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The Washington Post
She was scheduled to perform a Schubert selection, singing
German poems that told of the Erlking’s trickery and the leaping of the
Trout, with the accompaniment of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
But Anne Sofie von Otter, the world-renowned Swedish opera singer, canceled
just days before the three March concerts, after the unexpected death
of her husband, Benny Fredriksson, who was by her side on an
international tour.
“New Zealand, so beautiful,” she had written
on Facebook earlier that month, posting photos of rolling green hills
and bright pink lilies. Then the mezzo-soprano fell silent.
Now,
von Otter, 63, is speaking out against the #MeToo movement, which she
says expelled her husband from his job, cast him into the “deepest
depression” and, ultimately, drove him to take his own life.
“You can break a person,” she said in an expansive interview with Die Zeit, a weekly newspaper published in Hamburg.
She
laid blame on tabloid journalism for trading in what she described as
fallacious claims. But she also offered a broader critique of the human
rush to judgment — one cause, she said, of widespread social
misery. “What are we doing with our beautiful world?” she asked.
She said a herd mentality had taken hold, threatening “independent, critical thinking.”
Von
Otter’s statements position her as one of the most prominent skeptics
of the campaign against sexual harassment and assault that has swept the
globe since allegations surfaced against Hollywood producer Harvey
Weinstein. Perhaps no industry has been roiled as profoundly as arts and
entertainment, which has also been a site of some of the most vehement
pushback. The Grammy-winning vocalist joins film star Catherine Deneuve —
among 100 French women who signed an open letter in
January denouncing the social movement — in finding fault with the
treatment of some of the men accused of improper behavior.
A Post
investigation this month found more than 50 classical musicians, from
local instructors to global superstars, who said they were victims of
sexual harassment. A violinist, Zeneba Bowers, said William Preucil, the
concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra, had forced himself on her in
his hotel room in 1998. Preucil was suspended on Friday.
The
debate over sexual misconduct is incendiary in part because it is so
personal; few speak from a neutral position, and individual testimony
has been central, and searing.
Von Otter’s account adds a different perspective to the conversation. The Irish Times labeled her “the world’s most prominent #metoo widow.”
For
16 years, her husband led Stockholm’s Kulturhuset Stadsteatern, the
capital’s premier arts and culture center. He discovered his love for
theater at the age of 13 or 14, von Otter recounted to Die Zeit, and
began working in the city theater at 16. The playhouse was an escape
from Fredriksson’s hard-knock childhood, circumscribed by the one-room
apartment where his family lived. His mother was an alcoholic, his wife
said.
Last December, accusations emerged in the Swedish press that
Fredriksson, 58, had behaved like a “capricious dictator,” tolerating
sexual abuse and harassing his own employees.
Aftonbladet, a
tabloid, cited the anonymous accounts of dozens of people in describing
an alleged culture of fear and harassment under Fredriksson’s
leadership. According to the newspaper, the theater director had
required an actor to rehearse naked, had told an employee to choose
between having an abortion and giving up a role and had protected male
employees accused of sexual abuse. “Human dignity is zero,” one woman
said. Expressen — another tabloid, whose symbol is a wasp and whose
motto is “it stings” — followed with an account in which an actor called
Fredriksson “a little Hitler.”
An internal city investigation did
not substantiate the claims leveled in the tabloids. Sweden’s press
ombudsman, Ola Sigvardsson, declined in an interview Monday to confirm
the existence of an independent review. Editors at Aftonbladet and
Expressen did not return requests for comment.
In her interview
with Die Zeit, von Otter said she was in London with the couple’s
younger son when the explosive allegations appeared. She said her
husband was “at a loss” in responding to the “character assassination.”
He quickly resolved to step back from his job, she said.
At first,
he was relieved, she said. But depression soon set in. No one would
defend him publicly, she said, for fear of being “dragged into the muck
by the media.”
She said her husband suffered from post-traumatic
stress disorder that became acute about three months after the initial
shock. She offered to cut her tour short and return to Sweden, she
recounted, but he insisted on staying abroad with her in the spring.
“You are my everything, he often said,” von Otter recalled.
The
opera singer fiercely backed her husband’s innocence, saying he was a
difficult boss — “he could yell sometimes,” she said — but that he was
blameless of sexual misconduct.
“Benny was no skirt chaser, he
didn’t look at women’s breasts or behinds,” she protested. She judged
that it was unwise for her husband to have stepped down so quickly, a
view that he came to share, she said.
“The atmosphere was extremely charged,” she said.
An agent for von Otter said the singer had no further comment. She lives in Stockholm with her two sons.
Von
Otter was born in Stockholm and studied in the Swedish capital and in
London. Her father, Göran Fredrik von Otter, was a Swedish diplomat in
Berlin during World War II. He was involved in efforts to convey
information about the Holocaust to Sweden, which maintained a policy of
neutrality during the war.
She made her professional debut in 1983
at the Theater Basel in Switzerland. Her 2001 album with Elvis
Costello, “For the Stars,” won an Edison Award, and an album of French
songs, “Douce France,” netted her the Grammy Award for Best Classical
Vocal Solo in 2015.
The opera singer told Die Zeit she has never
been subject to sexual harassment. She said she “read with interest all
about Harvey Weinstein, what he did
in Hollywood in the hotel rooms with his bathrobe.” When Swedish
actresses banded together and complained of abuse, von Otter said, she
found much of what they described “bad and unacceptable.”
But she
also accused the media of exaggerating the charges of lewd conduct,
saying “pornographic undertones” became a strategy to attract
readers. She said she hoped the case would be a “rude awakening” for
newspapers that she said tarred her husband.
“We all have good and
bad sides, but we no longer live in the Middle Ages,” she said. “We do
not publicly pillory anyone and spit on or stone him or her.”
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