Royal Ballet and opera staffers betray their art

In a statement, the Royal Ballet And Opera has let it be known that the cancellation of plans to bring their new production of Puccini’s Tosca to the Israeli Opera next season has nothing to do with the much-publicised anti-Israel petition from RBO staff, and everything to do with safety concerns. I hope that is true. But in the meanwhile, to the hundreds of staffers who signed that petition, here’s a thought. Last month, too, the Israeli Opera featured one of your Puccini stagings, but that one stretches back to 1984 — the storied Andrei Serban Turandot. And I’m willing to bet that in the more than four decades of that production’s life, it has never endured a rehearsal period like it had in Israel just weeks ago.

Because your fellow artists and technicians in Tel Aviv were forced to try their utmost to do justice to that wonderful staging under a hail of ballistic missiles and attack drones from Iran — the third time in this war that Iran has targeted a massive, direct attack at their tiny country (the other two were each the largest single volley of ballistic missiles ever fired anywhere, in world history). Have you ever seen a ballistic missile? Any idea of its size? Take a stroll in central Tel Aviv, right near the opera house, and you will quickly get an idea of the damage it can do — high-rises that now look like God ripped the side away, like badly-torn tin foil.

Amidst all this, 200 workers of the Israeli Opera tried to put on this complex show. For much of the time Israel’s Home Front Command deemed it too dangerous for them to be together in their usual spaces, and they were forced to rehearse as they could — usually in small groups, in homes, in basements. Some days there might be a single orchestra rehearsal, and it had to be held in a bomb shelter.

Very different from the swish, safe surroundings you’re used to in Covent Garden.

Against all the odds, with a Herculean effort from those involved – who believe in the importance of art, all the more in times of war — Turandot made it to the stage, albeit with a postponed premiere, and not without incident. At one performance, on 1st July, the show was interrupted by wailing bomb sirens, as a Houthi ballistic missile was powering in from Yemen, 1400 miles away. The performance was suspended while the audience stayed in their seats (the auditorium is reinforced for such threats, a necessary reality of attending opera in Israel) and, once the news came through that the military had shot the missile down, the show, as they say, went on.

Think about it. Since the genocidal attempt to destroy it on October 7th 2023, Israel has been almost continuously under attack, variously and at various times from Hamas and other groups in Gaza, from Iran (paymaster general of all of these), from Iranian militia in Iraq, from Syria, from the Houthis in Yemen, from Hezbollah in Lebanon, and from Hamas and other groups in the northern West Bank. Israel is a tiny country, roughly the size of Wales. Iran is nine times the size of Germany. This all amounted to a genuine existential threat for Israel.

Can you imagine how frightening and how difficult it is to make art in such circumstances? What it takes just to decide to leave your house and take the risk of going to see an opera, not knowing what might fall from the sky? What significance opera has in your life when you risk that to see it? Can you conceive of how important it is to offer art to people who are traumatised from nearly two years of war, most of whom in that small country knowing people who were murdered, raped, held hostage? Maybe you can’t, because you probably have never been in such a situation and have no sense of it — but try. Really try.

Maybe you are outraged by the scenes of devastation in Gaza. But guess what? The reality is that most Israelis are outraged as well. They are outraged that after they risked civil war by pulling out all Israelis from that territory in 2005, Hamas became Gaza’s government and started launching thousands of missiles at Israeli civilians, culminating in their grotesque, worse-than-any-horror-film onslaught on October 7th — forcing Israel into a war that Israel didn’t seek and didn’t want. Got issues with Netanyahu? So have most Israelis, according to all mainstream polls. Another thing you’ll see walking around the opera house most of the time is Israelis demonstrating against their government.

And hopefully you have enough objectivity to agree that this is a tremendously difficult situation. Want the war to end? So do Israelis. Again, polls show that a large majority of Israelis want the hostages home, and the war to end even at the cost of Hamas still in power in Gaza. But Hamas leaders have refused all recent ceasefire offers — including the one on the table since the very start, to return the hostages, disarm and accept safe passage to another country — to the reported fury and frustration of the Arab states who have been mediating.

We could discuss all of that for an hour. Because it’s a horrific situation and it’s complex. But you are artists. Aren’t you? You understand the good that art can do in the world. Don’t you? The way it really can bring people together, increase empathy, allow all of us to feel in important ways. Israelis are frightened, traumatised. And they didn’t start this war.

Last week we saw video of a skeletal Israeli hostage, Evyatar David – kidnapped from the Nova dance party – in a Hamas tunnel in Gaza, being forced to literally dig his own grave. Withholding your Tosca achieves nothing, except to make the monsters who do such things — and film them and put them out on social media — feel stronger, and less inclined to agree to the ceasefires on offer. Which in turn postpones the suffering of Gazans. It also withholds a meaningful experience from Israelis, who are also suffering.

Music heals, and unites the world. Withholding it goes against music’s very purpose and, in this case, it is also harmful, and deeply unfair.