"No One Cares About This Anymore": The Historical Illiteracy of Timothée Chalamet's Dismissal of Opera and Ballet

 


Now, the performing arts world is up in arms. Scrolling through my Instagram feed this morning, I encountered a mix between Dias Irea (Days of Wrath)  and All'alba vincerò" (At dawn I will win). And only because of Timothée Chalamet. 

In an interview with Matthew McConaughey for Variety and CNN, the conversation was about the survival of movie theaters and new streaming models. Chalamet said, "I don't want to be working in ballet or opera where it's like, 'Hey, keep this thing alive, even though no one cares about this anymore,'"  then added, "all respect to the ballet and opera people out there — I just lost 14 cents in viewership."

And the Internet was fast, creative, and at times vicious.

The irony that made it worse

Chalamet's grandmother, mother, and sister were all ballerinas. He has previously spoken warmly about growing up backstage at the New York City Ballet, saying he "grew up dreaming big at the backstage at the Koch Theater at Lincoln Center." Many online immediately pointed out the contradiction, and some on social media trolled him for wearing a New York City Ballet baseball cap in January. 

The institutional clap-backs

The Metropolitan Opera responded swiftly, posting a reel showing various craftspeople working on a production, captioning it "This one's for you, @tchalamet." The LA Opera tagged Chalamet in a post reading, "Sorry, @tchalamet. We'd offer you complimentary tickets to 'Akhnaten,' but it's selling out." 

The Wiener Staatsoper took to the streets asking people if they cared about opera and invited Chalamet to attend a performance. The Paris Opera shared a clip from their production of Nixon in China — which features ping-pong — with the caption "Plot twist: ping-pong also exists in opera," drawing a connection to Chalamet's role as a table tennis champion in Marty Supreme. 

Performers firing back

NYC Ballet principal dancer Megan Fairchild was particularly pointed, saying: "It's not even the idea that he dissed ballet and opera that bothers me; it's the suggestion that he had the talent and aptitude to pursue these Olympic-level artistic fields in the first place. Timmy, I didn't realize you were a world-class dancer or opera singer who simply chose not to pursue it because acting's more popular!" 

Opera singer Isabel Leonard called it "cheap shots at fellow artists" and said only "a weak person/artist feels the need to diminish the very arts that would inspire those who are interested in slowing down." 

Irish opera singer Seán Tester said the comment was "the kind of reductive take you hear when popularity is mistaken for cultural value," adding that opera and ballet "have survived wars" and that dismissing them "says far less about the art itself than it does about how little time someone has spent truly experiencing it." 

The Oscar angle?

Some have claimed the quote will sink Chalamet's Best Actor Oscar chances, though others think that's an overreaction — noting that if he loses, it would more likely be due to Michael B. Jordan's strong competition for Sinners than a tactless interview comment. 

As of now, when my fingers are typing this up, Charamet has not yet reacted to the criticism. I, however, had time to reflect on his profound misreading of what opera and ballet as art forms actually are and have been. 

The Core Fallacy: Confusing Popularity with Significance

Chalamet's argument rests on a category error — the assumption that cultural relevance is measured by mainstream popularity. This is a thoroughly modern, market-driven view of art that would be unrecognizable to most of human history, during which opera and ballet were not niche pursuits but the primary technologies of political communication, national identity formation, and social control. To say "no one cares" is to apply a Netflix metrics dashboard to art forms that were, at their peak, more politically potent than anything cinema has achieved.

Ballet as the Infrastructure of Absolute Power: Louis XIV (1638–1715)

The most devastating counterexample is also the most literal. Ballet was not merely tolerated by one of the most powerful monarchs in European history — it was his instrument of governance.

According to the political theory of the period, the state of France was literally embodied by its ruler. After all, Louis XIV is famous for saying: L'état c'est moi. Sculpting his muscles and ensuring his body was perfectly developed was a way to demonstrate he was the ultimate source of power, ruling by divine right. Dance was not decoration; it was a constitutional argument made flesh.

In 1653, Louis XIV appeared on stage to prove at age 14 that he was not only an accomplished ballet dancer but that he was able to use ballet as a political tool in an exceptionally skilful manner. To celebrate his victory over the aristocratic Fronde rebellions, he commissioned a lavish ballet performance that functioned as an allegory of the restoration of right and order, and as the subjugation of the nobility to the victorious monarchy. The Ballet Royal de la Nuit was, in effect, a political manifesto danced at the Louvre.

Ballet was a powerful political tool, a means of maintaining a country's stability and keeping the status quo. Louis XIV's theory was that nobles couldn't overthrow the government if they were too busy attending to trifling matters of etiquette — and dance was one of the many ways he kept the nobility in their place. 

Hyacinthe Rigaud's famous portrait of Louis places great emphasis on the monarch's legs, for these were a dancer's legs, which served as a symbol of both his political strength and graceful decorum. Just as the ornate architecture of Versailles expressed the cultural supremacy of French society, ballet served as a vehicle for Louis to demonstrate his own power in a social setting in which his subordinates could look on with amazement. 

More enduringly, in 1661, Louis XIV founded the Académie Royale de Danse, giving 13 men the authority as dancing masters to establish a standard for perfection. Pierre Beauchamps developed the five basic positions of the feet that are still used today. The technical vocabulary of all ballet that exists in the world — the vocabulary Megan Fairchild uses to perform at Lincoln Center — is a direct inheritance from a 17th-century instrument of French political power. To dismiss it as irrelevant is to dismiss the foundation on which Western theatrical dance stands.

Opera as the Sound of Revolution: Verdi and the Risorgimento (1842–1861)

If ballet was the tool of absolute monarchy, opera proved equally potent in the hands of those fighting to destroy it.

In the years leading up to the revolutions of 1848, opera in Italy became a focus of dissent, and opera houses were flashpoints for political unrest.  The art form Chalamet dismisses was, in this period, a site of active political combat. Governments knew it, which is why they censored it.

The mechanism was elegant. Italian audiences had no difficulty realizing that in Verdi's Nabucco, the Israelites represented themselves and the Babylonians the Austrians. The climax, the "Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves" — Va, pensiero, sull'ali dorate — became the anthem of the Risorgimento and is considered Italy's "other" national anthem to this day. 

The political threat was understood by authorities in real time. La battaglia di Legnano, premiering in Rome the year after the 1848 uprisings with an obvious parallel to the 19th-century conflict between Italy and Austria, was suppressed by the Austrian government after a few performances. When a government bans an opera, it is acknowledging that the opera matters profoundly.

Verdi's name itself became an acronym to secretly praise the nationalist cause: "Viva V.E.R.D.I." stood for "Viva Vittorio Emanuele Re d'Italia" — Long Live Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy. In 1848, prompted by Mazzini, Verdi composed the music for Suona la tromba, which he hoped would become "the Marseillaise of the Italians." 

When Verdi died in 1901, two hundred thousand people attended the funeral procession in Milan and joined in the singing of Va, pensiero. That is not the funeral of an art form no one cares about. That is the funeral of a man whose art had helped birth a nation.

It is worth acknowledging the historiographical nuance here: modern research has cast doubt on some of the more mythologized accounts — the story of the Va, pensiero encore in defiance of an Austrian ban may not have happened exactly as reported. Contemporary research suggests that Va, pensiero became the unofficial anthem of the Risorgimento only years after unification, more an acknowledgment than a harbinger. But this actually strengthens the argument: even in retrospect, even as a constructed myth, opera was the cultural form Italians chose to embody their national identity. A people does not elect a pop song or a film as its unofficial national anthem; they choose the chorus from an opera.

The Soviet Test Case: What Regimes Fear, They Censor

Perhaps the most compelling proof of opera and ballet's political weight is what totalitarian regimes did with them. Stalin understood something Chalamet apparently does not.

Soviet officials used opera as an instrument to rebuild an imperial common consciousness on new, Soviet ground. The elevation of opera into one of the most important and prestigious art forms in the USSR was quite an extraordinary transformation — they could have decided to marginalize opera, but they took the opposite course and promoted it. Opera identified Russia as a European and world cultural center. 

Composers who failed to follow the approved format were harshly punished. Shostakovich was denounced by the state twice — in 1936 and 1948 — for introducing Western influences on his music. Branded as an "enemy of the people," friends and family were forced to sever ties on pain of death. 

Ballet gave the artist a certain status. It was worth the struggle because this was such a valued arena.  The Soviet state did not waste its repressive apparatus on things nobody cared about. They censored ballet precisely because it was a medium through which critical meanings could be conveyed to millions — and because the body in motion could say things that could never safely be put in words.

The Structural Argument: What Opera and Ballet Are

Chalamet's comment treats these forms as content delivery mechanisms that have been superseded by more efficient ones. This misunderstands what they are. Opera and ballet are not simply stories told in an elaborate way. They are:

  • Repositories of collective memory. The chorus of Va, pensiero was sung spontaneously at Verdi's funeral by 200,000 people. It encoded a generation's experience of subjugation and liberation. No streaming algorithm produces that.
  • Technologies of the body. As the ultimate expression of mastery over body and mind, a talent for dance was a key asset in successful court careers, where it was all about acting the perfect courtier. The codified technique of ballet is a centuries-long conversation about what the human body can communicate — a language that film can sample but cannot originate.
  • Sites of resistance. Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov, who left Moscow after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, reimagined Boris Godunov so that the coronation of Godunov became the moment Putin was elevated to the presidency. Opera houses are staging active political commentary on the war in Ukraine right now, in 2025. This is not a museum artifact; it is a living form.

The Irony of the Source

Finally, there is something worth noting about who said this. Chalamet is an actor — a practitioner of an art form whose entire technique rests on a foundation laid by opera and ballet. Stanislavski developed his method in dialogue with opera. The physical discipline, spatial awareness, and breath control at the core of serious screen acting descend directly from performing arts traditions that Chalamet is dismissing. The ladder he climbed is the one he just called irrelevant.

The deeper problem is not ingratitude but intellectual parochialism — measuring the worth of an art form by its trendiness. By that standard, the Ballet Royal de la Nuit was merely a king showing off. In reality, it was one of the most sophisticated acts of political communication in the early modern world. That we have forgotten this says something about us, not about the art.


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