Opera’s Screen Metamorphosis: The Survival of a Genre or a Matter of Translation?

Might the screen provide opera with a kind of new skin—allowing it to survive, in our age of mechanical and digital reproduction? That is the underlying question of the ensuing discussion. In the first section, I will briefly unfold this question as a prelude to a more sustained development of my major hypothesis, which is that the concept of translation, as developed by Walter Benjamin, might shed light on the operatic-cinematic metamorphosis. Even though this hypothesis applies first and foremost to opera films (that is to say, to filmed versions of an entire opera), I believe that its full examination, not the least because Benjamin likens the task of translation to the exercise of criticism, is not without consequences for a more general discussion about the fate of opera as a genre. In the third and final section of the article I’ll try to account for why I think so, in a way that nonetheless does not downplay the encounter of opera and film as a subsidiary question to that of opera’s survival.

1

Opera has long relied upon a quite picturesque set of fans and devotees. Fellini’s E la nave va famously fictionalizes this, but reality does not lack examples either. Think of Henry Pleasants, “the spy who loved music” (as he was dubbed by Opera News), who had a professional double life as a music critic and a top intelligence agent for the CIA during the Cold War. He even lived with Reinhard Gehlen (a former Nazi officer who after World War II also joined the CIA) to evaluate his “suitability.” If only for this reason, Pleasants could definitely provide a source of inspiration for a film with a great deal of “operaticness.” We could easily imagine a scene in a room with a gramophone, showing the two men commenting on their love for, and listening to, opera, as the perfect dramatic background for Pleasants’s attempt to disclose the inner nature of his German colleague. Opera, after all, is supposed to prompt people to react emotionally. Would there be, in that case, any better occasion for Pleasants to delve into Gehlen’s psyche?

Conversely, as a music critic Pleasants revealed himself to be quite a conservative intellectual and writer, at least when we consider his negative appraisal of modern music or the way he interpreted the present situation of opera. As for the latter, he attributed its crisis today to the increasing influence of the producer/director (which he termed “produceritis”).¹ This, of course, also made him quite skeptical toward cinematic versions of opera. According to him,

what TV and film producers and directors do with their restless camera work, close-ups and other visual distractions—worse, as a rule, in studio productions than in the filming of live stage performances—diverts the listener’s or viewer’s attention from composition, performance and performer, thus working precisely against the objectives of composer and performer. . . . I have sometimes been tempted to think that these people hate music.²

Be that as it may, the least we can say is that his qualities as a spy—shrewdness, sagacity, sense of opportunity—were likely to be far ahead of his insightfulness as a music critic. Otherwise he might have evaluated the operatic-cinematic metamorphosis quite differently—for instance, as an opportunity for survival amid a hostile world . . . Taking on the skin of another medium (the medium of the screen) might have appeared to him, in that case, as a chameleonlike strategy by which opera could traverse modernity and postmodernity almost unharmed. By the same token, such a metamorphosis could even be thought of as amounting to the genesis a new, hybrid genre.

This is one of Marcia Citron’s claims in Opera on Screen (2000). Indeed, her book is aimed, as she puts it, at “showing how opera is an inclusive concept that embraces diverse kinds of aesthetic experience. In our media-saturated culture, the proscenium arch cannot contain this extravagant art form.”³ Citron thus reacts to the fears, expressed among...