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

The Phenomenal Side of the Operatic Performance: Implications of Promotion Strategies on Cinematic Representations of the 21st Century

“…When the final chord is completed by the orchestra and the vocal line fades out, the camera becomes briefly stationary and shows Florence's face in close-up, which creates a moment when time 'seems to stand still' before the audience's applause, when Florence is seen wiping away her tears (Weiner, 2002: 79) (see Figure 6). The scene's association of opera singing with wonder and with a transcendental experience evoking strong emotions resembles the trope conveyed in films from the 1980s and 1990s (Cachopo, 2014;Citron, 2010;2011;Weiner, 2002). Weiner's study (2002: 82) includes not only Philadelphia but also The Shawshank Redemption and he shows how the audio-visual configuration associates listening to opera with a combination of interiority and transcendence of particularity.…”

“…Turning to more recent opera-film encounters, opera produced for film and television in the 1970s and 1980s (opera films), show how opera could be subsumed by the medium of film through, for example, visualizations concealing singing, or, conversely, a sense of opera's spectacular quality could be enhanced through editing (cf. Cachopo, 2014;Citron, 2010). Sitting in a slightly different space from filmic adaptations, recordings of live performances place the attentive spectatorship as an important aspect of operatic presentation.…”

“…However, they appear on-screen in operatic performances for extended periods, all of which take place at crucial moments in the plots. By taking recent research on intersections between opera and cinema, and opera singer promotion via cinema, into consideration-especially that undertaken by João Pedro Cachopo (2014) and Gina Bombola (2018)-I show how the films illuminate broader tropes surrounding opera-film encounters. I begin by outlining short contextual backdrops to the relationship between opera and cinema and to the appearance of professional opera singers in film; I then explore the three recent films' audio-visual configurations of the singers' performances and the functions of the performances in the fictional situations.…”

The Aura of Opera Reproduced: Fantasies and Traps in the Age of the Cinecast

“…I used this concept to propose ways of addressing and evaluating opera films that avoid assumptions that opera films should be either strictly faithful to the original medium or blindly obedient to the new one. 20 What now seems more pertinent, however, is Benjamin's claim that his own considerations about the autonomy and relevance of translation do not apply to translations of translations. I would like to take his claim as a suggestion that our critique of the rhetoric of fidelity should adjust to different scenarios, and that we should be particularly cautious as to whether a staging, an opera film, or the video of a staging is under analysis.…”

Preference Dimensions of the Estonian Opera-Consumer: A Comparison of the Audiences at Opera Houses and Mediated Opera Performances

“…Despite the fact that the number of broadcasts presented by the Met is quite small 15 compared to the number of productions offered by Estonian theatres (ETA 2015a(ETA , 2015b(ETA and 2015c, for the Estonian opera fans, mediated performances still represent the possibility of increasing one's knowledge, developing a heightened sense of taste, comparing local productions and international ones, raising one's level of expectations to meet higher standards, and even daring to ask for more. This phenomenon has been described as a metamorphosis, as the rise of a new, hybrid opera genre (Cachopo 2014), or a new artistic medium (Žižek, Dolar 2002: 198). According to Walter Benjamin ([1921] 1996: 254), one should talk about the afterlife (überleben) or continued life (fortleben) of performances.…”