Sorry, Tara Erraught, but the age of the fat lady singing is over

London’s opera critics have been roundly condemned for suggesting that a female singer’s personal appearance could make her unsuitable for a role. The singer in question is Tara Erraught, a young Irish mezzo-soprano based in Germany, who has just made her British debut in the new Glyndebourne production of Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. She takes the part of Octavian, who, although always played by a woman, is supposed in the plot to be an irresistibly attractive young man. The critics all admired Erraught’s voice, but took the view that she was too stocky, dumpy, chubby and unsightly (to use four of their adjectives) to be even remotely plausible as an object of sexual desire.

Uproar followed, with other opera singers leaping to her defence. They accused the critics of cruelty to a vulnerable young woman at the start of her career and of regarding her appearance as more important than her voice. ‘How, then, have we arrived at a point where opera is no longer about singing but about the physiques and looks of the singers, specifically the female singers?’ asked the mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnston on the Guardian’s website. Dame Kiri Te Kanawa felt strongly enough to take a call in New Zealand from the Today programme in which she blamed any perceived shortcomings in Erraught’s appearance on the ridiculous costumes she was made to wear.

The impression given in the media reports of this affair has been of an opera world united in disgust at the critics’ cheap obsession with a singer’s appearance when all that really mattered in opera was the singing. But already ten years ago it was made clear that even a great opera house could care as much about a singer’s physique as about her voice when Covent Garden sacked the American soprano Deborah Voigt, who had been due to sing the title role in another Strauss opera, Ariadne auf Naxos, although she was considered perhaps the world’s best interpreter of the part.