Dallas Opera has canceled its planned North American premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage's The Silver Tassie. In a statement, the company said that the cancellation of the antiwar opera was "due to financial considerations and political sensitivities in the wake of the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center."
The Silver Tassie, based on the Sean O'Casey play about a soccer player who is paralyzed fighting in battle, was co-commissioned by the Dallas Opera and English National Opera; its U.S. premiere was originally scheduled for Dallas in 2003. In January of this year, Dallas Opera announced that it would be postponed until the 2004–05 season because of a fear that its antiwar sentiments could offend some patrons and because declining ticket sales required a "season with greater title recognition." Both considerations — and the costs of shipping the production from English National Opera, where it premiered in 2000 and was revived in June — have now led to the production's outright cancellation.
The 42-year-old Turnage, one of Britain's leading young composers, was internationally acclaimed for The Silver Tassie, winning both the South Bank Show and Olivier Awards for its original ENO run.
A number of American companies have recently cancelled new operas and other
ambtitious productions because of the economic climate, among them Houston Grand
Opera, which canceled a production of Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking;
Lyric Opera of Chicago, which replaced new productions of Berlioz' Benvenuto
Cellini and L'Amore dei Tre Re by Italo
Montemezzi with revivals; and Los Angeles Opera, which postponed a new Ring
cycle scheduled for this season and replaced a $3 million Kirov Opera production
of Prokofiev's War and Peace with a less expensive staging of Shostakovich's Lady
Macbeth of Mtsensk.
