Expecting opera critics to be uniformly kind to singers defeats the point of their existence

Should fat be an issue in opera? Are our opera critics overgrown schoolboys with a body fixation? To judge from reports and editorials in print and online over the last two days, you can answer ‘no’ and ‘yes’ respectively. Simple? No, not really.

On Monday morning, the critics of various national newspapers published reviews of Glyndebourne’s new production of Der Rosenkavalier. These reviews included comments about the physical appearance of Tara Erraught, the young mezzo-soprano cast as Octavian. These comments have been widely disparaged and taken as evidence of ‘body shaming’ on the part of ‘male, middle-aged critics’.

My first inkling of this debate came when many of my Facebook friends (mostly the opera singers) recommended an open letter by Alice Coote (on Norman Lebrecht’s Slipped Disc website) in which she asked those critics to pay attention to a singer’s voice rather than her appearance. The Guardian published a similar article by Jennifer Johnston, Lebrecht weighed in with an editorial, and the Guardian again produced a piece by Katie Lowe (a ‘blogger and body image activist’) who, by her own admission, doesn’t know much about opera, but is writing a book on body image and presumably saw a useful opportunity. Oh