Zooming In, Gazing Back: Don Giovanni on Television

Few opera productions look as good on television as the 2006 Don Giovanni directed for the Netherlands Opera by Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito, and for television by Misjel Vermeiren.¹ With the stage divided into modestly sized bedrooms, the big-stage/small-screen problem of televised opera disappears, and the bedrooms themselves, decorated à la 1960s suburbia, look manifestly appropriate in a medium famous for middle-class domestic drama (fig. 1). So does the plot, transformed into a clash between the sexual revolution (a.k.a. Don Giovanni) and the nuclear family (everyone else) and played out like a soap opera with minimal action and a surfeit of neuroses, notably repression, which afflicts even the hero. Foes of Regietheater will balk—audiences in Amsterdam booed²—but the production fits the medium to a tee. In a world of psychologized agents and familial dysfunction, the very world of television drama itself, all the zooms and cuts and close-ups that so often attract criticism in televised opera look entirely natural.

So natural, in fact, that one might want to praise the directors for having managed a successful marriage of opera and television, ostensibly a rare feat. Writing recently in these pages, Emanuele Senici and others note the insistence among many directors, critics, and consumers that television assume a subsidiary role in opera and other live theater, preserving the "aura" of stage events as far as possible and documenting productions without interpreting them.³ Few examples measure up, for strictly speaking no broadcast or video can conjure an unmediated performance—yet the televised incarnation of the Wieler/Morabito production comes close. So camera-ready is the stage production that, when viewed on-screen, it is hard to tell where "liveness" ends and "mediatization" begins.

Simply congratulating the directors, though, would obscure the larger lessons of their media savvy. Live theater's brief against television stands on a wobbly premise, a distinction between live and mediated that is much harder to sustain in practice than in theory.⁴ Not only that, but combing televised opera for the most faithful representations of what happens onstage—as much of the literature on the subject has done—ignores fundamental questions about the medium itself and what it makes of opera.⁵ This is no trivial concern, given the long-standing if underappreciated importance of television in operatic culture.⁶ Even among readers of Opera Quarterly, I am surely not alone in having seen my first operas on "Live from the Met," and in recent years both the home (or classroom) video screening and the growing archive of video excerpts on the Internet have made televised performances ever more ubiquitous. Nowadays scholars, fans, and even performers may encounter opera more often on-screen than onstage, and it is time to look seriously at what they see and hear.

Figure 1.

Don Giovanni, Netherlands Opera, 2006: full stage with "bedrooms" (DVD Kultur D0701, 2008).

Senici and a few others have begun to do so, focusing on select examples ranging from Peter Sellars's Mozart to Patrice Chéreau's Wozzeck.⁷ I cast a somewhat wider net, looking at many versions of a single opera in an effort to evaluate the workings of television more broadly. After six decades of regular televised appearances, Don Giovanni makes a good test subject, illustrating a representative cross section of technologies and directorial styles. Its legacy further allows for a host of illuminating comparisons, the effects of the medium emerging all the more clearly when the drama and music remain (more or less) the same. Where those effects stand out most—notably in the domains of time, subjectivity, performance, and what I would call visuality—the transformation of Don Giovanni can tell us a good deal about opera on television generally. It also offers some surprising insights into this most exhaustively discussed pillar of the operatic repertory.⁸

Put simply, filming, editing, audio mixing, and the other resources of television can make the action of Don Giovanni appear faster or slower (time), its characters deeper or more superficial (subjectivity), and...