Cinema's Illusions, Opera's Allure: The Operatic Impulse on Film (review)

In 1915, the film director and entrepreneur Cecil B. DeMille persuaded Geraldine Farrar to play the lead in his film version of Carmen. Not a single note from this fabled voice would be heard, of course, but the idea was that Farrar could offer a mass audience some sense of how she portrayed the gypsy temptress on the operatic stage. The film received a mixed critical response, apparently receiving more positive notices from critics interested in movies than from opera critics, some of whom commented on the absurdity of the attempt to present opera in a medium not yet capable of reproducing sound. The Farrar version seems to have inspired a prompt parodic response from Charlie Chaplin, and his film (known alternatively as Carmen or A Burlesque on Carmen) can be viewed as a satire either of DeMille's effort or the genre of opera itself. David Schroeder sees Chaplin's film as a satire that anarchically attacks "opera itself, and figures of authority" in general (p. 99). While this may be true, Chaplin's playful satire hardly warrants the vulgar subtitle given to the portion of the book in which it is discussed, "Cinema Gives Opera the Finger." (Such a vulgar gesture might more fairly be imputed to a later film parody of Carmen,Jean-Luc Godard's pretentious porno-trash Prénom: Carmen [First Name: Carmen], which Schroeder discusses later in the book.)

As important as Georges Bizet and his masterpiece may have been in the history of film, honors for the operatic composer having the greatest influence on film belong to Richard Wagner. Schroeder is not the first critic to link the cinematic technique of the American film director D. W. Griffith to Wagner's compositional technique, and it is not difficult to accept the argument that Wagner's overt racism provided Griffith with justification for the appalling racism in his film, Birth of a Nation. "Both Wagner and Griffith take us back to pre-enlightened intolerance," Schroeder insists (p. 36), while on the positive side he can commend Griffith for "adapting grand-opera methods to motion pictures" (p. 30). Opera itself, as a genre, cultural institution, and marker of good taste, is the actual subject of the 1925 Lon Chaney Jr. version of Phantom of the Opera,the best of many film versions of Gaston LeRoux's novel. The first section of Schroeder's study, dealing with the appropriation of opera in early film, ends suitably with a discussion of Serge Eisenstein's monumental Alexander Nevsky (1938), which earns the author's approval as "the highest achievement of the idea of opera permeating cinema not only in early sound cinema but perhaps in all of cinema" (p. 58). The author might have asked whether those wonderfully loopy helmets worn by the Teutonic knights in the film were inspired by traditional Wagnerian stage productions.

The operatic influence on film was obviously more direct once sound was introduced. Schroeder commends such Hollywood composers as Bernard Herrmann and Erich Wolfgang Korngold for their ability to use musical motives as indicators of character and plot, like the Wagnerian leitmotiv. In an effort to praise Korngold with a kind of meaningless superlative, Schroeder asserts that the composer "took the use of leitmotiv in cinema as far as it could possibly go" (p. 79), as if there were an outer limit that Korngold had somehow reached.

In the third section of the book, on satire of opera in the movies, Schroeder is not careful to make distinctions among films that satirize the pretensions of opera as a marker of cultural sophistication, as in the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera, and films like Citizen Kane that depict the exploitation of opera for the assertion of power and awkward self-realization. Schroeder says of Orson Welles's film, "in a film highly critical of the...