The opening night performance on Monday of a new production of William Tell at London's Royal Opera House was marked by loud and prolonged booing over a scene in which a woman is raped by soldiers.
The production, by Italian director Damiano Michieletto, updates Rossini's classic tale of the 14th-century Swiss hero William Tell to the 1990's Balkan conflict. Music critics – largely on the side of the booers – described the audience's reaction to the third-act ballet scene as unprecedented in the company's recent history.
"With one inexcusably nasty five-minute sequence, rightly greeted with a performance-stopping furore of boos probably unprecedented in Royal Opera House history, this show went from four stars to one," wrote Richard Morrison in his review for the Times. "An over-reaction? Not if you saw 20 men from the chorus pull forward a woman, taunt her, strip her naked and then pile on to rape her. Explicitly and downstage."
Michael Church, music critic for the Independent, registered his dislike in a three-star review.
"Some directors love to shock, but Damiano Michieletto got more than he bargained for when he staged a slaveringly-protracted stripping-naked of a female actor in a gang-rape chez the evil Gesler in Guillaume Tell: the auditorium was swept by a sudden hurricane of booing so loud, so angry, and so unanimous that the music was drowned and the scene brought to an embarrassed halt.
"This Italian director may have urgent things to say about Nineties Bosnia – whither he had transplanted Rossini’s Swiss melodrama – but it took the unprecedented gut reaction of 2000 punters to ram home the tastelessness of his little idea."
Guardian music critic Tim Ashley called the gang rape "pruriently voyeuristic" and noted that patrons "were voting with their feet as well as their voices: quite a few had already left during the second interval."
Yet, on Twitter, the negative reactions were far from unanimous.
A great #ROHtell yesterday night, A superb Pappano conducted this masterpiece! Many boos during the rape, remember Rossini wrote this
— michele marziliano (@mmarzili) June 30, 2015Lots of outrage re outrage at #ROHTell. Go and see it before you say the booing was undeserved.
— Ted Black (@TedLBlack) June 29, 2015Senseless, sensationalist Guillaume Tell complete with gratuitous nude rape scene @RoyalOperaHouse represents new nadir. Heads should roll.
— Michael Arditti (@michaelarditti) June 29, 2015#ROHTell Wonderful production of Tell which clearly touched a nerve with low brow booers.
— seneca (@seneca2008) June 29, 2015The opera house issued an apology after the performance for any distress that the scene caused. But director of opera Kasper Holten later told the Guardian that the house does not apologize for the scene itself, which is intended to show the prevalence of rape during wartime.
"I think it is very important that we are honest about sexual violence being a tragic fact for women around the world in warfare," he said. “Artists need to put the spotlight on that and make people think about that rather than stay silent about it and romanticize warfare.
"There is a reference in the first act to a man who’s daughter [has been the victim of] an attempted rape by the oppressors. It is all there in the Rossini and we need to bring that out and make it clear to people that it is not a lovely fairy tale, it is a story about terrible things that happen to real people."
The Royal Opera House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The opera will be broadcast on WQXR on August 8 and is scheduled to be screened as part of the Royal Opera House series at Symphony Space this fall. Below is a video of the curtain calls on opening night.