The Opera Singer and the Silent Film, and: Carmen on Film: A Cultural History (review)

In 1915 the young film producer Jesse Lasky went to see Geraldine Farrar backstage at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, after a performance of Madame Butterfly, to try and sign her up for a film version of Carmen. Farrar was intrigued by the thought that her performance (for which she would not have to sing as films were at that time silent) would be immortalised on film and be seen by thousands more than would ever be able to see her in an opera house. The money Lasky was offering – $2 a day whether shooting or not, plus a share of royalties and profits (she actually settled for a flat fee of $20,000) – was further temptation, and Farrar duly signed a three-picture deal, all three to be directed by Lasky’s young house director, Cecil B. DeMille.

A silent operatic film? It sounds strange, but Lasky and his partner Sam Goldfish (who later changed his name to Goldwyn) had an ulterior motive. The fledgling film industry was still looking to Broadway, the stage and vaudeville for its actors, but the star names were having nothing to do with an art form that was considered, at best, vulgar. To keep ahead of their rivals, Lasky and Goldfish needed someone of stature to demonstrate that the ‘flickers’, as they were known, were respectable: they needed a star like Geraldine Farrar. Lasky’s hunch paid off. Farrar became a huge box-office draw and went on to appear in a further thirteen movies, none of them remotely operatic. She had become one of the first great stars of the silent screen.

Farrar’s appearance in Carmen was neither the first nor the only connection between the world of grand opera and the movies. Italian soprano Lina Cavalieri, for example, publicised as the most beautiful woman in the world, had appeared the previous year in Manon Lescaut opposite her husband, the French tenor Lucien Muratore.

It is this relationship between opera singers and the silent screen that Paul Fryer charts in his extremely thorough and readable book. ‘The simple fact,’ he writes, ‘that more than seventy operas appeared in silent film versions by 1915 is one of those curious truths that have passed most of us by’. He is right about people being in ignorance, but has, I believe, underestimated the number of silent operatic films made at this time – not of complete performances of opera but of arias or scenes lasting no more than fifteen minutes, the length of a reel. There were well over a hundred even by 1909.

So what was this strange attraction, this desire to marry two totally different and apparently incompatible art forms? There can be no doubt that Lasky was correct: opera singers appearing in films did add a certain class. Equally, and this lies at the heart of Fryer’s exposition: opera singers played a significant, and to date unsung, role in the development of the cinema. Inventors from Edison onwards had been striving to put sound to pictures, and if they wanted a test piece, what better to choose than an aria of which there was already a recording available? It made economic sense.

Fryer is not content just to chronicle the story of those singers who swapped the stage for the studio. Rather, he spends four chapters dealing with the background, first concerning the way the media deals with opera stars from Caruso to Domingo, then looking at the effect caused generally by the arrival of cinema, and at the way the film camera changes stage performance. It is central to his hypothesis, and a very important point, that whatever the problems of synchronising lip movement with sound, the appearance of opera stars in films often gives us our only record of their acting skills.

The expression ‘silent films’, as Fryer reminds us...