Opera singer calls out body shaming after critic makes 'derogatory' remark about her size
Die Welt music critic Manuel Brug says he was insulting the show's director, not performer Kathryn Lewek
When the reviews started coming out for Orpheus in the Underworld at the Salzburg Festival in Austria, soprano Kathryn Lewek noticed an upsetting trend.
The U.S. opera singer, who had a baby 10 months ago, says critics have gone out of their way to comment on her body in their reviews.
But one particular line stuck out. In the German newspaper Die Welt, music critic Manuel Brug described female performers as "dicke Frauen," which means fat or thick women, "in tight corsets spreading their legs in private rooms."
"He kind of used me and my colleague as symbols of what he, I guess, doesn't like to see on stage," Lewek, who plays the character Eurydice, told As It Happens host Carol Off.
"It just felt like a very derogatory way of describing my character and of just everything that was going on on stage."
Writer, editors stand by comments
Lewek has since spoken out on Twitter and in the media about how women are treated in the industry, and how painful it is to read descriptions of her body so soon after having a baby.
"It's never OK to comment on a woman's body, but it felt like the sting was extra sharp, I guess, because I'm in what feels like a very vulnerable time," she said.
Other performers have come out in support of Lewek, and the Salzburg Festival's president Helga Rabl-Stadler issued a statement commending her "extraordinary artistic achievement as well as on her courage against body-shaming."
But Brug is standing by the article, insisting his comments have been taken out of context by English speakers.
In a phone call with As It Happens, Brug said he wasn't criticizing Lewek, but rather the show's director Barrie Kosky, who he says used large women in skimpy outfits to comedic effect.
"I didn't like the misogynistic view of the overweight women because he exposed them as overweight with the costumes they were wearing," he said. "That was my intention that I wanted to say that I did not like this idea, how he presented these women."
The opera, originally written by Jacques Offenbach, is a comical and hypersexualized lampooning of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in which the actors are scantily clad and the performances are burlesque in style.
"If she doesn't want to look overweight on the stage, she should go on and have a different costume," Brug said.
Brug's editors are standing by him.
When Lewek wrote to Die Welt express her displeasure with Brug's words, editor-in-chief Ulf Poschardt replied that the article "was not meant as a personal insult – and it is not written as a personal insult."
"What Manuel Brug is aiming at, is a theatrical stereotype ... which uses (or abuses) a certain type of female stage character to achieve an atmosphere of cheap laughter, like in an English pantomime or in the Italian Commedia dell'arte."
Grasping at straws
Lewek called Brug's response "laughable" and "hurtful."
"If he truly was displeased with the esthetic of the Commedia dell'arte idea with theatre then why doesn't he go after other elements instead of just the fat women?" she said.
"He's grasping at straws. He's looking for a reason to defend what he's talking about. But the bottom line is that he seems most displeased by seeing overweight women."
She says she was most offended by his comments about her costume.
"To respond by saying that somehow it was my fault because I allowed myself to be in a certain type of costume? This is the same type of thing that we hear now about women getting raped and people saying, 'Well, she had a glass of wine or she was wearing a sexy outfit so she was asking for it,'" she said.
Lewek says she mulled over Brug's comments for a week and discussed them with her family before finally deciding to speak out.
"I knew that there would be backlash, but I also knew that it would be worth it with the message that I could get across," she said.
"The bottom line is craft over body, and that young singers need to know that despite any way that they look or, you know, body image issues that they might have, that there is a place for them in the arts."
Written by Sheena Goodyear. Produced by Katie Geleff.