuth and Check’s research continues to be cited in the social sciences.
See, for example, Lee Ann Kahlor and Dan Morrison, “Television Viewing and Rape Myth
Acceptance Among College Women,” Sex Roles 56 (2007): 729–39.
24. See Rosanna Lauriola “Teaching About the Rape of Lucretia: A Student Project,”
Classical World 106, no. 4 (2013): 686; Yurie Hong, “Teaching Rape Texts in Classical
Literature,” Classical World 106, no. 4 (2013): 671–73; Elizabeth Gloyn, “Reading Rape in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses: A Test-Case Lesson,” Classical World 106, no. 4 (2013): 678–79.
25. Elizabeth Wells, “ ‘The New Woman’: Lady Macbeth and Sexual Politics in the Stalinist
Era,” Cambridge Opera Journal 13, no. 2 (2001): 163–89.
26. Wells, “ Lady Macbeth and Sexual Politics,” 179.
 Beyond the Trigger Warning    27

a rape at the time of the production’s premiere.27 It is thus striking that Aksinya
and Katerina sing the same motive on the same pitch in their interactions with
Sergei during Aksinya’s assault and Katerina’s so-called seduction.28 Wells’s
work thus suggests that critically interrogating the sexual violence in an opera
may, in some cases, help us better understand the opera’s musical and dramatic
text and context.
One common objection to describing or staging the scene as a rape is that
it defies Shostakovich’s intention. In a recent review of both Martin Kušej’s and
Robert Jones’s productions of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, with De Nederlandse
Opera and the Royal Opera respectively, Marina Frolova-Walker notes that
Jones’s staging of the Act I Finale —as a “side-splittingly funny caper of mutual
consent”—is “in keeping with Shostakovich’s original version, whose obscene
trombone glissandos had to be removed from the score before its initial publi-
cation.”29 Frolova-Walker’s review thus suggests that Jones’s reading of the scene
is more in keeping with compositional intent. Yet here there is scant evidence
for reading Katerina’s consent, or lack thereof, precisely because the argument
centers on the trombone’s phallic gesture, which tells us much about Sergei’s
response but little about Katerina’s. The parallels in Aksinya’s and Katerina’s
musical and textual language in their refusal of Sergei’s advances suggest that
these kinds of claims may overstate our knowledge of Shostakovich’s intent.
Shostakovich juxtaposes a dirty joke in the trombone and a calculated repetition
of one vocal line and the broader musical style of what Rena Moisenko deemed
“perhaps the most revolting scene in the entire opera,” in which “shrieks of
pain of the raped girl intermingle with coarse and cynical comments from the
crowd of onlookers.”30 The frenetic orchestral gallop, which has often been read
simply as lusty, can equally be read through its musical correspondence both

27. Wells, “ Lady Macbeth and Sexual Politics,” 168.

28. Wells, “ Lady Macbeth and Sexual Politics,” 181.
29. Marina Frolova-Walker, “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: Bleak Tragedy or Black Comedy?
(review).” The Opera Quarterly 25, no. 1–2 (2009): 152. Frolova-Walker’s reading suggests—
throughout—that she accepts the myths of rape culture, and that these myths influence her
appraisals of the operas at hand: she notes that “Paradoxically, it is the stronger and more
knowing woman of the Amsterdam production who is raped . . . while the awkward girl of
the ROH production is ready and willing” (155). Frolova-Walker fails to acknowledge that
this is “paradoxical” only if one assumes that a “stronger and more knowing woman” is less
likely to be raped than one who more closely matches an “ideal” rape victim, who “wears the
unsexy, girlish clothes of a virgin” (155). Further, Frolova-Walker’s account of Act I, scene iii
as “side-splittingly funny” reads somewhat differently when one juxtaposes it with the earlier
scene with Aksinya, during which the crowd laughs uproariously as she cries “Oh, you swine,
my breast’s covered in bruises! The shameless brute, he’s pinched my breast all over.” The crowd
declares this so funny that they may “split [their] sides.”
30. Rena Moisenko, Realist Music: 25 Soviet Composers (London: Meridian Books Ltd.,
1949), 203–04.
28    Journal of Music History Pedagogy

to Aksinya’s rape and Sergei’s flogging, underscoring the violence of the act.31
If, rather than instructing students in a received interpretation that attempts
to smooth over these complexities, we encourage them to seek evidence from
the score (and here, the libretto, which is co-authored by Shostakovich), we are
able to avoid projecting a set of troubling ideas that may or may not reflect the
composer’s own concerns into the work.
In Don Giovanni, which has a longer and richer interpretive tradition, these
questions become more pressing. Recent scholarship has suggested that some
of the gendered readings of Don Giovanni in the past represent a tendency that,
at best, engaged insufficiently with Mozart’s own contexts and at worst, slipped
into outright misogyny, as in the claim that “it would be beneficial to [Donna
Anna’s] personal growing-up if she had been pleasantly raped by Don Juan.”32
Kristi Brown-Montesano argues persuasively that much of the interpretive tra-
dition surrounding Don Giovanni, in which Don Giovanni is a heroic figure
and Donna Anna is secretly in love with him, is as deeply rooted in E. T. A.
Hoffman’s nineteenth-century reimagining of the work as it is to Mozart and
DaPonte’s opera.33 Yet such challenges do not come exclusively from explicitly
feminist scholars like Brown-Montesano. Mary Hunter has similarly shown
that a tendency to read Don Ottavio “essentially as a wimp” emerged out of
Hoffman’s reading, which contrasts “the forceful manliness of Don Giovanni”
with a “feminized Ottavio.”34 Hunter’s own analysis suggests that Don Ottavio is
better read through the discourse of “noble simplicity,” which turned in part on
“extraordinary restraint in a situation where extravagant expression . . . would
be ordinary.”35 From this perspective, Don Ottavio is not gendered as a weak or
effeminate man, but rather, marked as an ideal nobleman in the expectations
of his class and time precisely through the sharp contrast to Don Giovanni’s
excesses. In very different ways, Hunter’s, Brown-Montesano’s, and Wells’s
arguments point to the fact that ideas about gender performance and conven-
tions for sexual roles are shaped by particular historical and social contexts and,
in many cases, closely tied to class or social status. This example illustrates the
danger in speaking for composer intention in broad strokes in our discussions
of these operas: without sustained study of the gender dynamics and roles of
the opera’s time, we risk projecting the gendered conventions of our time onto
the opera—and identifying them, once thus projected, as the composer’s intent.

31. Wells, “ Lady Macbeth and Sexual Politics,” 168, 180–81.

32. William Mann, quoted in Kristi Brown-Montesano, Understanding the Women of
Mozart’s Operas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 12.
33. Brown-Montesano, Understanding, 11.
34. Mary Hunter, “Nobility in Mozart’s Operas,” Art and Ideology in European Opera: Essays
in Honor of Julian Rushton, ed. Rachel Cowgill, David Cooper, and Clive Brown (Woodbridge:
Boydell Press, 2010), 190.
35. Hunter, “Nobility,” 186.
 Beyond the Trigger Warning    29

Because these operas deal with a theme of contemporary relevance for our
students, acknowledging the issues at work may in fact spur students to a deeper
critical engagement with these operas than they might otherwise have. In my
most recent introductory course in Western concert music, I required students
to select one of the four operas that we had studied in class, to listen and watch
a production of the opera in its entirety, and to write a short response. Taken
collectively, the papers on Don Giovanni were the strongest that I received: stu-
dents engaged more deeply both with the libretto’s text and the music than they
did with other operas. In class, we had studied the opening scene, “Or sai chi
l’onore,” and the finales to Acts I and II. In class discussion, we had examined
the theme of sexual violence both in the opening to Act I and in its finale. For
students, this opened questions about the contrast between Don Giovanni’s
superficial charm and the violence of his actions throughout the opera, and
this made them more attentive to other issues of power throughout. More than
one student, for example, had rich interpretations of Don Giovanni’s interac-
tions with Leporello, turning attention to the ways in which Don Giovanni’s
relationships with social inferiors were plagued by some of the same issues as
his interactions with women. Further, students clearly realized the relevance of
the issues examined in opera to their lives on campus: one theater major, for
example, critiqued a number of elements in the staging she had seen and pro-
posed an effective contemporary staging of Don Giovanni on a college campus.

Planning, Preparation, and Reaction

The second intervention that I suggest unfolds in two stages: preparing stu-
dents for difficult materials and allowing them classroom time and space for
reactions. I do not use trigger warnings marked as such on my syllabi, in part
because that is not part of institutional culture at my current college or the
university where I previously taught. I do, however, prepare students for poten-
tially disturbing materials ahead of time, through a combination of annotations
in the syllabus and short verbal commentaries both at the course’s beginning
and in the class session that precedes our discussion of a work. Unlike a tra-
ditional trigger warning, my explanations and annotations acknowledge both
the opera’s difficult themes and its importance. I also leave room for students
to enjoy opera. For example, when I teach Don Giovanni, I often note that one
of my former students, a jazz performer who was a fan neither of opera nor of
classical music, studied Don Giovanni and became a convert: she asked for tick-
ets to a live performance at the Metropolitan Opera for her next birthday and
joined the college’s symphony orchestra the following year. This warning allows
students to prepare themselves for the experience of responding to an opera
that treats themes of sexual violence, and, if necessary, to request an alternate
30    Journal of Music History Pedagogy

assignment ahead of time—although I have never had a student ask for one. It
also prepares students for difficult material in a way that addresses one of the
primary criticisms of trigger warnings: namely, that they prepare students to
understand the material they are about to study as in some way harmful.36 This
strategy opens a window of opportunity to discuss opera’s emotional complex-
ity and the intensity of our engagement with it. Further, it leaves students room
to engage with difficult operas—even to love them—without becoming apolo-
gists for their treatment of sexual violence and gender roles (and, by extension,
issues of race, colonialism, or class).
My pedagogical strategy focuses equally upon discussion in response both
to the assigned materials and to in-class listenings and viewings. On days when
students have been assigned reading or listening that discuss sexual violence, I
begin class by eliciting students’ responses to them with an open-ended ques-
tion such as, “What are your reactions to this opera?” This allows students who
have found materials difficult, frustrating, or disturbing to express those con-
cerns immediately, and defuses tensions because students are sure that both
their classmates and I have heard their concerns at the outset. When such con-
cerns or responses result from a misunderstanding of the assigned material
or a misreading of a text, it allows for discussion that helps to focus students’
reading comprehension and textual interpretation. When students disagree,
it encourages them to practice the skills that are at the core of music history
courses: developing an interpretation of a musical or musical–dramatic text,
finding the evidence to support that reading, and framing it as an argument.
I continue this exercise with each in-class listening and viewing assignment
for the day, which helps to ensure that students who might struggle with the
material have ample opportunities to reflect and debrief.
In an interdisciplinary course for non-majors that I taught recently,
“Representing the First World War,” I asked students to watch the entirety of
Berg’s Wozzeck. I had warned the students (all non-majors) that the opera was
violent, but had left alone the question of the ambiguous Act I scene between
Marie and the Drum Major. The first student who spoke drew attention to
the apparent power differential between Marie and the Drum Major and to
the Drum Major’s aggressive posturing and language. Drawing upon these
elements, she suggested that the scene was best understood as a rape, since
Marie’s ability to consent was impaired by the class and power differential
between the two characters and her consent was not affirmative. The student’s
observation prompted a lively discussion. Students pointed to Marie’s appar-
ent concession—“it’s all the same to me,” she says, after a lengthy protest—and

36. Ellen Kaplan, “Trigger Warnings Scare Students When They Should Be Gently
Guided,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Aug. 11, 2014, http://chronicle.com/article/
Trigger-Warnings-Scare/148351.
 Beyond the Trigger Warning    31

debated whether that constituted affirmative consent. Ultimately, the majority

of my students understood this as a rape, a consensus they reached after draw-
ing attention not only to Marie’s text but also to the violent brass outbursts at
Marie’s “Lass mich!” (“Let me go!”) and her ascent into the high register for
“Ruh mich nicht an” (“Don’t touch me”), which read to them more like a shriek.
Responding to a student’s concerns about the potential sexual violence in the
scene thus led directly to a thoughtful discussion in which students responded
directly to both textual and musical elements, drawing evidence from the
opera to support their readings. One of the concerns that has been aired about
trigger warnings specifically is that they forestall critical thinking and censor
curricula.37 As this example demonstrates, however, I have found that a modi-
fied trigger warning, and a carefully prepared discussion of difficult materials,
has precisely the opposite effect. My students—both male and female—often
deeply engage with these works and the themes they present, which resonate
with broader campus conversations and concerns.
Preparing students for the conversations that we will have and allowing
them time to debrief in class acknowledges the emotional impact of this pow-
erful idiom, even as it encourages them to think critically about works that
make audiences uncomfortable—sometimes in productive ways. Indeed, there
is much to be gained from teasing out the line between objecting to or draw-
ing attention to materials that make one uncomfortable and censoring them.
This can be particularly productive in a discussion of Lady Macbeth. Students
often encounter only a short excerpt from or summary of the debate over Lady
Macbeth. Yet if one assigns both the review itself and a section of the opera, and
allows students to form their own reactions separate from the Pravda review and
debates about censorship, it opens room for critical thinking about music, drama,
and questions about opera’s social function. This can lead students to examine
why the plot unfolds as it does, to consider what function a scene that makes
us uncomfortable might have, and to exploit opportunities to put present-day
concerns in dialogue with music history. Thus, it allows students to appreciate
Lady Macbeth—or similar works—in ways that are much more complex (and
here, of course, I echo Liane Curtis’s suggestions on teaching Don Giovanni).38

37. See, for example, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, “The Coddling of the American
Mind,” The Atlantic, Sept. 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-
coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/; Craig Klugman, “Trigger Warnings on College
Campuses Are Nothing But Censorship,” Pacific Standard, Dec. 22, 2015, https://psmag.com/
trigger-warnings-on-college-campuses-are-nothing-but-censorship-a71cf8de272e#.wy7xe4z2b.
38. Curtis, “Sexual Politics,” 121.
32    Journal of Music History Pedagogy

Selecting Productions

One of the challenges in dealing with these operas is deciding whether to show
stagings of these operas and, if so, which stagings to show. Opera is a powerful
idiom precisely because it encompasses multiple sensory domains. It is also a
remarkably flexible genre; an innovative staging of an opera, like Chereau’s Ring
production, can rework the most problematic elements in a text; an unsuc-
cessful one can exacerbate them. Yet what kind of staging is successful in this
context? It might seem like the best staging for a class is the one in which the
presentation is least disturbing—one like last fall’s Met production of Lady
Macbeth of Mtsensk. Yet the audience reaction I described at the opening of
this paper suggests the problem with this kind of staging. If we show a staging
in which a scene that meets contemporary legal definitions or rape is presented
as titillating or pleasurable, we risk reifying the myths of rape culture. Showing
productions that show sexual violence for what it is will make students uncom-
fortable—but sexual violence should make students (and us) uncomfortable.
That is to say, this kind of discomfort is productive and thought-provoking.
The alternative—productions that stage rape as scenes of passion—encourages
audiences to consider the events as not-rape, and thus to accept a broader body
of myths about rape that enable rape culture.
This is not to suggest by any means that Regietheater is off the table. In upper-
level classes, I often discuss operatic stagings with students. When students
have had several opportunities to discuss and critique particular productions in
class, with an eye to the ways different productions shape meaning, I ask them
to imagine a staging of a work that raises thorny issues of contemporary rele-
vance. I have not yet asked students to consider this approach in a work treating
sexual violence, although I have asked them to imagine a staging of a work
with themes like anti-Semitism, racism, and colonialism. By asking students to
consider how they might stage a given work, the assignment invites students to
develop an investment in the work and its performance, but it requires them
to tackle the ethical issues such operas raise. Because even staging a portion
of a work requires both score study and careful examination of the themes
that might be brought out in staging, the assignment tends to encourage deep
critical engagement with operatic works. By way of a caveat, such assignments
depend on a continual engagement with opera over the course of a class and a
command of score study, and are thus better suited to upper-level courses and
assignments that fall later in the semester.
 Beyond the Trigger Warning    33

Working With Campus Partners

Much of the concern about trigger warnings has been precisely that trigger
warning policies handed down from administration reflect an infringement of
faculty’s rights to determine the content of their own curricula. I approached
this differently: at the time that I began working on this issue, I was working at
a large research university that had no administrative or departmental policy
on trigger warnings. I was concerned, however, about finding a way to meet
the diverse needs of the student population, which—statistically speaking—
was likely to include both a number of sexual violence survivors and a number
of students who accept a broad body of myths about sexual violence that the
operas we study in my classes might either challenge or reinforce. I took my
concerns to the experts on the issue. On that campus, the staff from Counseling
and Psychological Services ran not only the counseling program, but also work-
shops on sexual violence in first-year seminars; they were housed partially in
the Wo/Men’s Center and had offered a SafeSpace workshop I had attended
two years previously focused on supporting LGBTQ students. Ultimately, I had
three primary questions for them:

1.  If we want to be sensitive to the needs of both sexual violence survivors

and the general student body at large, should we include trigger warn-
ings on syllabi?
2.  Should we show productions of these kinds of operas in class?
3.  If we do show productions, what kind do we show?

While I had my own ideas about what was appropriate, I felt that referring the
question to a campus partner with greater experience with sexual violence sur-
vivors and sexual assault prevention could only be productive—and I was pre-
pared to concede I needed a new approach on their recommendation. Rather
than a simple answer, however, I found my questions prompted dialogues; I
spoke and corresponded with staff members and discovered that in fact sexual
assault educators face some of these same challenges. As a musician, I often
think of music, theater, and film as the only domains on campus where art
happens in time, and therefore with a kind of immediacy and emotional impact
that separates them out from other arts and humanities disciplines. Yet precisely
because of that emotional power, sexual assault educators often use mediums
like film or live theater in order to dramatize the importance of these issues. As
they explained it, sexual assault educators at that institution made their own
informed decisions about whether or not to show potentially disturbing scenes
34    Journal of Music History Pedagogy

that illustrated the issues at hand, although they always both prepared students
for such materials and allowed time for discussion and debriefing.
When I took on a new teaching position at a small liberal arts college in the
fall of 2015, I reached out to the co-director of the Faculty Center for Teaching
and chair of the Women and Gender Studies program to ask about the campus
climate surrounding trigger warnings at this institution. While there was no
existing policy on the issue, she invited me to take part in a Faculty Center for
Teaching discussion on the issue. The event drew interest from faculty not only in
Women’s Studies and the humanities, as might be expected, but from a number
of departments—including those where such issues infrequently come into play,
such as mathematics. In this context, faculty were able to share ideas and teaching
strategies in an environment conducive to frank but collegial conversation.
In both of these cases, perhaps the most important thing for me—particu-
larly as a young faculty member who given my field of study must engage with
these complex issues—was the opportunity to work collaboratively alongside
other members of the staff and faculty in considering and responding to depic-
tions of sexual violence in the classroom. When it is possible, this approach
helps to break down the polarities between campus constituencies, so that fac-
ulty, staff, students, and administration are not deadlocked against one another
but can instead work collectively to create a better campus environment.

Conclusion

In this article, I have laid out four strategies for negotiating the challenges
facing instructors who teach operas that depict sexual violence. These sugges-
tions are grounded in both a healthy realism and a healthy optimism. For if, as
instructors, we need to be realistic about the rape cultures on our campuses, the
possibility that we can be part of meaningful change by thoughtfully attending
to these issues is fundamentally heartening. Further, work in the social sciences
suggests that there is an evidentiary basis for this optimism. By working beyond
disciplinary, departmental, and administrative boundaries, we can address sex-
ual violence in music history classes in ways that take a proactive stance on one
of the most pressing pedagogical challenges in classrooms today—while fully
embracing the broader goals of engaging students in critical thinking, histori-
cal inquiry, and attentive listening.