Opera and Film

Abstract

Opera and film have enjoyed a close relationship since the beginning of cinema. In the silent era, operatic stories and stars graced the screen, and opera music was played live. Through the sound era and the advent of television, opera continued to appear in mediated form. In recent years, digital formats, the Internet, and streaming have affected how opera is viewed and consumed. Moreover, film in all its forms has exerted increasing influence on the staging of live opera. Opera and film is a relatively new area of study, emerging with Jeremy Tambling’s pioneering book Opera, Ideology, and Film (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987). Its practitioners come mostly from musicology but also other fields, including comparative literature, German studies, and Italian studies. At first, filmic opera was treated as a derivative of opera, but it has become an area in its own right, although adaptation still figures in some interpretations. The intersection of opera and film spans a wide range of types and behaviors. “Film” includes television as well as cinema, and streaming in addition to more conventional modes of presentation. Perhaps the main internal categorization is whether an opera constitutes the whole of a film, which is labeled an opera-film (although two early studies call it film-opera), or whether it occurs in a regular film, where the possibilities are legion. These can include a scene in the opera house, as in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera (1935); a story about an opera singer, as in Franco Zeffirelli’s Callas Forever (2002); opera music on the soundtrack, as in Mike Nichols’s Closer (2004); or an operatic tone to the film, as in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974). With a few exceptions, research on opera and film has appeared in the form of essays in single-authored critical studies, in anthologies, and in journals, with each essay on a specific element or film. Given the hybrid nature of the topic, theory draws on many disciplines, especially film studies, film-music studies, opera studies, media studies, and performance studies. Most research avoids a focus on any single theory or ideology, and instead adopts an eclectic approach that is practical and tailored to the situation. Theories of spectatorship, ontology, and narrative have been beneficial from film studies. Film-music studies has provided key concepts with respect to function (diegesis and its various categories), sound, and voice, the last especially important in Michal Grover-Friedlander’s work. Opera studies offers many tools for the interpretation of the music, although they must be tempered by the conditions of a mechanically reproduced work. Media studies is often central, especially in recent scholarship, but at the very least it infuses most research at some fundamental level.