A Note from the Guest Editor

mediate, v.

-To occupy the space between two things, times, etc.; to be transitional

-To function as an intermediary or link.

-To moderate, mitigate; to lessen, reduce.

—Oxford English Dictionary

To mediate is to find a middle ground, to bridge a distance, to act as a conduit for communication. That is precisely what this special issue of Opera Quarterly aims to do: to bring together a group of new essays that explore the spaces between operas and their publics, between works and their stagings, and between live opera and film or video. Our theme—mediation—is meant to encompass not only more recent media technologies such as film and video, but also those practices and concepts that have been thought to intervene (whether to facilitate or to interfere) in the operatic experience. These essays ask: What might it mean to "mediate" opera? Also, how might opera act as mediator in other channels of communication?

Several themes emerge in response to these questions. First, and perhaps most obviously, mediation has historically been pitted against the live or "unmediated." The lament that reading about opera, hearing of opera, or seeing it at a distance just isn't the same as being there is a familiar one. Moreover, technologies of inscription, recording, and reproduction that have attempted to capture such experiences have often explicitly promised to efface themselves in order to deliver a product—an experience—indistinguishable from the live. The tagline of those famous cassette ads ("Is it live or is it Memorex?") played upon the idea that the best media were supposedly transparent—the audience might easily see or hear through them, while remaining unaware of their existence. When this transparency fails, the final implication of mediation I have cited above comes into play: the belief that mediation, inevitably less than perfect, necessarily involves a kind of mitigation, lessening, or reduction of a pristine original.

However, the confusion the Memorex motto seems to acknowledge—we can never be sure, apparently, what is live and what is recorded—raises the possibility of intermingling between the live and the mediated, a kind of mutual infiltration that makes it difficult to discern where the live ends and the mediated begins. These essays, following the lead of recent studies of performance such as Philip Auslander's Liveness, do not take the existence of an unsullied live for granted. Rather, they look and listen again in an attempt to understand how operatic experience itself can be a product of its own mediation. Michael Markham's article centers on the problem of "capturing" solo song in written notation at the end of the Renaissance. The ideologies of transcription that emerged to address this problem, he argues, uncannily prefigure both nineteenth-century literary attempts to translate singerly presence into prose and modern film theory's concern with mechanism and loss. Anna Nisnevich explores how history itself is mediated via images, sound, and music in two films of Alexander Sokurov: Moloch (1999) and Russian Ark (2002). Sokurov's repudiation of grand historical narratives in favor of an exquisite attention to mundane detail is complemented by the multilayered counterpoint of voices, everyday noises, and snatches of Wagner or Glinka that permeate the films. Nisnevich argues that Sokurov's blatant appropriation of clichéd or iconic music and images draws the film spectator into a timeless elsewhere while at the same time opening up a distance that allows for critical reflection on his historical subjects.

The last three contributions to this issue engage in an even closer conversational counterpoint. My own article deals with the use of television in Harry Kupfer's 1987 production of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice, asking how the presence of media technology can be understood not as diminishing the frisson of the "live," but as actually enhancing it. The self-conscious use of media technology on the operatic stage also concerns Emanuele Senici, whose essay discusses how the use of so-called "green screen" and other fantastical video effects in the 2007 production of Rossini's La pietra del paragone filmed by French director Philippe Béziat work against any notion of media as transparent...