Opera Goes to the Movies

I'll tell you an embarrassing story. When I was a scrawny little wiener, forced to play goal in our Grade 7 soccer games (mostly because I couldn't do anything else), to make myself feel better, I'd recite the names of old, occasionally dead, opera singers in my head. Jussi Bjoerling, Renata Tebaldi, Joan Sutherland, Robert Merrill, Giorgio Tozzi, Victoria de Los Angeles, Leonard Warren. Just the sounds of their names was enough to lift my battered heart.

I like opera and I like film, but I don't necessarily like the two of them together.

Despite its intrinsic drama, opera doesn't necessarily translate well onto film. The Metropolitan Opera seems to have solved this problem by simply playing it straight. Performances at the Met are broadcast to theatres around North America. The Met's Opera Live in High-Definition series features eight live broadcasts and eight encore performances. This Saturday (Feb. 9) at Vancouver's Scotia Bank Theatre you can watch a production of Giuseppe Verdi's Macbeth. The rest of the Met's season is rounded out by several old warhorses -- Boheme, Tristan und Isolde, and Engelbert Humperdinck's comic opera Hänsel und Gretel -- all of which are beamed across the continent to opera fans everywhere.

If Macbeth is not to your musical liking, there is lighter fare also on offer at Vancouver's Ridge Theatre on Saturday, Feb. 9 at 10 a.m., with Rossini's The Barber of Seville beamed in from Teatro Real in Madrid.

Democratic arias

The Met's success has prompted a number of other opera houses to jump on the bandwagon, including that bastion of operatic history, La Scala. As a recent article in the New York Times indicated, the format works well, with the odd strange hiccup between live performance and film. Writes Anthony Tommasini, "On Sunday afternoon, almost all of the auditorium's 760 seats were filled for Wagner's 'Tristan und Isolde,' a new production by the renowned director Patrice Chéreau. Introduced last month, this was the company's first staging of this towering work in nearly 30 years. The elaborately edited high-definition video, with riveting close-ups, was assembled from the opening night and later performances at La Scala."

Unlike the Metropolitan idea, that the film screenings would basically be exactly the same as the performances, verbatim, the La Scala version uses film language to create a more cinematic experience. Both versions have different positives and negatives, but the central heart of the notion is inherently democratic. Even if you can't fly to Milan or New York and pay a large sum of money to see the actual thing, you can still partake, clapping away with the dowagers at the Met, like you were genuinely among their august company.

While the technology may be different, these HD broadcasts aren't that much changed from the old-time radio broadcasts (Live from the Met) that I used to listen to as a little kid on CBC Radio's Saturday Afternoon at the Opera. There is something sweetly old fashioned about the idea of a far-away performance that wafts out over the airwaves (or the digital stream) that still appeals. (The shower of distant applause still gives me a little frisson of excitement.) But therein lies the rub: opera requires you to suspend disbelief, and this is more easily done with something like radio than film. Singers, not renowned for their acting skills, are projected 40 feet high and asked to play doomed teenagers or titanic superheroes. Some of the greatest singers in the history of music were infamously bad actors. A case in point was Jussi Bjoerling, who said no one would believe him fighting duels with enormous swords, unless they closed their eyes, that is. His voice is still the voice of my dreams, everything that is best and brightest. I don't want to watch any videos of him, lest it destroy the image that lives in my head.

Big tonsils, bigger hair

It must be said that singers are often a weird looking bunch. From Joan Sutherland's giant bouffant hairdo to the majestic heft of Jessye Norman -- they don't often resemble the characters they're asked to play. While recent soprano superstars are a more cinema-friendly bunch, if you're a Wagnerian soprano, chances are you're not a sylph. Singing for three hours straight requires the strength and stamina of a Clydesdale, and occasionally the size.

The schism between sound and image may be something less obvious, because opera requires you to make pictures in your head to accompany the music; other people's visuals never seem to quite do it. If you want Arthur Rackham-esque illustrations in your brain while listening to Wagner, the image of Ben Heppner simply isn't going to do it for you. If you're seated far enough away in a theatre, you can project whatever you'd like onto that figure on the stage below. The same cannot be said for a movie screen. There is no remove with which you can people the music with your own imaginings.

A great many directors -- everyone from Anthony Minghella (The English Patient) to Sally Potter (Orlando) -- have tried their hand at transposing opera to the screen, some more successfully than others. Modernizing opera often results in a hideous smashup, whether it's Mozart in a concentration camp or Delilah's famous aria "Mon coeur s'ouvre a ta voix" that ends with cunnilingus on the hood of a car (as was the case in Corina van Eijk's film version of Samson and Delilah that screened this year at the Vancouver Film Festival).

Maestro Woody Allen

Despite the complications, film directors seem drawn to opera like moths to open fire -- a few get immolated, others emerge with a masterpiece. Bergman's Magic Flute is great, but anything by Franco Zeffirelli seems well past its sell-by date. And still they come. In 2006, the Washington National Opera season at the Kennedy Center featured two operas directed by William Friedkin (most famous for directing The Exorcist) Bartok's Duke Bluebeard's Castle and Puccini's Gianni Schicchi. The upcoming season at the Los Angeles Opera will include productions by David Cronenberg, William Friedkin and Woody Allen. Yes, Woody Allen. I'll let that one sink in for a bit.

Other directors such as Patrice Chéreau have fared much better flitting back and forth between opera and film. Chéreau's staging of Wagner's Ring Cycle at Bayreuth is still legendary. There are a few clips on YouTube, Siegfried's Funeral March being one of them, that attest to this. Chéreau's films often bear the imprint of his operatic work, some more directly than others. Gabrielle, starring Isabelle Huppert and Pascal Greggory, is an opera without music, where the principal characters cut and bleed in the airless prison of a sumptuous Parisian townhouse. Musical influences are less obvious in a film like Intimacy, in which a man and a woman meet for weekly anonymous sex in an empty apartment.

Aria, a compendium of shorts from directors Robert Altman, Bruce Beresford, Jean-Luc Godard, Derek Jarman, Nicolas Roeg and Ken Russell, used operatic arias as a linking device to tie a bunch of disparate films together. The idea might have looked good on paper, but the results were often downright goofy. Mr. Godard, I am looking at you when I say this. Directors use operatic arias whenever and wherever they want to inject big drama. Really, what would John Boorman's Excalibur have been without Wagner? Still ridiculous probably, but less grandiosely ridiculous. So too, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now.

Sex and death

Since the act of going to the opera is really about the attending details, the audience, the theatre, and what people wear or don't wear, as if is often the case in Vancouver, watching a telecast of a distant production may seem a paltry substitute for the real thing. But sometimes the drama still comes through, even on a ridiculous little bit of computer screen. If you're too cheap to shell out for the real opera, or even a film broadcast, there is always YouTube, where you can pretty much cobble together an entire opera, sort of. The highlights from La Scala's production of Tristan und Isolde have been posted, along with occasionally hilarious commentary from opera buffs. Sex and death -- that's all you really need to know about opera, and with that, I leave you with this...

On an entirely different note: don't miss the Pacific Cinémathèque new screening program, Cinema Sunday: A Film Program for Families. The inaugural film of this new series is Miyazaki's Spirited Away, a film so beautiful, it almost beggars description. In addition to the movie, there will be origami, games and much fun.

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