On the one hand, broadly speaking, in the west, most people appear to agree that the term lyric theater pertains to any theatrical production involving music, which means that music has been inextricably bound with words since the earliest origins of drama in Athens, when dithyrambs were sung in honor of Dionysus. On the other hand, there seems to be a certain amount of disagreement about what differentiates drama from opera.
“Opera” has always been acknowledged to be the more “comprehensive” art form in its merging of music, movement, acting, and singing, while “drama” is usually given credit for more detailed in its character development and plot. Setting aside whether that distinction is true or not, the sticking point seems always to have been that it is harder to understand what singers are saying than declaiming actors.
Provided that one agrees that the composer’s goal is to set the text in a manner that enables complete understandability of the words coupled with maximum emotional punch in the music — an incredibly difficult technical challenge — any seasoned composer of vocal music accepts that placing words above the “passaggio” in soprano and alto roles, or the “break” an octave lower in tenor and bass roles means that, while the emotional content of the music and performance will increase, the auditor’s ability to understand the words will decrease. None of this matters if the creative team has intentionally decided that the words do not need to be understood.
Words first or music? I have observed that so-called “traditional” opera producers tend to feel that the music is more important than the words. (I admit that I loved Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot as a kid more before I understood the words than after because I was able to construct my own narrative in place of the one concocted by Giuseppi Adami and Renato Simoni.) This reflects the longstanding tradition of placing the mechanism of the opera house at the service of the composer’s overall vision. This process certainly worked for Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner. Broadway-style musical theater producers tend to place the lyricist, along with the book writer, above the composer in the creative team. Stephen Sondheim’s quip in Merrily We Roll Along about the contract coming first notwithstanding, I’ve observed that it ultimately doesn’t matter. It interests me that, whereas in commercial theater the director is usually the driver, the person with the vision; theatrical pablum often ensues when (like a self-driving car deciding on its own destination) an opera director begins telling librettists and composers what to do.
In any event, opera and drama are both three-dimensional art forms that share the same DNA. The Lumière Brothers’ short films initiated the two-dimensional cinematographic motion picture era in Paris in December 1895. By 1923, when the first commercial screening of movies with fully synchronized sound appeared in New York City, film directors had become the closest thing to a 19th century composer like Richard Strauss conducting his own operas. The standout example is Charlie Chaplin writing, starring in, directing, and composing the scores for his silent films. (That’s why I have scored three Chaplin silents myself for practice.) But then there is also the breathtaking collective genius spread over several generations of Coppolas — Piero, Anton, and Francis Ford, not to mention composer-directors Clint Eastwood, John Carpenter, Michael Nyman, and, of course, Michael Giacchino.
Two Televised Operas
In 1951, NBC commissioned Gian Carlo Menotti to create Amahl and the Night Visitors specifically for live broadcast on the Hallmark Hall of Fame, with Samuel Barber stepping in to flesh out the orchestrations and Arturo Toscanini conducting. On the other coast, Playhouse 90 would birth the careers of Rod Serling and Sidney Lumet and so many others while composer John Williams was still a student at Juilliard. The lightning in a bottle that was the first production of Amahl consisted mainly of documentary-style verité shots (think John Cassavetes) alternating with stationary coverage shots; at its best it synthesized the “three camera” technique that served television throughout the 1950s. It appears Francis Ford Coppola has built his exploration of “live cinema” on the television model: multiple cameras, the shots strung together in real time based on a pre-planned teleplay, cutting away to pre-recorded segments to buy time for the camera crews to reset.
A better example of this adaptation of “shooting a stage play for television” is the staggeringly, astonishingly effective 1966 BBC production of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd for which Britten re-jiggered the dramaturgy. The claustrophobic setting aboard Indomitable allowed the director to lean into medium, over the shoulder, and closeup shots. Peter Pears sounds particularly good in the live singing, and most of the actors carry off the challenge of “singing big” but “acting small;” the director helps by pulling away from the characters when the physical demands of singing compel them to “go big.” Britten’s opera inspired me to become an opera composer in the first place when I was a kid; viewing the BBC production is probably one of the things that inspired me to begin making operafilms.
Two Cinematic Operas
As a student at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia lucky enough to have several lessons with Menotti in 1983 I recall viewing at the time the Franco Zeffirelli La Traviata. I have a vivid memory of Menotti telling me that he hated the lip-synching. In fact, the ADR (“automatic dialogue replacement”) is skillful and works beautifully in the small moments; but the exterior shots pull me out of the moment, and I have trouble suspending my disbelief when the onscreen singers are not physically manifesting the effort it requires to produce sound. This extends to the exquisite staging, which fills the frame with fascinating action the way a Pieter Bruegel painting fills the canvas but somehow doesn’t achieve the “all in” fakeness of Fellini. Despite Teresa Stratas’ incredible, committed performance, I am left wanting more and I still don’t really understand why.
Kenneth Branagh went for broke in his magical-realist 2006 Magic Flute, which he reset during the first World War, beginning in the overture with aerial combat footage, and an English language translation that pounced off the screen. Often campy, dizzying crane shots and extreme closeups on singers singing high notes alternate with realistic spoken beats and what plays like a sendup of the funhouse mirror scene from Lady from Shanghai. The dramaturgical flow is manic, and Branagh’s surpassing intellectual brilliance is everywhere evident. James Conlon’s vivacious account of the score emphasizes bright sonorities — or is this the way it was mixed? — and the sound design is extremely busy. It almost feels as though Branagh, with the same skittering joy that I felt as a young composer in the presence of David Del Tredici’s coruscating creative voice, decided to go along for the ride, buying Mozart metaphorical dramaturgical drinks and getting out of the way. With postmodern flourish, the film’s narrative sits atop the Mozart opera’s, counterpointing it rather than manifesting it.
Two Auteur Fusions
In translating Kurt Weill and Berthold Brecht’s Threepenny Opera to the screen, G.W. Pabst’s 1931 masterpiece uses only 29 minutes of Weill’s original 58-minute score, transforming what began as a “numbers” opera a play with a couple of songs. Weill and Brecht must not have been pleased. It folds Polly’s Pirate Jenny into Jenny’s role (a radiant Lotte Lenya, singing two octaves higher than she would years later) and, because Brecht took the liberty of rewriting the story after having sold it to the producers as the original treatment of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera that it was onstage, ends up being chiefly Pabst’s auteur vision — a fusion of Brecht and Pabst, really; with Weill’s score shoved under dialogue, as dance numbers, or used as source music. That tactic is so common as to be a trope in movie musicals—think of It Couldn’t Please Me More ending up on the radio and replaced by the addition of the knockout Mein Lieber Herr as a showpiece for Liza Minelli in the filmed version of Cabaret. I couldn’t help but do it to myself when I transformed my stage musical, I Hear America Singing into an operafilm, burying or repurposing several songs in the soundtrack and cutting several others, and composing several new songs. Oops.
Only thirty years later, marketed as “a reinvention of the movie musical,” Jacques Demy and Michel Legrand’s dazzling, wise 1964 tour de force Les Parapluies de Cherbourg did everything right with a radiant 20-year-old Catherine Deneuve and a through-composed score that suavely integrated stretches of parlando and recitative in place of spoken dialogue but did not hesitate to reach for the big tune when called for. Although the singing was lip-synced, the delicious, Felliniesque artifice worked because it was in blissful accord with the vivid, primary colors of the stylized photography, which maintained a lyrical, romantic rhythm of its own that respected, but was not tightly bound to, the rhythm of the musical score.
Film as Multimedia Element
Of the many instances of stage-and-screen hybrids, perhaps the most fascinating to me was Orson Welles’ use of pre-shot (silent) sequences (now lost) to flesh out his 1946 book and staging of the Cole Porter score for Around the World in Eighty Days. Per Welles biographer Frank Brady, there was nearly thirty minutes of film, all underscored in the orchestra by Porter. The “live cinema” Ford Coppola envisions incorporates pre-recorded segments (VT’s) that can be cut away to buy time for the camera crew to reposition themselves for the next sequence just as Welles was using his pre-shot segments to buy time for the stage crew to move sets.
Making staged operas out of films that integrate filmic scenic elements in performance such as Mikael Karlsson’s Melancholia—a 2023 adaptation of the 2011 film fascinate me, because they transpose the story from two into three dimensions, which have the potential to intensify the effectiveness of simultaneous action staged in multiple settings. When I shoot Hide during summer 2026 as an opera taking place in the audience during the live screening of a film I’ll be exploring that from the other direction (translating from two to three dimensions), as I’ve already filmed live in front of live audiences for the screen (translating from three to two).
Soaps and Operas Without Singing
Writer Joe Caldwell, a writer on the original gothic soap opera Dark Shadows (1966-1971) and co-creator of the reluctant vampire Barnabas Collins, once told me over dinner at Yaddo that one of the joys of writing for the show was the opportunity to create “situations of operatic intensity,” such as the one where David, in the ruins of the original Collingswood, expresses to Barnabas his wish “to take him to watch the sun rise.” The relatively slow dramatic pacing of telenovelas, the extra dramatic beats, actors’ frozen faces waiting for some offscreen business to conclude, all unintentionally create the same stylized elongation of expression opera singers are typically called upon to sustain a dramatic moment while the score catches up with your character’s sung line.
A truly operatic television show like David Lynch’s surrealist mystery drama Twin Peaks (1990-1991; 2017) managed to maintain its deliciously consistent narrative tone because of Lynch’s brilliant, tightly controlled combination of Angelo Badalamenti’s dream pop musical score (co-written with Lynch), highly stylized acting style (melodramatic, “operatic” in its camp elements), distinctive cinematography (editing is exquisitely pinned to the score), and, most importantly, the fully scripted, storyboarded extensive use of visual, musical, and textual motifs whose meaning evolves operatically with their constant recontextualization.
MET Live-in-HD and COVID Streaming Archival Videos
In 2006, Peter Gelb, as new incoming general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, initiated live high-definition video broadcasts to selected venues (mainly theaters) worldwide. Though they utilize more cameras and have many more “live broadcast” options than did the original NBC television shows of the 1950s, the MET broadcasts — technically immaculate, visually sumptuous, sonically exquisite, represent an apotheosis of the “three camera” approach, honed over the past fifty years in the production of live sports and cultural events. The crucial new element is the increasing integration of handheld cameras, the lightness and compactness of which make it possible for characters to film reaction shots of one another in performance with bodycams.
Many bricks-and-mortar companies began streaming to their patrons during the COVID epidemic (2019-2020) their three camera archival videos of past live performances. OPERA America began giving “Awards for Digital Excellence” to encourage the next generation of opera creators to capitalize on the fact that digital editing software and iPhones have made filmmakers of us all. Several opera companies have made forays into creating their own “film studios,” such as Atlanta Opera, whose creative team declares that their videos “break the boundaries of opera with a unique cinematic style in mind to push opera forward in the screens.”
Why Opera in. Film?
It is in this context that it says a lot that Orson Welles never directed an opera; but it is deeply meaningful that he positioned Kane’s brutality towards Susan by subjecting her to the humiliation of starring in the Bernard Hermann ersatz opera-within-the-film, Salammbô. It is also meaningful that Ford Coppola meticulously counterpointed the bloodbath that precedes Michael Corleone’s rapture with a live performance of Pietro Mascagni’s verismo masterpiece Cavalleria rusticana. Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element (1997), with its use of Il dolce suono, the bel canto mad scene from Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia Di Lammermoor, to create a dramatic inflection point at which the two divas appear to be driven mad by man’s inhumanity but then triumphantly transform the music (over a driving techno beat) into a dizzily ornamented humanistic appeal. One doesn’t have to like it to love the panache with which it is delivered. Perhaps the most rigorously integrated pre-existing opera into film comes in Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, where a man building an opera house in the middle of the jungle serves as the clearest and most searing of dramaturgical drivers and an apt metaphor for the artist’s life.
“My brother Kevin,” I wrote in my memoir, “loved how characters in operas expressed their feelings: openly, at the top of their lungs, like crazed animals.” All four filmmakers reached for that urschrei in their films because the expression of it is what opera can do better than any other artform, and a director set with the task is as close to pulling off what an opera composer can as is possible without being one.