The campaigns for political correctness that have spilled out from the western cultural metropolises via the Internet have now also reached music films.
This was evident at this year's Avant Première of the International Music and Media Center Vienna (IMZ), which took place online only for the second time.
In some of the almost six hundred new productions from five continents, blacks and women were demonstratively brought to the fore.
In particular, the big players, who are prone to criticism, want to offensively counter the accusation that they are a stronghold of the culture of the white man.
That is why the Metropolitan Opera in New York has now focused on a black man with the opera "Fire Shut Up in My Bones", which premiered in Saint Louis in 2019.
Terence Blanchard's rapidly filmed three-act play is marketed as a stage work in which all visible performers, with the exception of the conductor, are black.
However, it is questionable whether the psychologically overloaded, musically rather conservative work will survive the current economic situation.
It cannot be compared to a work like Gershwin's Porgy and Bess.
Now the focus is also on female artists who, little noticed by the mainstream, have consistently followed their own path for decades, such as the conductor Marin Alsop or the composer Florence Price, who died in 1953.
Such attention to previously underexposed phenomena is nothing fundamentally new for the music film industry and is characteristic of the mobility of the actors.
Most of them don't make a fuss about being female, black or otherwise.
For example, the New Zealand film producer Rebecca Tansley with the live recording of George Frideric Handel's opera "Semele" in a church, where Semele, the bride, tears himself away from the groom at the altar, falls into the arms of Jupiter, who unexpectedly appears as a rocker, and flies with him rushes away on the motorbike.
Or the film presented by Arte by South African producer Carolyn Carew about the vocal ensemble Ladysmith Black Mambazo: it offers an insight into a highly developed collaborative art of singing.
As a result of globalization, the industry is diversifying, new members from New Zealand to Mexico have joined the Avant Première, somewhat putting the preponderance of European opera and concert recordings into perspective.
More spontaneity thanks to the pandemic
But how did the industry survive the pandemic, how does it assess its future prospects?
A survey of the participants of the Avant Première for this newspaper gives a multi-faceted picture.
A consensus was that the pandemic has changed the industry -- positively too.
Capable production companies are the winners of the crisis, it was heard.
Thomas Freundlich from the innovative Finnish small company Lumikinos puts it this way: “The pandemic was a tough time, but it also opened up new paths and stimulated ideas.”