Carmen Study Guide - Manitoba Opera

Opera and Media Technology
Electronic slow motion was invented for sports video. Tapeless camcorders were created for
TV news. But something else that seems to drive media-technology innovation is opera.
Really. Opera.
The European Digital Cinema Forum’s 2008 EDCF Guide to Alternative Content for
Digital Cinema begins with a chapter on opera because opera happens to be the numberone
form of alternative (non-movie) content worldwide, beating out rock concerts, sports,
and political events. In many countries, a single opera showing is enough to out-earn a
weekend’s worth of continuous movie showings to finish in the top-10 box-office grosses.
The Metropolitan Opera received an Engineering Emmy Award and a
Peabody Award for their technological contributions to television. Their
first global HD cinema transmission was in 2006, but their first multi-city
live cinema transmission was in 1952, and The Los Angeles Times
noted then that the Orpheum theatre there had been equipped with a
stereophonic sound system for the occasion.
Although FM stereo wouldn’t be introduced until the following
decade, 1952 wasn’t opera’s first stereo sound. A 1925 Radio
News article described the Berlin Opera’s stereo broadcasts,
and the Paris Opera’s first stereo transmissions (by wire)
were in 1881!
opera in stereo 1925... ...and 1881
Why would they even consider such a thing? Perhaps it’s because the first electronic-media
entertainment service was actually opera via telephone lines. It began in Switzerland in 1878
and spread around the world. In 1930, there were more than 91,000 paying subscribers in
the city of Budapest, alone.
More interested in the moving-image media? The first color-TV broadcast is sometimes said
to have been the Rose Parade on New Year’s Day in 1954, but NBC broadcast the opera
Carmen in color the previous year. NBC Television had its own opera company for 16 years,
and ABC and CBS (among others worldwide) also commissioned operas for network
television broadcast. BBC television’s first commission of an opera was in 1938, a year
before television was supposedly introduced at the New York World’s Fair; and they had been
televising operas since 1936.
Some say the first sound movie was The Jazz Singer in 1927, using the Vitaphone process.
Vitaphone was located in the Manhattan Opera House. It was a good process and a good
movie, but a sound movie of the complete opera Faust had been released in Britain in 1907,
and sound movies of opera arias were seen and heard in 1900 in Paris.
Incidentally, the first movie score was written by opera composer Camille Saint-Saens in
1908. In 1914, 24 years before Erich Korngold won an Oscar for the score of 1938’s The
Adventures of Robin Hood, he completed his first two operas. Alfred Hitchcock’s favourite
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