Christopher Morris, Maynooth University
In a 1985 interview for the Los Angeles Times, stage and screen director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle drew a sharp distinction between, on the one hand, the studio-shot opera films for which he had become well known and, on the other, the multi-camera productions of staged opera broadcast on television and often released commercially on video. Shooting performances in the opera house may be adequate as a form of ‘documentation’, Ponnelle observed, but it is ‘not a form of art’. Reading Ponnelle’s remark as symptomatic of a wider attitude, my paper unpacks some of the implications of its dismissal of what is often termed the ‘capture’ or ‘relay’ of staged opera.
Historically, opera studies has mirrored this value judgment, devoting disproportionate attention to the relatively rare phenomenon of the opera film at the expense of the much more prevalent form of multi-camera remediation of staged opera. It is an imbalance only now being redressed as scholars investigate the historical and contemporary role of an operatic screen culture that extends from the early years of television to the era of live cinema transmissions and digital streaming. Complicating this critical re-evaluation, however, is the insistence by multi-camera directors that success in their field is measured by the capacity of a video production to facilitate a sense of immediacy with the performance while itself remaining unnoticed, its practitioners anonymous. What place, I ask, for art or auteur directors in a media form devoted to its own concealment? Highlighting the historical role of creativity in theatre, and drawing on recent work in the fields of adaptation studies and transmedia studies, I propose a reconsideration of the work of multi-camera direction and its practitioners.
Biography: Christopher Morris is Professor of Music at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. He is author of Reading Opera Between the Lines: Orchestral Interludes and Cultural Meaning from Wagner to Berg(Cambridge, 2002), Modernism and the Cult of Mountains: Music, Opera, Cinema (Ashgate, 2012) and Screening the Operatic Stage: Television and Beyond (Chicago, 2024), as well as chapters and articles on opera and topics in music for screen. With Antonio Cascelli, he co-edited the anthology Re-Envisaging Music: Listening in the Visual Age (Chigiana, 2022). Morris is co-editor of The Opera Quarterly.