It’s not even Halloween, but here’s an operatic Christmas story for you. This is the 75th anniversary of the first opera made for television: Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors, broadcast at Yuletide in 1951 and watched by five million people across the US in a production sponsored by Hallmark. You can watch the original broadcast on YouTube: it was introduced with wit, self-deprecation and early 50s elegance by Menotti himself (vastly less charmingly, the role of King Balthazar was played by a singer in blackface). Chet Allen’s performance as the boy, Amahl, is staggering, and even more moving is Rosemary Kuhlmann’s Mother, especially in her aria, All That gold!.
Amahl is “an opera for children because it tries to recapture my own childhood”, Menotti said. It was played on US TV every Christmastime throughout the 50s, and was recorded and remade in new productions the next decade, while the BBC picked it up in 1953, and there was even an Australian TV version. Less than an hour long, Menotti’s festive fable works because of the intimacy of its story, and its refusal to patronise its intended audience.
But Amahl was a high-water mark. Another opera-made for-telly anniversary this year is Benjamin Britten’s Owen Wingrave, composed for the BBC and first broadcast 55 years ago. Britten’s piece definitely wasn’t made for children. Based on a gothic novella by Henry James, it’s the story of the pacifist Owen Wingrave’s struggles against his military forebears and his fiancee who is ashamed of him. Britten’s opera is uncompromisingly claustrophobic and intense, one of his most underrated scores – but it’s a piece that wasn’t designed to capture Amahl’s popularity on screen.
The later story of operas made for TV in Britain is more about exploration of the possibilities of the medium rather than following in Menotti’s audience-first footsteps: in the 90s and 00s there are pieces composed for TV including Judith Weir’s Armida or Jonathan Dove’s When She Died …, written on the fifth anniversary of the death of Princess Diana, and there were filmed productions of existing operas especially remade for television, such as the director Margaret Williams’s scintillating versions of Thomas Adès’s Powder Her Face or her version of Britten’s Owen Wingrave, produced for Channel 4 in 2001 to mark the opera’s 30th anniversary.
These days, opera is more often found on the big screen: cinemas all over the world can take you to a night at the opera, and here’s another anniversary for you – this autumn marks 20 years since the Metropolitan Opera started streaming its productions to cinemas, an innovation that the Royal Opera House in London quickly followed, finding new audiences, as well as a parallel stream of income and impact.
The Met: Live in HD has been controversial: Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager suggested in 2013 that the cinema audiences were “cannibalising” the audience for live shows; but surely, from Japan to Brazil, and here in the UK, these broadcasts reach opera-lovers who are unable to go to the Met in person.
On cinema screens there are huge gains in seeing close up what the singers are doing as actors, subtleties of facial expression and the relationships between the characters on stage that you can’t pick up when you are sitting at the back of the gallery. But the essential problem with broadcasting live opera on any screen remains the same as it was in 1951. We are watching performers who are projecting through the acoustic miracles of their voices into an auditorium that seats thousands.
The intimacy of film, and especially TV, requires precisely the opposite mode of delivery. In drama on TV or film, the wonder and the illusion lies in sharing an intimacy of space and feeling with the actors, whereas the mechanics of opera work through the other end of the telescope, zooming out from their voices towards us in the audience, rather than zooming us in to be with them in each scene. Opera and film are essentially made for entirely different purposes.
But if you do want to see what happens when opera is made for television from the ground up, there’s another anniversary to tell you about: it has been 19 years since Richard Thomas’s Kombat Opera Presents, half-hour shows broadcast in 2007 that sent up TV staples from The Apprentice to the South Bank – Bragg! – Show. Thomas was hot on the heels of the success of his theatre show with Stewart Lee - Jerry Springer: The Opera, but the origins of Kombat Opera also go back to sketches in Simon Munnery’s Attention Scum series that aired on the BBC in 2001, with the soprano and contemporary music catalyst Loré Lixenberg, who made a new art-form dressed as a gothic uber-diva, filmed on the white cliffs of Kent.
Lixenberg, and trained singers including Leigh Melrose, Janis Kelly and Sophia Ragavelas made every half-hour long episode of Kombat Opera their own, but it’s the way Thomas included parts for actors including Kevin Eldon, Hugh Dennis and Jon Culshaw, and mixed all the media together, that makes these shows so compelling.
The format never feels as if it is selling either medium short: the heightened emotionalising and ridiculousness of opera serves the satire perfectly, joyously and concisely. Seems opera on screen works best when its turns its attention to the screen itself.
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Talking of taking the artform into new places, Raymond Gubbay celebrates his 80th birthday with the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge at Wigmore Hall, London tonight. Gubbay’s Classical Spectaculars, his Christmas shows, his operas at the Royal Albert Hall – which included flooding the arena with 65,000 litres water every night for Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, a Turandot at Wembley Arena in collaboration with the Royal Opera House, and even his Savoy Opera venture, a brave but doomed attempt to make repertory opera work in the West End without subsidy, are some of the most brilliant, energetic, and imaginative ways of popularising classical music over the last 60 years.
To make large-scale classical music profitable is a vanishingly rare phenomenon. (Even if, while it’s true to say that as a business, Gubbay never took a penny from any Arts Council, most of the musicians and orchestras he worked with wouldn’t exist without it.) Gubbay’s 80th birthday concert will give its profits to another now Arts Council-free organisation, Wigmore Hall itself. Gubbay’s subsidy-free business model remains an impossible dream for most, but Wigmore Hall is an unlikely contemporary torchbearer for the same spirit of entrepreneurship.
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This week Tom has been listening to: Anna Meredith’s Dusky, the single from her new album.
You know that feeling when you’re on the summit of the rollercoaster Stealth at Thorpe Park, and there’s that microsecond where your heart’s in your mouth before the drop? Dusky is like six and a half minutes spent in that place of delirious freefall, as rhythms grind against each other, melodic arcs rising and falling, to make time warp and your stomach pitch and yaw.
