Operatic Configurations in the Digital Age

Let me start with a seeming paradox. Beginning in December 2006, the rise of “Live in HD” broadcasts from New York’s Metropolitan Opera (and, soon thereafter, other major houses) has made some commentators worry, once again, about the survival of opera. As New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini paradigmatically argued in 2013, broadcasts into the cinema offer a fundamentally different experience from prior forms of operatic remediation because of the former’s combination of audiovisual immersion and communal—even live—viewing. Thus, Tommasini feared, not only might HD broadcasts lure audiences away from the opera house, but they also blur a sense of “what the real thing is.”1 The cinema is cast as opera’s angel of death. Ironically, a number of film scholars have simultaneously raised concerns about the future of the cinema itself, which they see endangered by the recent proliferation of digital technologies.2 Partly in response, Francesco Casetti in 2015 (re)defined cinema by focusing not on its enabling technologies but on the experience it affords—an experience constituted by three fundamental aspects: an enclosed environment, the onscreen creation of a world, and “an audience immersed in viewing.”3 In his analysis, this cinematic experience has now “relocated” to new devices and situations, summarily marked by a loss of darkness. Hence Casetti’s verdict: “No longer capable of aiding the other arts, it is now cinema that is in need of assistance.”4 This diagnosis could make us ponder whether HD opera broadcasts perhaps promote cinema more than they do opera; whether the novel content and added boon of a live event, simulcast (by now) in over seventy countries, lend assistance and cultural cachet to an ailing technical medium.5 But I want to emphasize instead Casetti’s own rescue operation—his call to adjust our idea of the cinema: it lives on, he holds, in multiple medial configurations, and it reveals its essence precisely through these new relocations. Such a conceptual sleight of hand is elegant; but it would surely not appease Tommasini, concerned as he is with the embodied live performance that the cinema has arguably always been missing (at least since the rise of sound film).