First they came for the books. But sooner or later, the forces of censorship scoop up everything in their path.

现在他们是一个fter the operas as well.

Earlier this fall, the management of WCPE, a listener-supported radio station in North Carolina devoted to classical music, decided that the Metropolitan Opera’s live radio broadcasts — a staple of the American cultural landscape for more than 80 years — were no longer suitable fodder for its community.

In a letter to the station’s listeners and supporters that subsequently found its way onto social media, station manager Deborah S. Proctor laid out her objections to several of the operas in the Met’s 2023-24 broadcast season, none of which she planned to air.

“Dead Man Walking,” the popular opera by San Francisco composerJake Heggie, deals with the death penalty and begins with a horrifyingly brutal depiction of a rape and double murder.

“I heard the boy being shot,” Proctor wrote about the production, “then I heard the girl screaming during an attempted rape by de Rocher before he knifed her to death to silence her.”

“X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” by San Diego-based composer Anthony Davis “addresses adult themes and contains offensive language plainly audible to everyone, children included.” SFJazz’s incoming Artistic Executive DirectorTerence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” also “addresses adult themes,” and “The Hours,” American composer Kevin Puts’ luminous adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, contains, among other problematic content, a “segment culminating in an actual death.” (To be clear, this was mentioned in contrast to other scenes in which suicide is contemplated; no cast members in this opera lose their lives.)

Proctor’s letter concludes with a list of classic operas thatdomake the cut. Among the works she deemed passable in spite of some perfectly obvious disqualifying features were Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” (child sexual abuse and suicide), Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” (racism and misogyny), Bizet’s “Carmen” (sex, murder, rope play) and Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” (an entire scene devoted to an orgy).

I don’t mean to make light of the adult elements in those operas either. But there are all kinds of ways to help families and younger listeners get acclimated to the form.

“When we invite school groups for dress rehearsals, it’s palpable how connected children are to what’s onstage, no matter how challenging the subject, or how contemporary the work,” San Francisco Opera General Director Matthew Shilvock told me. “We rarely have productions in which there is R-rated language or imagery, so it doesn’t really affect season planning. But when we do, we share advisories and let parents make that determination themselves.”

Happily, WCPE’s plan to divide the operatic repertoire into the clean and the unclean was short-lived. Once the news got around, thanks in part to aninterview天天p给NPR的阿纳斯塔西娅Tsioulcas伯爵ier this month, a number of prominent voices were raised in protest.

The protesters included composer and musicianRhiannon Giddens, whosePulitzer Prize-winning opera “Omar” is scheduled for its San Francisco Opera premiere on Nov. 5, and the journalist and author Celeste Headlee. The station backed down and agreed to broadcast the Met’s entire season — even the operas that had once been deemed too problematic.

Still, that doesn’t mean the danger is past, or that there’s nothing more to learn from this episode. Far from it.

If there’s anything we know about cultural reactionaries — and recent years on the political front have only underscored the truth of this proposition — it is that they can be parried but never placated. The next musical administrator who sets out to clean up the airwaves will simply be cannier about it.

The thing about the forces of cultural repression is that they’re not wrong to be wary of operas, books and all the rest of it. Those art forms are a genuine threat to the conformist mindset — at least if they’re done right.

Newly created operas can make a point of poking and probing at the political and social stresses of contemporary life. Long-lived classics of the stage can do the same through constant reevaluation.

Most of the operas on WCPE’s banned list are very much in that strain. They challenge listeners to rethink the certainties they bring with them into the opera house (or in this case, to whatever room in the house the radio is in). They turn over the accumulated dust of generations and shine a new light on things we might have thought were long settled.

In particular, a number of the operas on the list are among those addressing matters of race with an urgency that is comparatively new in the opera world. Davis’ “X,” which premiered in 1986, was an early pioneer in this regard, but recent years have seen opera companies (including the Met) treat it with newfound admiration.

Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” from 2019, based on New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow’s memoir of the same name, offers a frank treatment of race and sexual orientation. Like the other operas on the list, it has attained a critical and commercial success, including a Grammy for the Met’s 2023 recording.

Yet something about these operas, and others like them, make them threatening to a censorious sensibility.

Proctor didn’t respond to my request for an interview, but her conversation with NPR revealed a religious undercurrent at work.

“I have a moral decision to make here,” she said, breaking into tears. “What if one child hears this? When I stand before Jesus Christ on Judgment Day, what am I going to say?”

I’m not qualified to opine about Jesus’ views on opera and morality, assuming they exist. But I would insist that the afterlife is not the best venue for judging art.

Opera, like every art form, exists in the here and now. It brightens and enriches and complicates our communal life. It gives us moral conundrums to contemplate and tunes to hum. The more we fear it, the more we pore over it in search of dirty words or impure thoughts or even musical dissonances, the more power we grant to the forces that truly mean us all harm.

Reach Joshua Kosman:jkosman@sfchronicle.com