I had arrived at the Metropolitan Opera stage door as instructed—10:30 a.m. on Saturday, January 16, 2010—but apparently we were already running late.1 Marisa and I quickly made our way to the stage, where the dry run for the opening segments and intermission features of the afternoon's high-definition broadcast of Carmen was well under way. Marisa was more precisely Marisa Biaggi, a Princeton musicology PhD who, after finishing her degree,2 took a position with the Met's Creative Content division, the team responsible for producing and promoting the spectacularly successful Live in HD broadcasts. For several years Marisa had been my point of contact and fact-checker for my academic interest in the HD initiative; after several years of learning about the broadcasts secondhand, I inquired about the possibility of shadowing her and her colleagues during an actual broadcast. After some discussion of scheduling, they settled on the Carmen performance as a good day for me to visit.
No takes yet. Share an insight, caveat, or question.
James Steichen (2011) studied this question.
Synapse has enriched one closely related paper. Consider it for comparative context: