Sex & the Strait-Laced Strongman

It was a state occasion in Buenos Aires' majestic Colon Theater. In honor of visiting Japanese Crown Prince Akihito, the city had scheduled a gala performance of Stravinsky's ballet Rite of Spring, and Juan Carlos Ongania, the retired general who seized power last year, had agreed to attend. Ongania was not enjoying himself. In the middle of the performance, he rose from the presidential box and ushered his wife and 28-year-old daughter Sara to the rear. Rite of Spring, he informed Mayor Eugenio Schettini the next day, was a dirty ballet and should not be permitted in Buenos Aires. "My wife and daughter had to look at indecencies performed by seminude dancers," the President complained. "Today, we had to go to confession."

Ongania's outrage was no surprise. During his 14 months in the Casa Rosada, the mustachioed strongman has all but declared sex illegal in his already strait-laced country. His regime has put Argentina's few tame girly magazines out of business, ordered nightclubs to keep their lights bright at all times and outlawed kissing in public parks. It has banned such widely acclaimed films as the Czech-made Loves of a Blonde and Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, based on a short story by Argentina's Julio Cortazar; it recently ordered a popular local television show discontinued because it showed too much of a bosomy blonde film star named Libertad Leblanc. One evening this month police stormed into the Buenos Aires Institute of Modern Art Theater just before curtain time, canceled a production of British Playwright Harold Pinter's The Homecoming, gave the actors 20 minutes to take off their make up and get out, then closed the theater for 15 days as a warning to the institute never to try to corrupt public morals again.

Incitement to Matricide. By far the most significant casualty of Ongania's morality crusade, however, has been Alberto Ginastera's Bomarzo, the first important opera ever composed by an Argentine. For a while, Bomarzo was the pride of the government. For its world premiere three months ago, it was exported to Washington, where First-Nighter Hubert H. Humphrey found it "difficult, discordant and different"--although in good-neighborly fashion, he added, "It has distinction." Then, just before the opera's scheduled opening in Buenos Aires this month, Ongania changed his mind and decided that it was "too obsessed with sex." He banned it forthwith.

It was not a popular decision. Music Critic Jorge d'Urbano, who had panned Bomarzo at its premiere, wrote that by the government's standards, "Dante's Divine Comedy would have to be considered a political libel and Hamlet an incitement to matricide." Composer Ginastera, pointing to the libertine antics of such operatic heroes as Don Juan, the unmarried exploits of Tristan and Isolde, and the sadism of Salome, suggested tartly that the government should have done with it and suppress all operas. Which it might well do if Ongania ever got hold of the librettos.

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