World famous lesbian conductor is 'offended' by Cate Blanchett's 'Tár'
The world’s best-known female conductor, Marin Alsop, revealed that she’s “offended” by her best-known fictional counterpart: Lydia Tár. “So many superficial
The world’s best-known female conductor, Marin Alsop, revealed that she’s “offended” by her best-known fictional counterpart: Lydia Tár.
“So many superficial aspects of Tár seemed to align with my own personal life,” Alsop said in an interview published this week in the U.K.’s Sunday Times. “But once I saw it I was no longer concerned, I was offended: I was offended as a woman, I was offended as a conductor, I was offended as a lesbian.”
The title character in Todd Field’s critically acclaimed film, “Tár,” and Alsop are both barrier-breaking American conductors, protégés of legendary conductor Leonard Bernstein (though Tár’s claim is questionable), teachers at major American conservatories and lesbian moms married to fellow orchestral musicians.
However, the fictional maestro, played by Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett, is also a narcissistic and manipulative abuser who is accused of sexual misconduct by a female underling.
“To have an opportunity to portray a woman in that role and to make her an abuser for me that was heartbreaking. I think all women and all feminists should be bothered by that kind of depiction because it’s not really about women conductors, is it? It’s about women as leaders in our society,” Alsop, the chief conductor of the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and a MacArthur “genius award” winner, told the Sunday Times. “There are so many men actual, documented men this film could have been based on but, instead, it puts a woman in the role but gives her all the attributes of those men. That feels antiwoman.”
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