Television Opera: The Fall of Opera Commissioned for Television (review)

Since the advent of the age of mechanical reproduction, opera production has exploited such modern media as television, video, and film as well as the traditional live stage. The proliferation of technologically mediated operas has stimulated critical inquiries, and the scholarship on these mediated operas has rapidly grown over the past few decades. Yet there are only a handful of book-length studies on the topic. While the existing scholarship has shown a tendency to focus on the opera-cinema encounter (for instance, Jeremy Tambling's inaugural work Opera, Ideology and Film [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987]; the collection Between Opera and Cinema [New York: Routledge, 2002] edited by Jeongwon Joe and Rose Theresa; and David Schroeder's Cinema's Illusions, Opera's Allure [New York: Continuum, 2002]), Jennifer Barnes's book is entirely devoted to the televisual mediation of opera.

Many opera scholars (and opera fans as well) have shown strongly negative reactions toward the technological mediation of opera. Sam Abel noted, "If film turns opera into a Hollywood epic, television turns opera into a nighttime soap opera, a lurid melodrama where the actors happen to be singing along with the sound track" (Sam Abel, Opera in the Flesh: Sexuality in Operatic Performance [Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996], 173). Some of the critiques of mediated opera seem to be motivated by operatic elitism, revealing their underlying disdain for media generally—whether film, video, or television—because of its cultural status as popular entertainment. Unlike those studies which are primarily concerned with the ideological and cultural assessment of the popular media, Barnes's work demonstrates an historical and analytical approach to the development of opera on television.

She touches upon all three subsets of the televisual opera—a live broadcast, a video recording, or a filmed opera made for television (vi)—but her close analyses focus on Television Opera (upper case), that is, "opera commissioned for television" (p. 2). Barnes examines three Television Operas in detail: Gian Carlo Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors (from NBC, 1951), Benjamin Britten's Owen Wingrave (from the BBC, 1971), and Gerald Barry's The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit (from the U.K. Channel 4, 1995). Based on her vigorous research of copious primary materials such as letters and interviews, Barnes provides substantial and detailed factual information about these three operas and other related works, including their production history, and the reactions from various people differently involved in their production and reception, such as composers, singers, directors, and reviewers. Although this type of factual information occupies considerable, occasionally excessive, space in Barnes's slim book, its strength lies in her analytical inquiries into the technical and aesthetic possibilities and difficulties that the new medium of television can bring to both opera production and composition.

For instance, Barnes discusses how composers responded to the aesthetic tension between televisual realism and operatic theatricality and how this tension is negotiated in particular television operas. More intriguingly, she examines the efficacy and problems of television techniques in the visual interpretation of opera. The close-up is one of the issues Barnes touches upon. She first indicates that although this technique is commonly regarded as one of television's "strongest assets," it has been a liability rather than an advantage in opera on television, and she cites Robert Donington, who humorously yet sarcastically expressed the absurdity of a close view of the singer's vocal labor by comparing it to a TV commercial for toothpaste ("Close-ups Versus Opera," Musical Times 129 [1988]: 281). Barnes then advances her discussion to explore how Menotti bypassed the awkwardnessoftheclose-ups by using themshrewdly and effectively in both The Medium and Amahl (pp. 21-23). Barnes also shows how camera operation can contribute to the visual reinforcement of the drama in ways not realizable on stage. In Amahl, for example...