Classical Music’s Suicide Pact (Part 2)

Until August 2020, Dona Vaughn had been the longtime artistic director of opera at the Manhattan School of Music. Her experience included singing, acting, and directing on and off Broadway and on opera stages. The Manhattan School of Music’s 2019 production of Saverio Mercadante’s little-known opera buffa I Due Figaro showed her influence in some stunningly charismatic and witty student performances.

Vaughn was committed to championing minority musicians—so much so that she endowed a scholarship for them at her alma mater, Brevard College in North Carolina. “In all my years of teaching,” she said at the time, “I often have wished that more minority members were encouraged to pursue a music profession.” Besides the classics, she produced socially conscious contemporary works, giving the first professional staging, for example, at the Fort Worth Opera Festival of a feminist opera about a seventeenth-century nun.

The mob cares nothing for facts, though. On June 17, 2020, Vaughn was teaching a class on opera dramaturgy to high school students via Zoom. An unidentified participant, whose name and image were blacked out (very likely a plant), asked her, out of the blue, how she could justify having produced Franz Lehár’s allegedly racist (in this case, allegedly anti-Asian) operetta Das Land des Lächelns (The Land of Smiles) several years earlier. Vaughn cut the questioner off for raising a warmed-over issue irrelevant to the current discussion.

The fuse was lit. A Manhattan School of Music student petition was immediately forthcoming. Vaughn must be fired because she is a “danger to the arts community,” it thundered. The petition resurrected a meme from the time of the Lehár production—that Vaughn had cast a black singer as a butler character, thus proving her racism. A rule banning blacks from playing servant characters would put off-limits some of the most essential roles in the repertoire, including Leporello in Don Giovanni, and Figaro and Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro (the latter of which Kathleen Battle knocked out of the park). For good measure, the petition threw in unspecified “reports” of “homophobic aggression and body shaming.” The petition quickly garnered 1,800 signatures. Phony Instagram accounts under Vaughn’s name suddenly appeared on the Web, containing fake inflammatory material.

Vaughn’s colleagues, cowering from the mob, let her twist in the wind. Almost none came to her defense. Vaughn was fired, and replaced by a black male.