From Woke to Broke at the Washington National Opera?

Washington National Opera has not had an easy year. Formally declared the nation’s opera company by congressional act in 2000, the company saw its much-heralded 70th anniversary season fall off the rails last autumn after artistic director Francesca Zambello told the Guardian that poor ticket sales and declining donations might force it to leave its longtime home at the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. Conflicting reports describe what happened next, but within hours, the Center’s Trump-appointed director Ric Grenell, who has been critical of WNO during his tenure, initiated a discussion that led to the company’s departure from the Center, a move its board approved on January 9. Grenell himself stepped down on March 16. After July 4, the Center will close for two years of renovations.

WNO’s story is that Grenell set exacting conditions for it to remain at the Center, possibly including Zambello’s firing and a new business model that would have required the company to guarantee sufficient revenue for all future productions. The Center has denied demanding Zambello’s ouster and defended the new business model, claiming that WNO underperformed financially. Grenell has also been wary of WNO’s special status within the Center, which in 2011 essentially absorbed the opera company to bail out its then-parlous finances. The agreement, renewed in 2024, also included an exclusivity clause that prohibited the Center from hosting other opera companies. Grenell has argued that losing an unprofitable resident company would both remove a financial burden on the Center, whose coffers he has claimed were empty when he took over, and allow Washington audiences to see the work of other opera companies, as they do of touring groups in virtually all other artforms presented at the Trump Kennedy Center.

Regardless of these practical issues, the political overtones of President Trump’s “takeover”—including the replacement of Joe Biden-appointed board members with prominent Trump allies—have shadowed the drama. WNO’s leadership has tactfully refrained from direct criticism of the president. Nevertheless, it introduced its continuing season’s truncated three-performance run of Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha, which opened at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium on March 7, with claims that it is standing up for “creative freedom” and “American civil society.” WNO has also cited Treemonisha’s near sell-out as evidence of community solidarity.

Is WNO really leading artistic “resistance” in Trump’s Washington? Most media present it that way, hyping the tale of a noble underdog institution boldly declaring its independence from a government-controlled arts complex, despite Grenell’s seeming to have initiated the breakup. The narrative also ignores WNO’s steady decline from its heyday in the 1990s and 2000s, when superstar singer Plácido Domingo was its director. Domingo, who left his post just before WNO’s 2011 merger with the Center and was later proscribed from American artistic life following #MeToo allegations, presented eight mainstage productions a year, many of them ambitious repertoire choices featuring starry casts. Insiders have assailed him ever since for allegedly spending too much money, a charge he recently denied in a forceful letter to the Washington Post. After his departure, WNO’s annual offerings slimmed down to half as many major productions, often with weaker casts and fewer performances, while lesser projects gestured toward filling the gap. Even without Domingo’s alleged spendthrift habits, there has been little apparent prospect of the company returning to its former stature under anyone’s leadership. Even drawing attention to Treemonisha’s three sold-out performances falls flat when one recalls that Joplin’s opera, which ends with a black woman’s acclamation to lead her community after experiencing the transformative power of education, was originally scheduled for six performances at the Trump Kennedy Center.

One might also ask who really interjected politics into the situation. Grenell and his team have repeatedly said that their mandate is to create an “apolitical” cultural space where “everyone” feels comfortable and welcome. Notably, they claim never to have “canceled” any contracted artists, all or virtually all of whom have withdrawn of their own accord, and do not appear ever to have altered WNO’s programming. That distinction belongs to composer Gregory Spears, who, along with his librettist Greg Pierce, withdrew from the current season his opera Fellow Travelers, a gay love drama set during the 1950s “lavender scare,” to protest Trump’s assertion of authority. This was entirely the creators’ own decision, however, one that Zambello at the time said she and her colleagues “deeply regret.” For the same reason, musical theater composer Stephen Schwartz, the announced host of WNO’s annual gala despite his not working in opera, canceled his appearance.

WNO’s recent programming suggests that Zambello chose to take the company in a politically charged direction that may not have had universal appeal or left every demographic feeling welcome at its performances. Just before the Covid-19 pandemic, a WNO production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni described the title character’s romantic conquests as “survivors,” included program notes suggesting that single males are “toxic,” and was accompanied by an all-female discussion panel of the work under the hackneyed billing “Let’s Go There.”

In 2023, WNO opened its season with Jeanine Tesori’s newly commissioned opera Grounded, about a female fighter pilot reassigned to drone duty by callous male supervisors after getting pregnant, a condition that as of the time of Grounded’s premiere no longer disqualified any female pilot from active flight service. Tesori’s opera was critically panned and, a season later, sold only 50 percent of its seats when the Metropolitan Opera offered a shortened revised version.

WNO’s 2024 production of Puccini’s Turandot was presented with a rewritten finale commissioned from composer Christopher Tin, which gave the title character a baseless backstory of rape to account for her murderously imperious conduct. Tin told an interviewer that the opera’s signature aria “Nessun dorma,” its male hero’s confident prediction that he will triumph in love, exemplifies “toxic masculinity.” Later that year, a WNO production of Beethoven’s Fidelio arbitrarily recast the opera’s highest-ranking male authority figure as a woman.

In 2022, WNO created an award specifically for singers who identify as “nonbinary.” Its older Marian Anderson Vocal Award, for which singers of all backgrounds are technically eligible, has long seemed to have been won only by black performers. In a February Instagram post, the company appeared to admit as much by celebrating the award’s past winners as a way to honor Black History Month.

Since white males are responsible for almost all of opera’s creative output, have traditionally been its most generous donors, and make up a significant portion of its expensive-ticket-buying audience, these might not have been the best choices in a world where “going woke” often means “going broke.” Despite the cheers that greeted the professionally staged and adeptly sung matinee performance of Treemonisha on March 8, the occasion felt lugubrious and sad. Lisner Auditorium, where WNO coincidentally first performed in 1957, is frowzy and ill-equipped for opera. Directed by Denyce Graves, herself once a storied WNO singer who made it big internationally, the production had to be adapted to fit Lisner’s smaller stage, while the orchestra pit barely fit the tiny ensemble of 18 performers. Despite these deficiencies, the company will make do with Lisner for its next production—Robert Ward’s The Crucible, the politically charged opera chosen to replace Fellow Travelers—before decamping to venues in Maryland, apparently the only place where it could find space to conclude its season with Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story.

Beyond that, the WNO’s future is unknown. With the Trump Kennedy Center scheduled to close for a two-year renovation starting in July, one wonders if downgrading even under pressure was really wise or necessary—especially as the Center’s Eisenhower Theater, the smaller venue where Treemonisha was scheduled to be performed, stood empty a short walking distance away.

Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images