16 Opera and film
So why do we stick to a kind of theatrical activity which seems no longer to be viable? Granted, new and contemporary forms are continually arising, but in their lack of tradition they are naturally not exalted enough to meet with serious encouragement or to win favour with the cultivated! Isn’t a good film to be preferred to a bad performance of Schiller?
ALFRED ROLLER ( 1909 )
Although this book is primarily concerned with operas composed in the twentieth century, space precluding a detailed consideration of how earlier repertoire has been reassessed in modern times, the present chapter will be concerned with filmed interpretations of operas written in various epochs. The relationship between opera and that quintessentially twentieth-century art-form, cinema, has been complex and potentially fruitful – but often fraught with difficulties, both real and imagined. Traditional repertoire has been reassessed from the cinematographer’s perspective, the experience having been fed back into modern stage productions; film music was from the outset profoundly influenced by operatic techniques, before it in turn came to influence operatic music; and several operas were specially composed for the screen. This chapter looks briefly at those three topics, examining filmed treatments of existing operas, the relationship between opera and film music, and the select corpus of twentieth-century operas written specifically for film or television.
Opera on film
Cinematic interpretations of scenes from popular operas were widespread in the era of the silent film. By as early as 1904, extracts from Wagner’s Parsifal , Rossini’s Barber of Seville and Gounod’s Faust had been recorded on film and projected with live music. The sumptuous Gounod film, Faust et Marguerite , was directed by pioneering film-maker Georges Méliès, who himself appeared as Méphistophélès. In 1908, two developments contributed towards a boom in such ventures: first, the founding of the influential film d’art movement in France (for which Saint-Saëns composed an original score for the launch film, L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise ), which intensified interest in cinema as an art-form; second, the introduction of more stringent copyright legislation which henceforth compelled film-makers to plunder non-copyright classics of literature and the operatic stage in the interests of economy. A further consideration in the issuing of operatic extracts on film was the desire to promote gramophone recordings of the singers featured, a commercial concern that sat uncomfortably alongside the growing feeling that operatic source material could lend the medium of film a prestige that had formerly eluded it.
‘Canned theatre’ (in the parlance of the day) thus came to include ‘canned opera’, with both Pathé and Edison releasing new versions of Gounod’s Faust , in 1909 and 1911 respectively; Pathé also made a film based on Verdi’s Il trovatore in 1910. Other operas subjected to film treatment included Thomas’s Mignon , Auber’s Fra Diavolo and Wagner’s Siegfried (all 1912). Appropriate musical extracts from the operas were suggested by the distributors to guide projection venues in fitting live performances to the images, and these performances generally lacked the vocal parts (Marks 1997 , 72); venues were at liberty to use any other music of their choice, and often did. In the case of a film based on Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro (1914), the distributor declared in its trade advertisement that ‘Music adapted from the famous Opera will be supplied gratis’ (193). Biopics based on the lives of Wagner and Verdi appeared in Europe in 1913 and 1914 respectively, and operatic films continued to be produced in large numbers in France, Germany and Italy.
Bizet’s ever-popular Carmen , already given a filmed treatment by Edison in 1910, formed the basis for a silent film starring operatic soprano Geraldine Farrar in 1915 – and wickedly parodied a year later by Charlie Chaplin in his Burlesque on Carmen . Produced by Cecil B. DeMille for Paramount, the Farrar film was launched in the USA to the accompaniment of arrangements from Bizet’s score prepared by leading film-music pioneers Hugo Riesenfeld and Samuel L. Rothapfel. In 1917, Puccini refused to allow his music to be used for a film version of La Bohème , his gesture reinforcing the problem of tackling works still in copyright; but production of non-copyright opera films continued apace. By the 1920s silent films had grown longer in duration and relatively sophisticated in technique, and later operatic ventures were accordingly more satisfying. Among them, several films based on La Bohème finally appeared (in 1921, 1922 and 1926).
A silent film of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier was made in 1925, and this is occasionally screened today – as it was at Aldeburgh in 2002, with live piano accompaniment. The film’s production credentials were impressive, with direction by Robert Wiene (responsible for the legendary expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari in 1919), design by Alfred Roller (designer of Max Reinhardt’s original staging of the opera) and the direct participation of both librettist and composer. Strauss originally intended to have little to do with the project, which was scheduled to be screened at the Dresden Opera House in January 1926; he agreed to compose a new march, but left the task of adaptation to Otto Singer and Karl Alwin. In December 1925 the librettist Hofmannsthal wrote to the composer to say: ‘I must admit that your refusal to conduct the film in Dresden came quite unexpected and is a grave blow to me . . . I cling to the hope that it may perhaps be tempered with “blessed revocability”, but if it were irrevocable, I foresee for you (and consequently also for me) . . . the loss of very considerable financial expectations’ (Hammelmann and Osers 1961 , 411). Hofmannsthal was impecunious at the time and clearly had a vested interest in generating revenue from the project: his awareness of its commercial potential is telling. In a later letter Hofmannsthal passionately argued that the film would provide ‘a positive fillip and new impetus to the opera’s success in the theatre’ (quoted in Jefferson 1985 , 123). Strauss duly relented, and conducted the shambolic first screening in which it rapidly became apparent that he possessed neither the technical expertise nor sympathy with the medium necessary to ensure accurate synchronization with the projected images: he suffered the humiliation of being forced to yield his baton to an experienced film conductor (London 1936 , 69). In April 1926 Strauss was in London to conduct the first English screening, on which occasion he also recorded orchestral excerpts with the Tivoli Orchestra. Released by His Master’s Voice, these recordings were an early example of a film ‘tie-in’.
Reflecting on the tension between populist film music and modernist music ‘driven into the esoteric’ because of its minority appeal, Hanns Eisler – in a prejudicial study of film music co-authored with Theodor Adorno – took a hearty swipe at both Der Rosenkavalier and its composer:
at the time when motion-picture music was in its rudimentary stage, the breach between middle-class audiences and the really serious music which expressed the situation of the middle classes had become unbridgeable. This breach can be traced back as far as Tristan , a work that has probably never been understood and liked as much as Aïda , Carmen , or even the Meistersinger . The operatic theater became finally estranged from its audience between 1900 and 1910, with the production of Salome and Elektra , the two advanced operas of Richard Strauss. The fact that after 1910, with the Rosenkavalier – it is no accident that this opera has been made into a moving picture – he turned to a retrospective stylized way of writing reflects his awareness of that breach. Strauss was one of the first to attempt to bridge the gap between culture and audience, by selling out culture.
(Adorno and Eisler 1994 [1947], 57)
It is worth noting, however, that the first screening of the Rosenkavalier film took place in a prestigious opera house, not a picture palace , and that more elaborate presentations of silent feature films were often mounted in similar venues: in 1921, for example, Eugene Goossens conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in the Royal Opera House for the screening of a silent version of The Three Musketeers , starring Douglas Fairbanks. Goossens based his compilation score heavily on the work of an obscure composer, August Enna, whose music ‘fitted anything, and also conveyed a spurious impression of great emotional depth, making it very suitable for my purpose’ (quoted in Kershaw 1995 , 128). The boundaries between art and popular entertainment were becoming blurred even at this early stage, and Adorno’s and Eisler’s ‘breach’ between the allegedly self-contained audiences for both is clearly an over-simplification.
Various attempts were made in the 1920s to improve synchronization between sound and image in operatic films, notably in Germany. In 1922 the first opera specifically intended for the silver screen, Ferdinand
Hummel’s
Jenseits des Stromes
, included musical notation as part of the projected image as a guide to the conductor, but the film has not survived (Evidon
1992
, 196; Fawkes
2000
, 27). In Berlin four years later, Carl Robert
Blum exhibited his ‘rhythmonome’, which recorded sound in the form of a ‘rhythmogram’ charting the rhythmic course of the music diagrammatically and designed to be played back on the conductor’s desk in exact synchronization with the moving pictures; this device found an application in live opera, being used for the first production of K
enek’s
Jonny spielt auf
in 1927. Synchronized film sound first took the form of music recorded on gramophone records and played back in mechanical coupling with the image projector, and at the launch of the highly successful Vitaphone sound-on-disc system in New York in 1926 the feature film Don Juan
was prefaced by a series of short films of musical and vaudeville performances: several star singers from the Metropolitan Opera had been signed up by Vitaphone specifically to make synchronized shorts of popular operatic excerpts.
As sound-on-film technology developed rapidly after 1927, Hollywood’s penchant for glossy musicals resulted in the production of many filmed operettas, while films of ‘serious’ operas appeared mostly in Europe. An early highlight, which trod a middle ground between the popular and the esoteric, was G. W. Pabst’s interpretation of Weill’s The Threepenny Opera , shot in 1930 in both German and French versions using two different casts (Hinton 1990 , 42–3). Pabst was a pioneer of cinematic neue Sachlichkeit , his innovative montage techniques developing methods of continuity editing still prevalent today. As with Max Ophüls’s film of Smetana’s Bartered Bride (1932), Pabst showed how a front-rank director could significantly enhance the impact of a stage work by skilfully adapting it to the new medium. The script for The Threepenny Opera was partly the work of Béla Balázs, librettist of Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle and a noted film theorist, and the cinematography revelled in the restless, searching camera movements, high-contrast lighting and shady settings typical of Weimar cinema. Although the musical content was drastically pruned, it was treated inventively throughout: particularly effective use was made of diegetic cues, as when ‘Mack the Knife’ is accompanied by a barrel organ in a street scene (with the recording level manipulated to suggest distance in a long shot), and songs used in instrumental versions played in a tavern and brothel. A débâcle surrounding the film’s contractual arrangements drew attention to the ongoing dangers in tackling copyright material: both Brecht and Weill were legally entitled to have exclusive control over alterations to the screenplay and music respectively, and both independently took the production company to court when their entitlement was openly flouted. Brecht lost his case, but Weill won his – securing in the process a hefty cash settlement and potentially lucrative options to score further films by the same company. On the film’s release in 1931, Universal Edition issued a tie-in album containing four of the score’s most popular songs (Hinton 1990 , 44–6).
In the UK, the 1930s saw the production of two expensive opera films in colour, one based on Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci (destroyed by the distributor, Trafalgar Films, after its completion in 1937 owing to the lack of revenue generated by its release) and the other of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado (dir. Victor Schertzinger, 1939). The latter was intended as the launch vehicle for an ambitious series of G&S films featuring the D’Oyly Carte company and London Symphony Orchestra, but the series was halted by the outbreak of the Second World War. The Mikado met with mixed reviews, one critic declaring that ‘the mechanical nature of the screen-photograph (added to its self-complete realism in its own sphere) precludes any direct inter-action between audience and performers’ (quoted in Huntley [ 1947 ], 48). The most celebrated postwar British opera film was Michael Powell’s and Emeric Pressburger’s interpretation of Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann (1951), in which dancing and powerful special effects combined to create a new kind of cinematographic theatricality that appeared to be located in a fruitful middle ground between fantasy and reality, described by film theorist André Bazin as ‘an entirely faked universe . . . a sort of stage without wings where everything is possible’ (quoted in Joe and Theresa 2002 , 51). Also in 1951, a film of Menotti’s The Medium received critical acclaim and subsequently won an award at the 1952 Cannes Film Festival; this was an appropriate accolade for Italian filmed opera in general, the country having remained at the forefront of cinematic treatments of grand opera throughout the previous two decades.
Debate had by this time begun to rage on an apparently fundamental tension between filmic realism and stage theatricality. Because of the conceived incompatibility of the two approaches, several early commentators on film music bluntly predicted no future for filmed opera. Leonid Sabaneev identified the principal stumbling block as ‘the fact that the art of the cinema . . . is a photographic art, and is therefore obliged to be naturalistic and anti-theatrical’ ( 1935 , 26). Kurt London declared filmed opera to be ‘impossible and intolerable’, and continued:
Those elements for which on the operatic stage even to-day allowance is made, under the influence of the personalities of live artists, must on the screen have an insipid, ridiculous, and anachronistic effect. The camera brings the singer’s pathos much too close to the spectator; a close-up of a photographed high C, on which the distorted face of the tenor, with wide-open mouth, is to be seen, at once destroys the effect of even the most beautiful melody and resolves it into laughter or even disgust.
(1936, 139–40)
On the subject of the dubious value of close-up shots of singers’ faces, which can be just as disconcerting on television as in the cinema, the problem has been wittily summarized by Mary Holtby in her satire ‘The Pearl-flashers or Simonna Boccanegra ’:
Fair face, in distant drama seen,The source of sumptuous trillings,Avoid, I pray, the mini-screen,Where I can count your fillings.(Parrott 1989 , 176)
In his account of the problematic nature of filmed opera, London concluded: ‘The unreal world of opera and the naturalistic film have nothing whatever in common’ ( 1936 , 139–40). This view was elaborated by film theorist Siegfried Kracauer in the early 1950s, when he declared ‘The world of opera is built upon premises which radically defy those of the cinematic approach . . . Opera on the screen is a collision of two worlds detrimental to either’ (quoted in Joe and Theresa 2002 , ix).
Today’s spectators are more aware that cinema is arguably the most artificial and manipulative of creative media – and potentially the most fantastic – and are far less desirous of realism. London’s assertions that ‘opera is static, film dynamic’ and that ‘well-known works of operatic literature have become rigid conceptions which may not be touched by the film’ ( 1936 , 140, 142) will amuse contemporary opera audiences, accustomed as they are to a spectacular diversity of production styles beyond the wildest dreams of both film and opera audiences in the 1930s.
As early as 1913, Schoenberg had explored the possibility of filmed opera in an unnaturalistic style when contemplating a hand-tinted silent film of Die glückliche Hand . Writing to his publisher, he characteristically stipulated that he should retain total control over all aspects of the live musical performance, and showed himself to be in sympathy with the exigencies of movie distribution by being prepared to consider the use of a cinema organ instead of an orchestra if dictated by the size of the projection venue. Schoenberg’s comments on the style of the visual images were far-sighted in their experimental nature and awareness of the unlimited potential for illusion inherent in the medium of film:
the basic unreality of the events, which is inherent in the words, is something that they should be able to bring out even better in the filming (nasty idea that it is!). For me this is one of the main reasons for considering it. For instance, in the film, if the goblet suddenly vanishes as if it had never been there, just as if it had simply been forgotten, that is quite different from the way it is on the stage, where it has to be removed by some device. And there are a thousand things besides that be easily done in this medium, whereas the stage’s resources are very limited.
My foremost wish is therefore for something the opposite of what the cinema generally aspires to. I want:
The utmost unreality! (Hahl-Koch 1984 , 99–100)
Significantly, Schoenberg was considering Roller as one of three possible designers (he was in good company: the other options were the expressionist painters Kokoschka and Kandinsky), having been impressed by the anti-realist tendencies he had shown in his production of Tristan for Mahler at the Vienna Opera in 1903. Roller’s positive attitude towards cinema early in the century, as shown by the quotation reproduced at the head of this chapter, was revealed in the course of an essay bemoaning what he perceived as a general lack of interest in theatrical experimentation on the part of opera directors.
The film version of Die glückliche Hand remained unachieved , and Schoenberg’s latent interest in the cinema was not successfully revived by abortive attempts on the part of Hollywood producers to entice him to compose film scores after his emigration to the USA. On one memorable occasion when Schoenberg attempted to secure entire directorial control over a picture he was asked to score by Irving Thalberg at MGM, Thalberg (much to his credit) declared: ‘This is a remarkable man. And once he learns about film scoring and starts working in the studio he’ll realize that this is not like writing an opera’ (quoted in Silvester 1998 , 188). In fact, the composer’s curiosity about film music bore fruit only in his orchestral work Begleitmusik zu einer Lichtspielszene (1930) .
A particularly prolific output of filmed opera was produced by the Soviet Union from the 1950s onwards, in tandem with a series of films of well-known Russian ballets. Following the stage-bound film versions of Rakhmaninov’s Aleko (dir. N. Sidelev, 1953) and Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov (dir. Vera Stroyeva, 1955), more creative cinematography was demonstrated in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin (dir. Roman Tikhomirov, 1958). Tikhomirov later directed films of Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades (1960) and Borodin’s Prince Igor (1971). Other treatments of standard repertory items included two films by Vladimir Gorikker, of Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta (1963) and Rimsky’s Tsar’s Bride (1964). The most notable Soviet opera film was based on a twentieth-century score: Shostakovich’s Katerina Izmailova (the revised version of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk , withdrawn in 1936 after the composer’s infamous lambasting in Pravda ). The opera was filmed in 1966 by director Mikhael Shapiro, working in close collaboration with the composer, and Galina Vishnevskaya took the title role as she had in the revised opera’s first staging in 1963. Shapiro combined sophisticated montage techniques with two features common in later Soviet opera films: realistic settings and a double cast (one of actors, the other of dubbed singers; the only exception was Vishnevskaya, who fulfilled both functions). According to Tatiana Egorova, the film’s only ‘serious mistake’ was the exclusion of naturalistic sound and sound effects from the final soundtrack, with the result that ‘the visual element of the film resembled an animated illustration, a pantomime of the recorded opera’ ( 1997 , 190).
Outside the Soviet Union, the output of filmed opera had dwindled somewhat, being largely confined to straightforward filmings of staged productions, such as Paul Czinner’s films of the Salzburg productions of Don Giovanni (1955) and Der Rosenkavalier (1961), or films designed for the greater intimacy afforded by the medium of television, such as Ingmar Bergman’s Die Zauberflöte (1975) and Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s Le nozze di Figaro (1976). Also dating from 1976 was a more ambitious project in which Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet directed an austere outdoor version of Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron that ‘represented the zenith of the Brechtian anti-aesthetic trend in cinema’ (Joe and Theresa 2002 , 215). This film was too estoteric in both its choice of opera and style of presentation to be widely influential, and interest instead began to focus on the commercial viability of straightforward treatments of popular operas in lavish period settings.
The 1980s vogue for full-scale grand opera in the cinema was initiated by Joseph Losey’s film of Don Giovanni (1979), performed on the soundtrack by the Paris Opéra under Lorin Maazel. The project was conceived by Rolf Liebermann, who considered Patrice Chéreau and Franco Zeffirelli as possible directors before deciding on Losey – who had never seen the opera. The action was shot entirely on location amongst the impressive Palladian architecture of Vicenza and in the Venetian islands, and viewers who merely revelled in the visual splendour of the cinematography may have been surprised to learn that, according to Marcia Citron, the stunning locations were used ‘to erect a Marxist critique of class relations’ ( 2000 , 11–12). Critical responses ranged from Julian Rushton’s curt dismissal of the project as an ‘elegant imbecility’ ( 1981 , 80) – a remark which might also be applied to a good deal of the operatic repertoire itself, even in its unfilmed state – to David Caute’s attempt to prove that this ‘masterpiece ravishing to both ear and eye’ is dramatically superior to a stage interpretation:
Losey met the challenge by flooding the picture with sunlight and water, paintings and sculpture, his camera movements boldly responsive to Mozart’s music, a dazzling fusion of the fine and performing arts. Confronted by the visual stasis of operatic convention, Losey eased apart the orchestral and the dramatic, reuniting them in the cutting-room on his own terms.
(1994, 431)
At the time of the film’s release, the critical response in the UK and US was almost unremittingly negative. Only in France did massive publicity on the part of the producers (Gaumont) help the film to score an enormous success at the box office and receive the critical adulation that eluded it elsewhere. This was in spite of a major rift between Liebermann and Losey when the former objected to the latter’s inattention to matters of dynamics in the score, and his tendency (in marked contrast to Shapiro’s in Katerina Izmailova ) to allow sound effects to dominate the singing; as Liebermann put it, ‘Mozart did not compose film music’ (430–31).
Zeffirelli brought his considerable stage experience, as both director and designer, to bear in a film version of Verdi’s La traviata (1982), with a music track performed by the Metropolitan Opera under James Levine. Characteristic of its director were the opulent costumes and sumptuous interiors with warm lighting, and the simple use of stock cinematic devices such as flashbacks (to illustrate a character’s thoughts), slow zooms in and out, and the occasional use of voice-over in soliloquys – the last a neat way of avoiding the intrusiveness of close-up photography of singing mouths. In the opening sequence, a flash forwards to the dying Violetta’s dustsheet-clad apartment, and again during the Prelude to Act III, the combined effect of the mute visual images and Verdi’s heart-on-sleeve music was remarkably similar to that of silent-film melodrama of the 1910s. A follow-up film of Verdi’s Otello (1986), conducted by Maazel, took significant liberties with the score in the interests of serving the visual images, to the extent that the defensive director prevented music critics from attending the New York premiere (Citron 2000 , 74). Otello failed to repeat the success of La traviata , even though (like the same director’s Romeo and Juliet of 1968) it predictably netted the Academy Award for best costumes. In a television interview in 1997, Zeffirelli claimed that he felt opera to be the most complete artistic form, combining ‘dance, drama, poetry, music and the visual arts’ (R. Jackson 2000 , 212); yet, in spite of their surface gloss, his filmed operas were deeply conservative in their production values and offered little to stimulate either the intellect or the emotion, treading a careful middle-ground between restraint and excess.
More successful was Francesco Rosi’s version of Bizet’s Carmen (1984), which also used traditional costumes and appropriate exterior locations. Produced by Gaumont and again featuring a music track conducted by Maazel, this flamboyant and colourful interpretation was distinguished by effective crowd scenes, several of which used voice-overs instead of mimed singing to achieve greater visual realism and freedom of movement. The main titles appear over a slow-motion bullfight to the accompaniment of crowd noise and distant snatches of music; the overture crashes into life at the precise moment when Escamillo’s sword enters the bull’s neck and the animal drops lifeless to the ground. An effective sequence in its own right, this prologue forms a symmetrical counterpart to the bullfighting climax with which the film concludes. Bizet’s score proved to be admirable for cinematic adaptation in those instances where purely instrumental passages could be treated by Rosi as straight underscoring to the action on screen. As H. Marshall Leicester has shown, Rosi’s refined cinematography – which at times purports to be as realistic as Zeffirelli’s – subtly underlines the contrast in the score between vernacular musical idioms and conventional operatic gestures: ‘Rosi converts “realism” into a textual element, making use of the rich reference to actuality in a way Zeffirelli, the exemplar he emulates and parodies, never dreamed of. He exploits the oddness of people singing in what looks so much like real life to specify and reinforce the psycho-social implications of a difference in musical style’ ( 1994 , 273).
The diversification of opera films in the 1980s resulted in several contrasting ventures entirely different from the heady energy of Rosi’s Carmen . Hans Jürgen Syberberg’s interpretation of Wagner’s Parsifal (1982), played out on a massive set modelled on the composer’s death mask, combined boredom and pretension in equal measure; singer Robert Lloyd (who played Gurnemanz) recalled that ‘none of the cast really understood what Syberberg was on about, they simply did what he asked’ (Fawkes 2000 , 182). The portmanteau film Aria (1988) was a hotchpotch compilation of operatic excerpts interpreted by no fewer than ten different directors with varying degrees of flair and success; according to Derek Jarman, ‘not one of the directors opened the music up; in nearly every case they used it as a backdrop for a series of rather arbitrary fantasies, none of which had the depth or complexity of the original work’ ( 1989 , xi). (For a detailed audio-visual analysis of the segment based on Lully’s Armide , directed with characteristic idiosyncrasy by French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, see Cook 1998 , 215–60.) Losey had been planning a film of Tosca before his death in 1984; Puccini’s opera received an over-ambitious live-on-location filming in 1992, and an accomplished interpretation by director Benoît Jacquot in 2001 in which full-colour costumed scenes in luminous Zeffirellian settings were disconcertingly intercut with monochrome footage of the singers recording the soundtrack in modern dress – a rather gratuitous reminder that the singing in the film is, as usual, entirely pre-recorded.
Opera in film
Just as the choice of popular operas by composers such as Bizet, Mozart and Verdi for film treatment has always been a safer commercial bet than more modern or less familiar stage works, so early film music drew heavily on extracts from popular operatic scores rather than exploring new ground. To the three names just listed must be added that of Wagner, whose example is invoked time and again in contemporaneous commentary on music in the silent cinema. A journal proclaimed in 1911 that all movie-theatre musical directors were disciples of Wagner (Flinn 1992 , 15), and the influence was manifested both in specific compositional techniques such as the use of leitmotives as both narrative and structural device – considered to be a cutting-edge technique in early film music and persisting to the present day, in spite of the attempts of later commentators to discredit it – and in an aspiration towards unendliche Melodie in the interests of musico-dramatic continuity. Not suprisingly, the Wagnerian ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk was quickly applied to the new art-form as a whole, and the connection emphasized the vital role played by music in shaping the impact of filmed drama.
In the silent cinema, the live performance of well-known operatic gobbets (especially overtures) quickly became an audience attraction in its own right, and the introduction of compilation scores designed to accompany original narrative films occurred when the procedures used in the early filmed treatments of operatic tableaux were adapted for other genres. In 1911, for example, the commercially successful Italian film Dante’s Inferno appropriated music from Boito’s Mefistofele (Marks 1997 , 73–4). Cue sheets and anthologies helped picture-palace music directors to select appropriate numbers for a wide range of films for which dedicated scores did not exist. As cue-sheet compiler Max Winkler recalled, ‘extracts from great symphonies and operas were hacked down to emerge as “Sinister Misterioso” by Beethoven, or “Weird Moderato” by Tchaikovsky’ (quoted in Karlin 1994 , 157). A popular favourite was Rossini’s William Tell Overture, which proved ideal for chases, while the bridal march from Wagner’s Lohengrin was used for wedding scenes – two of the many silent-film clichés that persist in the popular imagination to this day.
When pioneering director D. W. Griffith collaborated with Joseph Carl Breil on an elebarate compilation score for his enormously influential epic The Birth of a Nation (featuring music by Wagner, Beethoven, Bellini, Grieg, Hérold, Mozart, Suppé, Tchaikovsky and Weber), reporter Grace Kingsley commented in the Los Angeles Times on 8 February 1915 that the film’s music was ‘no less than the adapting of grand-opera methods to motion pictures! Each character playing has a distinct type of music, a distinct theme as in opera . . . From now on special music is to be written in this manner for all the big Griffith productions’ (quoted in Marks 1997 , 137). Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ was selected to accompany equestrian action in the film and, according to actress Lilian Gish, director and composer argued intensely over this particular cue. Griffith wanted some of the notes to be altered but Breil refused to ‘tamper’ with Wagner, whereupon the director remarked that the music was not ‘primarily music’ but rather ‘music for motion pictures’ (140). (Wagner’s famous ‘Ride’ was later used to memorable effect in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film, Apocalypse Now , where it is blared out from a tape recorder in an attack helicopter during the Vietnam War.) In an attempt to shed the ubiquitous Wagnerian idiom, which he detested, German director Fritz Lang commissioned an original score from Gottfried Huppertz for his Siegfried in 1923; much to the director’s annoyance, however, the film was provided with a Wagnerian compilation score by Riesenfeld when screened in the USA two years later.
In the sound cinema, the mainstream style of Hollywood film scoring was heavily shaped by the work of immigrant composers from Europe who were steeped in the idiom of turn-of-the-century opera and operetta, to which dashes of exotic colouring from the styles of Debussy, Strauss and Rimsky-Korsakov were occasionally added. Given the strong early links between opera and film music, it is not surprising that several leading exponents of the latter were also accomplished operatic composers. Erich Wolfgang Korngold was one of the most respected and sought-after film composers working in Hollywood in the 1930s, and although his music was close to many of his lower-profile film colleagues in style, he was atypical because he already enjoyed a formidable reputation as a European classical composer: as a result he was the leading celebrity of the Hollywood music studios, and commanded ideal working conditions of which the hack film composers could only dream. Korngold had begun composing operas in Vienna during his teens, and made his name with Die tote Stadt (1920), composed at the age of twenty-three. He wrote eighteen film scores in the period 1935–47, including music for a celebrated series of swashbuckling adventures starring Errol Flynn.
Korngold believed that film music was essentially operatic music without the singing, and he brought his colossal experience of operatic composition to bear in his work for the silver screen. Christopher Palmer aptly summarized Korngold’s achievements in this regard:
Wagner and Strauss were the immediate progenitors of a self-indulgent style wrought with a Puccinian lusciousness and luxury of invention and occasionally tinctured with Impressionist atmospherics. Korngold’s melody was sweepingly lyrical, his harmony heated and opulent. His orchestration was creamy and full-flavoured. He had a lavish and superabundant talent, one that, fortunately, had enough inbuilt vitality to stop short of the kind of maggoty over-ripeness into which the idiom degenerated in the hands of less-accomplished practitioners . . . The scores he wrote for pictures whose other component parts accorded perfectly with the inherent character of his music have survived the test of time to emerge as models of their kind . . .
(1990, 52–3)
Palmer noted, however, that the negative side of Korngold’s achievement was the vindication it seemed to offer to hack composers who continued to churn out ‘maggoty over-ripeness’ when (as Adorno and Eisler would have wished) film music might better have embraced a more daring modernism. Yet Korngold’s influence on film scoring has extended right up to the present day, with leading contemporary practitioner John Williams continuing to pay homage to the Viennese master’s thoroughly outdated style in his superbly crafted scores to modern swashbucklers such as the Star Wars and Indiana Jones series.
More original than Korngold was Bernard Herrmann, whose film music was less indebted to well-worn leitmotivic principles and rooted in ostinato techniques and a dissonant harmonic language influenced by Stravinsky and the Second Viennese School; his best-known scores were written for Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers, including Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960). Like Korngold, Herrmann did not compromise the idiom of his concert music when working for films, and his film experience was carried over into operatic works, which included a full-scale opera based on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1952) – a project directly suggested by the experience of having composed a score for a film version of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre in 1943, parts of which were reused in the opera’s music. The libretto for Wuthering Heights was written by Herrmann’s first wife, Lucille Fletcher, who also collaborated with him on the extraordinary diegetic operatic music he composed as part of his famous score for Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941). In this film, he was required to provide vocal music for Kane’s second wife, Susan Alexander, who was an aspiring opera singer for whom Kane had an opera house specially built. Herrmann composed a pastiche segment from a fictional opera entitled Salammbô , designed to show how she was inadequate to the task of performing it: the music was wilfully over-scored and then deliberately recorded by a weak-voiced soprano (Palmer 1990 , 261). In a montage sequence depicting Susan’s performances on tour, the music of Salammbô was brought into conflict with Herrmann’s extra-diegetic music representing Kane’s selfish ambition, ‘which after one statement is reduced to an obsessive rhythmic hammering on drums, as if beating poor incompetent but sensitive Susan to a mental pulp’ (259).
The direct links between operatic composition and film music were perpetuated in the work of those composers from the classical arena who also worked occasionally in the cinema: these included Copland, Virgil Thomson, Philip Glass and John Corigliano in the US; Vaughan Williams, Walton, Britten and Michael Nyman in the UK; Hindemith and Henze in Germany; and Prokofiev and Shostakovich in the USSR. Britten’s early career forms an interesting parallel with Herrmann’s, since both worked in experimental radio drama in the 1930s and brought this experience directly to bear on their film work; in Britten’s case, his apprenticeship with the GPO Film Unit supplied him with a formidable armoury of musico-dramatic techniques that bore fruit in his later operas – some of which have been aptly described as ‘cinematic’ (see below). Prokofiev’s collaboration with director Sergei Eisenstein on Alexander Nevsky (1938) and the first two parts of Ivan the Terrible (1943–6) resulted in a close relationship between visual image and music, exemplifying the pioneering director’s controversial theories of audio-visual counterpoint. Eisenstein himself regarded these films as essentially ‘operatic’ in conception.
Film music admitted a higher degree of dissonance and modernistic fragmentation during the 1950s, with composers such as Leonard Rosenman responding creatively to the atonal idiom of the Second Viennese School. Leading film composer David Raksin recounted an amusing episode when a producer approached him with an invitation to compose a ‘powerful’ film score based directly on the idiom of Wozzeck : ‘To hear the magic name of Alban Berg’s operatic masterpiece invoked by the man with whom I would be working was to be invited to be free!’ (quoted in Kalinak 1992 , 78). Raksin duly invited the producer to dinner and, when he arrived, Wozzeck was already playing on the gramophone. Clearly annoyed by the music, the ignorant guest curtly asked: ‘What’s that crap?’ Berg had himself been interested in the musical potential of cinema, and reportedly wished that Wozzeck might be filmed in order ‘to realise certain details to perfection by means of close-ups and long shots . . . details that never emerged with the desired clarity in the theatre’ (Willi Reich, quoted and discussed in Tambling 1987 , 76–7). The cinematic nature of Berg’s operatic language was noted by Joseph Kerman, and by Adorno and Eisler, who singled out the twelve-tone chord at the moment of the eponymous anti-heroine’s violent death in Lulu as producing ‘an effect very much like that of a motion picture’ ( 1994 [1947], 37).
Berg’s Lulu (1935) was one of several stage operas that imported a filmic element into their dramaturgy. Based on plays by Wedekind filmed by Pabst in 1929, Lulu features at its mid-point a palindromically scored film interlude depicting Lulu’s incarceration and subsequent release from gaol: this device serves both as a convenient compression of stage time and as a graphic illustration of the turning point in the drama before various elements in the second half start to run in reverse. Filmed segments also featured in Satie’s ballet Relâche (1924), in Hindemith’s Hin und zurück: eine Zeitoper (1927) and in a production of Wagner’s Ring in Berlin (1928). In Milhaud’s Christophe Colomb (1930), according to the composer’s wife, ‘for the first time in an opera one could see moving films showing scenes a little different from what was happening simultaneously on stage’ (Nichols 1996 , 39). In 1994, Glass conceived his La Belle et la Bête as a simultaneous (silent) projection of Cocteau’s 1946 (sound) film of the same title with a new musical accompaniment provided by live but static singers (Joe and Theresa 2002 , 59–73). Glass’s novel venture was a follow-up to his Orphée (1993), an operatic version of another film by Cocteau.
Conversely, a steady succession of narrative films featured operatic excerpts in their screenplays. An opera-house setting was memorably used in the silent film of The Phantom of the Opera (dir. Rupert Julian, 1925), starring Lon Chaney, and remade with sound in 1943. The Marx Brothers incorporated an extended segment of Il trovatore in their riotous comedy A Night at the Opera (1935), but later cinematic appropriations of opera were generally serious in intent. The diegetic opera in Citizen Kane (see above) was a rare example of specially composed operatic music: more typical has been the use of pre-existing operas from the popular repertoire. In the film version of Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus (dir. Milos Forman, 1984), numerous lavishly staged extracts from Mozart’s operas provided spectacular punctuation to the drama but somewhat impaired the narrative flow. In The Godfather Part III (dir. Coppola, 1990) a diegetic performance of Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana forms an ironic and cohesive backdrop to a climactic series of killings. Nino Rota’s music for the two previous films in the Godfather trilogy (1972 and 1974) drew heavily on the bel canto idiom of Italian opera, while Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi was reworked in Alex North’s score to the mafia comedy Prizzi’s Honor (dir. John Huston, 1985) as a similarly ‘ethnic sonority’ (Joe and Theresa 2002 , 107). Verdi’s music appeared in many postwar Italian films (155–76), and remained a popular choice outside a specifically Italianate setting, notably in classic literary adaptations: it featured as a period-establisher in the film version of Dickens’s Little Dorrit (dir. Christine Edzard, 1987), and indicated the force of destiny in the Pagnol diptych Jean de Florette and Manon des sources (dir. Claude Berri, 1986).
Several idiosyncratic uses of operatic subject-matter are to be found in non-Anglophone films. Krzysztof
Kie
lowski’s Personnel
(1975), in which a young man for whom opera represents a pinnacle of fantasy has his illusions cruelly shattered by the mundanity of working behind the scenes at an opera house, plays out a political metaphor of repression in Poland: according to the director, ‘our dreams and ideas about some ideal reality always clash somewhere along the line with something that’s incomparably shallower and more wretched’ (Stok
1993
, 96). In Jean-Jacques
Beineix’s Diva
(1981), a fictional opera star is idolized by a young lad who records her singing illicitly, she having publicly declared that she will never preserve her voice on record. Her recorded voice almost becomes a separate character, and much play is made on the artificiality of extra-diegetic music in film: singing which appears to be extra-diegetic is twice revealed to be diegetic in origin when it ceases abruptly as the lad turns off the portable tape player that accompanies him on his bike rides. (Diegetic and extra-diegetic music in film are broadly comparable to Carolyn
Abbate’s conception of the ‘phenomenal’ and ‘noumenal’ in opera: see Abbate
1991
.) In Werner
Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo
(1982), the building of an opera house in the middle of a Peruvian jungle is ‘paradigmatic of the desire for an opera and for an art generally to be situated outside the commercial pressures that have previously constituted the arts’ (Tambling
1987
, 18; see also Rogers
2004
).
Disembodied recordings of operatic performances also feature prominently in narrative films. In The Shawshank Redemption (dir. Frank Darabont, 1994), a recording of Mozart’s Figaro is relayed through prison loudspeakers to symbolize freedom – and this universal message is instantly comprehended by all classes of inmate. An identical device appears in Life is Beautiful (dir. Roberto Benigni, 1997), where recorded Offenbach similarly lifts the spirits of those incarcerated in a Nazi concentration camp. A recording of an aria from Giordano’s Andrea Chenier illuminates various aspects of character and cultural context in Philadelphia (dir. Jonathan Demme, 1993). All these instances use an outdated musical idiom to suggest a sense of timelessness or nostalgic yearning, much in the fashion (as Caryl Flinn has persuasively argued) of the aural utopia conjured up by old-fashioned Hollywood film music. But, as Marc A. Wiener points out, operatic music can be used in films for diametrically opposed purposes according to context: ‘When it represents particularity, opera signifies entrapment, and when it functions as a sign of the universal, it represents freedom’ (Joe and Theresa 2002 , 83).
The ongoing links between cinema and opera have been fostered not only by composers working in both genres, but also by a clutch of influential directors and designers whose work straddles both media. Directors of both staged opera and feature films include Baz Luhrmann, Chéreau, Eisenstein, Herzog, Nicholas Hytner, Losey, Rouben Mamoulian, Luchino Visconti and Zeffirelli. Film designer Georges Wakhevich worked on Peter Brook’s 1948 Covent Garden production of Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov – a staging which Ernest Newman explicitly condemned for its filmic qualities (Sutcliffe 1996 , 20–21). Some opera singers have made a significant impact as screen actors, including Maria Callas in a magnificent interpretation of the title role in Medea (dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1970) – described by one critic as ‘an opera without music’ (Walker 2001 , 533) – and Teresa Stratas in a powerful performance as a self-absorbed singer who neglects her autistic-savant daughter in the Canadian production Under the Piano (dir. Stefan Scaini, 1995). Stratas had previously received critical acclaim for her interpretation of the title role in Götz Friedrich’s film of Strauss’s Salome (1974).
Opera as film
The first opera conceived as a sound film was The Robber Symphony by Friedrich Feher (1936), and it seemed to bode well for the genre’s future. An anonymous contemporaneous critic commented: ‘The intimate alliance of music and fantasy is in principle wholly commendable . . . Here, perhaps, may even be opera’s legitimate successor – the transmutation of that hitherto over-synthetic medium into something more complex and closely-knit’ (quoted in Huntley [ 1947 ], 45). Ernst Toch went further, predicting that
the focus of film music to come is the original film opera. This cannot be done by adapting old operas for the screen, for the conception of stage-opera music is bound to be different from what film-opera must be. To adapt existing operas . . . means to mutilate either screen action or the music itself. Music of film-opera has to create and develop its own forms out of typical screen action, combining its different laws of space, time and motion with constant music laws. The first film-opera, once written and produced, will evoke a host of others.
(1937)
As we have seen, however, later filmed operas were invariably based on existing repertoire, and the kind of creative vision demonstrated by Schoenberg’s unachieved plans for Die glückliche Hand was reflected only in the Powell–Pressburger Tales of Hoffmann in 1951. That same year marked the birth of opera conceived for television, which bypassed some of the perceived problems inherent in filming opera for the big screen, but presented new challenges of its own.
The first television opera was Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors , commissioned by NBC in America and first broadcast live on Christmas Eve 1951. The opera’s simple plot, family appeal and attractive music made it a considerable success, and it has been repeated and given new television productions numerous times in the past fifty years – generally with broadcasts taking place in the Christmas festive period. Menotti had already gained directorial experience with the cinema film of The Medium , a stage work which had been produced for CBS television in 1948. Even with the success of Amahl behind him, however, he considered that it worked best in a live theatrical staging; in 1963 he fell out with NBC because they had not involved him personally in a new production of the piece, and he prohibited future showings of the offending version (Barnes 2003 , 37–8). Amahl was most recently produced on British television in 2002, when Francesca Zambello directed a straightforward intepretation for the BBC using Spanish locations as a naturalistic Biblical setting.
Amahl
was the first in a major series of television operas commissioned by NBC: others included Martin
’s
The Marriage
and
What Men Live By
(1953), Lukas Foss’s
Griffelkin
(1955), Stanley Hollingworth’s
La grande Bretèche
(1957) and Menotti’s
Maria Golovin
(1958). Menotti later wrote
Labyrinth
for NBC in 1963 and
Martin’s Lie
for CBS in 1965.
CBS had first made its mark on television opera by commissioning
The Flood
from
Stravinsky, which was broadcast in 1962. Although he later described the work as a ‘musical play’, Stravinsky showed a keen interest in the televisual medium, not only for its creative possibilities but also on account of the musical concision and economy the swiftness of screen drama seemed to demand: ‘Because the succession of visualisations can be instantaneous, the composer may dispense with the afflatus of overtures, connecting episodes, curtain music . . . [S]o far, I have not been able to imagine the work on the operatic stage because the musical speed is so uniquely cinematographic’ (Stravinsky and Craft
1968
, 79). This
approach sat well alongside Stravinsky’s contemporaneous interest in serial technique and the resulting score was characteristically compressed, lasting under thirty minutes. In spite of his comments on the work’s ‘uniquely cinematographic’ nature, however, The Flood
almost immediately received a theatrical production in Hamburg in 1963.
Television opera came into vogue in Europe in the late 1950s, with the BBC commissioning its first works for the medium from Arthur Benjamin ( Mañana ) and Malcolm Arnold ( The Open Window ) in 1956. The same year saw the establishment of the Salzburg TV Opera Prize, awarded triennially until 1986; Paul Angerer’s prizewinning Die Paβkontrolle (1959) was one of several scores with topical subject-matter (Barnes 2003 , 9). The BBC commissioned a further eleven television operas between 1957 and 1969, highlights including Arthur Bliss’s Tobias and the Angel (1960) and Christopher Whelan’s Some Place of Darkness (1967). While US television opera commissions dwindled after the 1970s, British television – after a barren decade in the 1980s – continued to elicit new scores throughout the 1990s (for a complete list, see Barnes 2003, 104). Especially notable was a series of six fifty-minute operas commissioned by Channel 4 in 1994–5 from Orlando Gough, Anthony Moore, Stewart Copeland, Michael Torke, Gerald Barry, and Kate and Mike Westbrook. Captured on film rather than video in accordance with 1990s production practices, these commissions were intended to be exclusively for realization on the small screen and ‘unsuitable for live performance’ (85). In contrast, some later BBC projects were jointly commissioned with opera companies so that the works received both televisual and theatrical productions: examples include Gordon Crosse’s Purgatory (Cheltenham Festival and BBC TV, 1966) and Tippett’s New Year (Houston Grand Opera, 1989; BBC TV, 1991).
One of the best-known television operas remains Britten’s Owen Wingrave , commissioned by the BBC and first broadcast in May 1971. Prior to this, Britten had already gained considerable television experience from his involvement in the BBC’s studio productions of his large-scale operas Billy Budd (dir. Basil Coleman, 1966) and Peter Grimes (dir. Brian Large, 1969). For the subject-matter of Owen Wingrave , Britten turned again to a ghost story by Henry James; significantly, his earlier handling of James’s The Turn of the Screw in the medium of chamber opera (1954) had consistently been praised for its cinematic qualities (see, for example, the use of ‘flashbacks’ identified in Mellers 1984 , 146), and it may not be coincidental that The Turn of the Screw had originally been suggested to Britten as the basis for an opera specially intended for film (Carpenter 1992 , 331). The rapid scene changes, dissolves and evocative instrumental interludes of the Screw proved ideal for cinematic realization when it was stylishly filmed on location in Czechoslovakia by director Petr Weigl in 1982, the haunting images expertly dubbed with the music of a Covent Garden production conducted by Colin Davis. In Owen Wingrave , Britten adapted some of the freely aligned textures he had developed in his 1960s trilogy of Church Parables in the service of televisual montage; his attitude towards television as a medium fluctuated between a professed desire to avoid realism and a strong need to be able to visualize every single detail of the production, a paradox that lies at the heart of many of his stage operas. As in the case of Stravinsky’s Flood , Britten’s television opera quickly made its way onto the live operatic stage in a theatrical production at Covent Garden in 1973. A new television production of Wingrave was broadcast in the UK on Channel 4 in 2001, and a comparison of the two interpretations highlights some of the essential differences between a 1970s studio recording and a 1990s filmed opera.
Figure 16.1 Britten’s Owen Wingrave , directed by Brian Large and Colin Graham (BBC Television, 1971): the Wingrave family confront Owen. Left to right : Miss Wingrave (Sylvia Fisher), General Sir Philip Wingrave (Peter Pears), Kate Julian (Janet Baker) and Mrs Julian (Jennifer Vyvyan). Photo: Reg Wilson.
Figure 16.2 Britten’s Owen Wingrave , directed by Margaret Williams (MJW Productions, 2001): the Wingrave family at the dining table. Left to right : Kate Julian (Charlotte Hellekant), Miss Wingrave (Josephine Barstow) and Mrs Julian (Elizabeth Gale). Photo: David Hobson.
Figure 16.3 Britten’s Owen Wingrave (MJW Productions, 2001): Owen (Gerald Finley) enters the haunted family mansion. Photo: David Hobson.
The 1971 Wingrave was conducted by Britten in Snape Maltings Concert Hall, which had been transformed temporarily into a television studio. Directed by Brian Large and Colin Graham, the production was recorded using six video cameras running simultaneously and was edited in the same manner as the classic BBC TV literary adaptations and sit-coms of the 1970s. It is therefore inappropriate to compare the production with the techniques of Hollywood cinema – as does Shannon McKellar, who misleadingly states that the recording was situated ‘within the boundaries of the classical Hollywood film genre. To a large extent, the work’s film techniques and apparatus remain those one might have expected to find in the latest American movie’ ( 1999 , 394). As with studio drama, the sharp clarity of the videotaped image proved well suited to intimate scenes. There were only brief moments where the presentation departed from realistic studio norms, as in the greater abstractness of the Wingrave family’s combined outcries of ‘How dare you!’ to Owen, which are addressed directly to camera against a stark black background, and the stylized regimental banners at the beginning of Act I scene 2. The camerawork is otherwise standard for its time, though McKellar has drawn attention to the careful editing of the crucial ‘Peace Aria’ which seems to suggest visually how Owen remains oppressed by his family background even as he ostensibly breaks free from it:
the turning point in Owen’s aria created by camera techniques is also the crux around which the opera revolves . . . by embedding Owen’s song within the actual diegesis of the work – with symmetrical design and shot length, and the greater amount of attention that the camera eye pays to the portraits – film techniques deny Owen the very quality that characterizes solo as aria. His song for peace is neither reflective nor wholly enclosed; he builds awareness only in relation to others, and sings, in effect, to the portraits and not to himself. His voice echoes from within the narrative space of the film, and not, like the [other characters] during moments of aria, from without.
(1999, 409)
In the few parts of the score which do not involve voices, it is intriguing to hear Britten adopting a musical idiom that at times seems directly redolent of modern film music: as Owen enters the family mansion in Act I scene 4, for example, the eerie twelve-note chord stacked up in the orchestra and topped off by a dash of glockenspiel recalls a standard spine-tingling gesture in 1960s film music. This seems appropriate to the stereotyped dramatic situation, described by Jeremy Tambling as ‘playing on the way Owen comes to what seems to be an empty house; the device is out of any horror-movie, and appropriate as a reminder of the artificiality of the genre’ ( 1987 , 118).
The 2001 Wingrave was directed by Margaret Williams and shot on film in widescreen format, in accordance with the increasing vogue throughout the 1990s for television adaptations of literary classics to aspire to the often glossy production values of narrative cinema – especially in a heavy use of location filming. The action is updated to the Cold War of the late 1950s, which on the one hand makes the story seem more topical to a modern audience, yet on the other renders disquietingly anachronistic the strict Victorian family and military values at the heart of James’s tale; in this version, Owen’s personal predicament may seem less plausible than in the original production. The replacing of the latter’s intimate theatricality with cinematic realism offers a challenge when it comes to creating the claustrophobic intensity at the heart of the story; the opening sequence of family portraits, for example, brilliantly disturbing in the 1971 production (where it was closely synchronized with every detail implied by Britten’s graphically programmatic orchestral prelude), is in visual terms no longer as threatening in the more expansive 2001 production. The filmic quality of Britten’s orchestral music for the approach to the family mansion is well realized in this film, however, where the moody exterior shots include an additional appearance of the ghostly presence which will soon be implicated in the protagonist’s mysterious death.
At the time of writing, the most recent opera film made specially for television was Penny Woolcock’s interpretation of John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer , shown on Channel 4 in 2003. With the exception of the surreally beautiful images of Klinghoffer’s corpse sinking into its watery grave, the film cultivated a detailed cinematic realism consistently at odds with the extreme stylization in the music. Adams’s score cries out for a corresponding degree of visual stylization, and the unnecessary realism in this film version paradoxically makes suspension of disbelief wellnigh impossible. A similar problem is encountered in the lavish cinema production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rock opera Evita (dir. Alan Parker, 1996), where the attention to 1950s period details in the visuals often jars with the stylized 1970s idiom of the soundtrack, and where a greater degree of theatricality or fantasy might also have proved beneficial (as it invariably does in stage productions). In the case of Klinghoffer , realistic terrorists with realistic guns on a realistic ship in a realistic ocean seem a viable cinematic proposition right up to the moment when the characters open their mouths and break into apparently diegetic song, and this problem seems far more acute in works with a topical modern setting than in the case of, say, Losey’s period-dress Don Giovanni . The difficulties of negotiating the conflicting demands of cinematic realism and operatic theatricality remain as strangely problematic today as they did at the birth of the sound film over seventy years ago.
Operas specially written for film have always been exceptionally rare and, although rather more have been commissioned for television, the combined total is still small. This select repertoire has been notable for its surprisingly low level of dramatic and visual experimentation – possibly a consequence of understandable attempts on the part of those composers involved to write works which would transfer relatively easily to the live operatic stage and thereby stand a chance of securing a living future in the theatre. Clearly the commercial non-viability of filming modern opera for exhibition in cinemas has been a major factor contributing towards the paucity of original film operas. But the roots of the problem go right back to the 1930s when the film medium was generally perceived as too lowbrow to be applied to the interpretation of great works of art. The debate that raged in the 1940s on the subject of the relative merits of realism and theatricality in filmed opera productions singularly ignored the fact that the stunningly original Hollywood musicals of the 1930s had already shown what could be achieved when music and image were creatively combined and fantasy allowed free rein, and it is a considerable irony that this degree of artistic experimentation seemed acceptable only in the context of a popular and commercially viable genre.
Shortly before he completed Peter Grimes , Britten prophetically commented: ‘I feel that with the advent of films, opera may turn its back on realism, and develop or return to stylisation – which I think it should’ ( 1944 , 4). Although from a modern vantage point we often view representative art that purports to be ‘realistic’ with suspicion, cinema was in the 1940s viewed as the realist art-form par excellence – and, just as the visual arts became less representative once photography became commonplace, so stage productions of opera and drama gradually yielded realism to the cinema and cultivated in its stead more compellingly stylized approaches to their raw material. Those who firmly believe in the artistic potential of cinema and television, and perhaps view film in particular as the ultimate collaborative Gesamtkunstwerk , will continue to regard filmed opera as something of a curiosity, that rarely – if ever – attains the creative heights of which it seems easily capable. If filmed opera is destined to remain an occasional presence in the margins of both cinematic and operatic history, the impact of cinema – both positive and negative – on the development of live stagings is nevertheless likely to be remembered as one of the defining influences on the theatrical arts of the twentieth century.