Opera on Screen Book

For many opera fans, a live performance is a rare luxury. Film and television are infinitely more accessible, with new productions out on video all the time. How do we square a long, slow art form with the agitated media of the 21st century?

Marcia J. Citron, a musicologist at Rice University, finds a richly varied field. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Parsifal exploits film's ability to produce cognitive gaps, such as a man's voice emerging from a woman's mouth. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's Tales of Hoffmann uses a cast of dancers while unseen singers carry the vocal line; the split between sound and image gives it a silent movie's abstractness. Looking at Peter Sellars's productions of Don Giovanni on video, Citron shows how the camera enhances these contemporary settings of 18th-century works. Sellars rethinks Mozartian ensemble numbers--which normally function to bring characters onto common ground--by trapping his performers in isolated close-ups. A good deal of Citron's analysis of Sellars, though, pertains to his original staging, not the video treatments as such, begging the question of exactly when a screen version can be considered a distinct work. The blurry line between a screen opera and the mere opera it originated from is one she crosses repeatedly.

Citron, whose prose is marred by academic jargon, is at her best when she's enthusiastic. Discussing Francesco Rosi's Georges Bizet's Carmen, she documents the way the nonnaturalistic conventions of opera fit into an "everyday" film context: the layer of nonmusical sounds that grounds the story in a recognizable world; the score that at times recedes from the foreground, like a soundtrack; the dusty palette that undercuts the "idealizing travelogue" effect of the Andalusian settings.

Rosi's movie may not be part of a separate discipline but simply an interpretation that draws on the techniques at its disposal. Still, if film and video offer new ways of conceiving opera, of bringing it to more people in an evening than fit into La Scala in a year, who can complain? --David Olivenbaum