from Part four - Directions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2011
So why do we stick to a kind of theatrical activity which seems no longer to be viable? Granted, new and contemporary forms are continually arising, but in their lack of tradition they are naturally not exalted enough to meet with serious encouragement or to win favour with the cultivated! Isn’t a good film to be preferred to a bad performance of Schiller?
alfred roller (1909)Although this book is primarily concerned with operas composed in the twentieth century, space precluding a detailed consideration of how earlier repertoire has been reassessed in modern times, the present chapter will be concerned with filmed interpretations of operas written in various epochs. The relationship between opera and that quintessentially twentieth-century art-form, cinema, has been complex and potentially fruitful – but often fraught with difficulties, both real and imagined. Traditional repertoire has been reassessed from the cinematographer's perspective, the experience having been fed back into modern stage productions; film music was from the outset profoundly influenced by operatic techniques, before it in turn came to influence operatic music; and several operas were specially composed for the screen. This chapter looks briefly at those three topics, examining filmed treatments of existing operas, the relationship between opera and film music, and the select corpus of twentieth-century operas written specifically for film or television.
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