Why can't great movies be made out of
great operas? To get a handle on this question, I invited
a select audience of die-hard live opera buffs to see highly
rated movies of operas on DVDs and laserdiscs in my screening
room. Of course, a live performance at its best in a great
acoustical venue has a magic that no replication can match.
But not all live performances in the real world attain this
magic: Singers' performances are often flawed-I watched
Pavarotti's voice crack so badly during the first act of
Donizetti's La Fille du Regiment that he had to be replaced
by another tenor-and acoustics vary often with where you
are seated. A movie has the potential of capturing peak
performances and digital reproduction on a DVD is at least
constant.
Movies, though a different medium, have
great potential for operas. Much of the power of opera proceeds
from its ability to intensify human emotions, especially
those emotions aroused by love, found and lost. Movies have
the power to amplify such emotions, as demonstrated by Sergei
Eisenstein and Ingmar Bergman. Consider, for example, the
close-up, which can direct an audience's attention in ways
that a live performance cannot. It can, for example, focus
on the human face at the height of emotional crises. Or
the subjective camera technique, which can let the audience
see through the eyes of the protagonist. It can make an
audience "see" the object of desire or pain, real or imagined.
Or flashbacks, which break through the unities of time and
depict a character's memories. And most importantly, movies
have the almost infinite potential of the retake. Like the
Bill Murray character in Groundhog Day who is condemned
to keep trying permutations of the same day until he finds
the right combination, a film director can re-shoot a scene
over and over again until he perfects it to fit his concept-and
through editing, he can do it retrospectively.
Opera movies often require dubbing, since
opera singers cannot be expected to perform over and over
for retakes. But despite the conceit that artists perform
best before a live audience, dubbing may improve rather
than hurt the quality of the sound. Glenn Gould, for example,
who stopped performing before live audiences, argued that
a live audience may distract an artist from perfecting his
performance. And like Gould, many opera singers prefer to
record their arias in the controlled conditions of a recording
studio. So, in theory at least, holding aside the social
pleasure of being at an opera, there is no visual or sonic
barrier that prevents a movie of an opera from surpassing
the live performance of an opera.
In fact, not many movies of operas even
approach this potential. While there is no shortage of filmed
operas, especially since the advent of television, most
are merely faithful photoplays of a staged opera. In some,
the cameras and microphones are positioned around the stage;
in others, the stage itself is moved to more picturesque
locations, while the performance remains the same. Even
film directors often do no more than photograph staged opera,
adding peripheral cinematic segments as Ingmar Bergman did
in his montage of the audience (including his granddaughter)
in The Magic Flute and Joseph Losey did with his montage
of sword fights and fiestas in Don Giovanni. Only a few
directors have attempted reconceptualizing the entire opera
as a movie.
The most successful of these opera movies
is, in my opinion, Francesco Rosi's Bizet's Carmen, filmed
in 1984 in 70mm color. The story, drawn from Prosper Merimée's
Nineteenth Century play, is familiar and basic: a simple
soldier, Don José is beguiled, tormented, and destroyed
by the charms of an exotic woman, Carmen. Rosi used true
opera singers as principal actors-the tenor Placedo Domingo
and the soprano Julia Migenes Johnson. To expand his scope
for visualization, he added dialog from Bizet's much wordier
original libretto (hence the title "Bizet's Carmen.) In
reconstructing the story, he uses cinematic metaphor to
stunning effect. For example, he intercuts Don José's plight
with that of a powerful bull, snorting, romping, panting,
and charging under the illusion of freedom as he is gradually
being prepared for the inevitable kill. Cinema, unlike the
stage, lends itself to such symbolism. Rosi's real triumph
comes from his camera's ability to eroticize Carmen by interpreting
the lust of her body language and choreographing her gypsy
dances into sexual climaxes, with the help of choreographer
Antonio Gades. Such images, combined with meticulously recorded
(post-synchronous) six-channel sound, draw the audience
into the ceaseless seduction. As an experiment, I switched
to the DVD of one of the better stage productions of Carmen
at Covent Garden with Maria Ewing playing Carmen. Although
Ewing is superb in the role, and very attractive, she could
not escape the stilted artificiality of the stage. Before
the scene was finished, my opera-philic audience was screaming
to return to the movie version. In terms of illusion, there
was no real competition to it.
Franco Zeffirelli's 1986 film of Verdi's
Otello is a more ambitious reconceptualization. The opera,
based on the Shakespearean tragedy, is essentially the story
of a hero in a foreign society, Otello the Moor, tormented
into murdering his beloved wife, Desdemona, by the deceptions
of his cunning aide, Iago. Verdi made the triumph of Iago's
evil intellect so central to the opera that he originally
titled it Iago. Zeffirelli, who had 20 years' experience
directing opera films-in 1982 alone, La Traviata, Cavalleria
Rusticana, and I Pagliacci-shot it in Crete, using well-established
opera singers as actors: Placido Domingo (Otello); the beautiful
soprano Katia Ricciarelli (Desdemona); and bass Justino
Diaz (Iago). Taking full advantage of cinematic techniques,
he employs the subjective camera to show the progressively
distorted way Otello sees the world, dissolves to flashbacks
to fill in the narrative, and applies moody lighting to
blur the line between reality and delusion. He also uses
his poetic license to change the opera. Not only does he
insert dance scenes (which had been in one 1896 Paris version)
and an ending where, instead of escaping, Iago is killed
by Otello, he cuts out a number of visually static scenes.
Unfortunately, some of these scenes contain the preparatory
music for the singing that follows (for example, the Willow
Song that precedes Otello's murder of his wife). The result
of this restructuring is a visually exquisite movie but
a compromised opera.
Petr Wiegl, a Czech director who has
made a half-dozen opera films, takes a very different approach
to Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Shostakovich
wrote the opera in 1934, based on a short story by Nikolai
Leskov about the destructive sexual lust of a bored housewife
in a small town in Tsarist Russia, but it soon ran into
the objections of Stalin, which could be lethal in those
days, and was withdrawn. In his 1992 production of it, incorporating
revisions done by the composer (who had died in 1975), Wiegl
uses two casts of characters: One cast, Czech actors, acts
out the parts and mouths the words of the libretto, the
other cast, who sings the parts off-camera, is made up of
world-class opera singers, including the soprano Galina
Vishnevskaya, for whom Shostakovich had rewritten the role
of the housewife (Katerina), and the tenor Nicolai Gedda,
who sings the part of her lover (Sergei). Because the Czech
actors are well directed (and Russian-speaking), the lip-synching
works almost seamlessly. The camera is also able to capture
much of the opera's eroticism. In the bedroom scene, for
example, there is a series of close-ups of Katerina's lips
and nude body that, perfectly synchronized to Shostakovich's
orchestral counterpoints, become progressively more intimate.
By making the seduction more credible, the film prepares
the audience for the lust-inspired murders that follows.
Indeed, Wiegl's film so reinforces Shostakovich's musical
invention, I preferred it to the live performance I saw
soon afterwards at the Metropolitan Opera.
In all these operas, the sound from DVDs,
while not as good as one would get at a live performance,
was equivalent to CDs. Except for Rosi's Carmen, there is
not yet a great operatic movie, but the potential clearly
exists. The problem may be that operatic directors do not
understand film techniques, or that film directors do not
understand the dynamics of opera, or that no one has given
them the budget to fully explore the medium. But the challenge
remains.
[click
here for full list of operas shown]
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