HD Opera: A Love/Hate Story

Staging the Backstage at Carmen, Live in HD

I had arrived at the Metropolitan Opera stage door as instructed—10:30 a.m. on Saturday, January 16, 2010—but apparently we were already running late.¹ Marisa and I quickly made our way to the stage, where the dry run for the opening segments and intermission features of the afternoon's high-definition broadcast of Carmen was well under way. Marisa was more precisely Marisa Biaggi, a Princeton musicology PhD who, after finishing her degree,² took a position with the Met's Creative Content division, the team responsible for producing and promoting the spectacularly successful Live in HD broadcasts. For several years Marisa had been my point of contact and fact-checker for my academic interest in the HD initiative; after several years of learning about the broadcasts secondhand, I inquired about the possibility of shadowing her and her colleagues during an actual broadcast. After some discussion of scheduling, they settled on the Carmen performance as a good day for me to visit.

My official status was that of a member of the press (General Manager Peter Gelb himself signed off on my being there), but I saw my job for the day as more ethnographic than journalistic. Who made the broadcasts happen, and how? More specifically, what went into the "special features" of the broadcasts (artist interviews, backstage access, historical montages) that made these performance events different from other mediatized opera?³ As an arts management veteran, friend of Marisa's, and somewhat avid fan of the broadcasts, I could hardly call myself a complete outsider, but I still hoped to cast a reasonably objective eye on the proceedings.

By the time Marisa and I made it to the stage, slightly out of breath, everything was up and running, with stagehands and other Met personnel efficiently making their way to and fro to prepare for the 1 p.m. curtain. For Marisa and her colleagues, however, all attention was focused on the day's broadcast host, Renée Fleming. Renée (as everyone called her, and as I'll dare to call her in this essay) was dressed in a smart light brown pantsuit, her hair still damp—she would have time for hair and makeup after the run-through, I was told. She showed no signs of fatigue, despite having sung the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier the evening before alongside Susan Graham and Christine Schäfer. I felt worn out just having sat in the audience the previous evening (a happenstance not intended to coincide with my day backstage), but I silently chastised myself upon realizing that I'd spent significantly more time away from the opera house in the last twenty-four hours than Renée, who at least this weekend seemed to merit the mantle of Hardest Working Woman in Opera.

I've been a more or less enthusiastic follower of the HD transmissions since their inception in the 2006-07 season and have attended over a dozen broadcasts. I've been to several in downtown Chicago (I Puritani and Hansel and Gretel) and one in the outer suburb of Woodridge, Illinois (Eugene Onegin). I've seen five at two different theaters in central New Jersey, including the 2008 live broadcast of opening night (in which Renée starred in a triple bill of scenes from Traviata, Manon, and Capriccio), complete with red-carpet arrivals and, memorably, Martha Stewart mixing cocktails with Susan Graham at intermission (and, oddly, Rufus Wainwright lurking in the background, apparently trying to sneak into the camera shot).

Since my first HD broadcast, I've been in equal measures intrigued and troubled by the special features of the experience, and I am similarly ambivalent about the larger narrative that the Met, under the direction of Peter Gelb, has created to frame the broadcasts more generally—namely, that they will help save opera from otherwise inevitable obsolescence in the age of new media. This underlying narrative has been reproduced in hundreds if not thousands of journalistic accounts, which seldom fail to mention the broadcasts' special features.⁴ Fortunately these two...