For decades now, opera directors in Europe and the United States have felt licensed to revise operas to conform to their political agendas. These directors did so through wildly incongruous stagings that updated an opera’s plot to modern times and introduced progressive totems that would have been unfathomable to the opera’s original creator. Such directorial interventions left the libretto (i.e., the text) intact, however. Now even that cordon sanitaire between the structure of a work and an interpreter’s political preferences has been breached.
