And why I wouldn’t recommend it
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The first time I watched an opera on a screen was in the Dallas Cowboys football stadium. My mom and I picked our way to the front over sparsely filled plastic seats—the bleachers had a hollowed-out, cheerless feel—and settled in for the show, where a simulcast of Turandot played across a 1.2-million-pound jumbotron more familiar with instant replays and fan-cam footage. It was a spectacularly underwhelming experience.
Most opera fans aren’t exactly awed by the beauty of the broadcast version, but the practice is still worthwhile, particularly as a way to increase accessibility to the art form (and, frankly, to keep it alive). Televising opera was first proved possible on the small screen in the 1940s—before that, it was broadcast to loyal audiences over the radio—and continues today through the Metropolitan Opera’s Live in HD and Live at Home programs, which stream performances to movie theaters and living rooms, respectively. The New York opera house has approximately 650,000 yearly visitors, but Live in HD opera streams reached nearly 1 million people last season. These programs hope to reach you even if you’re “on assignment in Antarctica.” It’s hard to argue with that.
But as persistent as the desire to televise opera is the debate over whether—and how—to do it. In 1983, the critic Lloyd Schwartz opined about “Opera on Television” for The Atlantic, calling it “virtually a self-contradiction: the most grandiose, elaborate form of entertainment this side of the Ringling Brothers (not always this side, either) diminished by the most intimate, reductive medium of transmission.”
The Met telecast its first complete performance in 1948, collaborating with ABC to bring Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello to more than 1 million viewers. They brought the works: long-range shots, close-up shots (those front-row seats didn’t stand a chance!), and even the rare backstage moment. It was a success in many ways, but not enough to stop the critic John Crosby from noting that “the Metropolitan’s great roster contains some of the worst actors, and actresses on earth,” and that “by Hollywood standards,” the Met’s female performers “are not likely to drive Betty Grable out of the pin-up business.”
Crosby understood that live audiences were willing to “overlook these failings,” and he predicted that television audiences might do the same. But imperfections may be harder for modern TV audiences, with their expectations of cleanly edited, smoothly run perfection, to ignore. Live audiences, however, understand that the most important component of an opera is not the acting or the visual charm of the soloists—Maria Callas comes around only once a century—but the singing. The composer David Schiff mused in The Atlantic in 1999 about what keeps opera magical in the age of movies:
Opera combines storytelling and spectacle in ways that rarely achieve the state of fusion we take for granted at the movies. Only die-hard film fans go to a bad movie to catch a great cameo performance, but opera-lovers do the equivalent all the time, knowing that a few moments of vocal bliss are more important than an evening of credible acting or striking “production values.”
Seeing the seams is part of live performance’s charm—it asks the audience to actively participate in the suspension of reality, as opposed to having it ready-made for them. Broadcast opera retains some of that immediacy, but without the magic of a live performance, it’s harder to forgive its failings.
Watching the machinations of the orchestra down in the pit or waiting for the curtains to go up all serve to remind us that “we’re ‘at the opera,’” Schwartz wrote, “watching not only the work but an event, a document of a particular performance.” Knowing that you can experience a moment only once—and being unable to relive it—is a rarity in today’s world. Live opera reminds us that capturing also entails destroying, and that sometimes the ephemeral is meant to be just that.
