Conference Agenda

In 1966, National Educational Television (NET) speculated that the future of opera broadcasting would be in “behind the scenes” documentary programs that revealed how opera was produced in the TV studio, as they “draw in the younger viewer, many of whom respond more to the production process at first than to fully staged performances.” Although scholars have long disputed the extent to which a broadcast documents and is thus secondary to a pre-existing stage production of an opera (Esse 2010; Morris 2024; Senici 2010), less attention has been paid to how studio production cultivated a different documentary approach, one in which the “by-product” of making opera for television became the show itself. And yet, such examples abound in the 1950s and 1960s, as television intersected with a boom in pedagogical programming to introduce opera to new audiences.

This paper examines how opera has documented its own production since its advent on television. Early television was often thought to be a “window on the world,” documenting a reality beyond itself (Fickers 2008; Hilmes 2011), but this same documentary impulse could also be turned inward. In this talk, I trace how studio opera production drew upon a legacy of televisual strategies from documentary film and TV docudramas so as to convey a sense of privileged access and transparency. Focusing on examples from different American broadcasters, I argue that, far from being reliant on some external event, opera on television adapted documentary strategies for the purposes of self-referentiality, thus challenging the connotation of “secondary” often associated with opera broadcasts. Whether deconstructing an opera production as it happened, featuring rehearsal footage of an upcoming TV opera premiere, or using roving camerawork to journey into the hidden recesses of the studio, broadcasters adopted a documentary orientation, not only as a promotional strategy, but also as part of the hypermediated drive for an ever more “real” operatic experience (Bolter and Grusin 1999). I conclude by considering how this documentary impulse has persisted in opera broadcasting today (Steichen 2009; Cachopo 2018) and question whether a focus on process has ultimately led new audiences to embrace opera.

“I’ve never felt that ‘reality’ was well served in an opera house,” Philip Glass wrote in 1992. “The opera house is the arena of poetry par excellence, where the normal rules of historical research need not be applied.” With their non-linear narratives, unconventional dramaturgies, and abstract music, Glass’s operatic portraits of Gandhi, Akhenaten, Columbus, and other historical figures certainly reflect this belief. The unreality of these operas, however, belies the presence of and stands in tension with an underlying documentary impulse. In a 1977 funding application to the Rockefeller Foundation, Glass emphasized the importance of studying Gandhi-related books, articles, photographs, correspondence, and films on-site in India for his opera-in-progress, Satyagraha. “The need to investigate primary source material,” he wrote, “has become increasingly apparent.”

Although many American composers in the late twentieth century began to embrace opera as a historical mode (Renihan 2020), Glass’s insistence on utilizing primary source material was unusual. It was not, however, unique (Cotter 2016; Ebright 2024). Just a few years later, Anthony Davis responded to Satyagraha with X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X and employed a similar documentary process, drawing on speeches, recordings, and autobiography. In this paper, I argue that these operas reflect a shift in how American opera engaged with the past, one conditioned by concerns over the genre’s cultural relevancy and verisimilitude, as well as the emergent televisual epistemology of media reportage (Kamuf 1994).

To make this case, I examine the documentary impulse as it manifested throughout these operas’ developments. Synopsis drafts for both operas, for instance, reveal plans for a striking degree of audiovisual materiality: the creators for Satyagraha intended to feature documentary footage of Gandhi’s Great Salt March in the opera’s final moments, and in X, on-stage television monitors would display archival news video to track Malcolm X’s growing social stature. Although neither plan came to fruition, traces of an underlying documentary orientation still lingered in the mise-en-scène of their original productions. The distance between these traces and their material origins, I suggest, draws attention to the processes of documentary opera and the aesthetic transformations engendered by opera’s unreality.

Amidst the growing trend of documentary opera, the moniker “CNN opera” has returned to common parlance. A reference to the first television channel to provide twenty-four-hour news coverage, the term is often used in both critical reviews and scholarship to gesture towards works that draw on topical news stories as subject material. Since the 1990s, “CNN opera” has played a significant role in taxonomizing works such as Nixon in China (1987) and X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X (1986), but the term itself has yet to receive critical scrutiny. In her monograph, American Opera (2001), Elise Kirk dedicates a chapter to the ways so-called CNN operas immortalize heroes as operatic protagonists. Additionally, as recently as 2023, critics have used the term as a generic categorization and explanatory label in reviews for publications such as The New York Times and Opera News.

This presentation interrogates the term “CNN opera,” contextualizing its denigrating coinage by journalist Peter G. Davis in his 1995 New York Magazine article, “Headline Muse,” and chronicling its unexpected legacies in characterizing opera’s adoption of the documentary impulse. According to Davis, such derivative operas pander to philistine audiences by prioritizing immediacy and topical relevance at the expense of music or drama. In response to Davis, I reframe these works under the broader concept of “documentary operas” (Chu 2025), placing opera in dialogue with the televisual aesthetics and generic affordances of documentary film, theater, and television. I build on recent scholarship on the cross-pollination of operatic and televisual strategies (Morris 2024), the recontextualization of the archive in documentary film (Baron 2013), and opera’s historiographic potential (Renihan 2020) to move beyond an emphasis on reportage and literal representation. I argue that documentary operas reinterpret primary source materials to advance sociopolitical critique, highlight the narratives of forgotten or historically marginalized figures, and create new archives. Ultimately, by returning to the genealogy of CNN opera in American opera history, I posit that the embrace of the documentary impulse is not the mere promotional strategy Davis alleges, but rather part of opera’s continuous justification of its place and role in contemporary culture.