Conference Agenda

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 The Met: Live in HD and digital streaming (Senici 2010, 2012; Ward-Griffin 2014, 2019; Morris 2010, 2024). Yet countering Ponnelle’s argument by insisting on the artistry of multi-camera production runs into the problem of a field of practice that repeatedly measures success according to a production’s ability to facilitate an immediacy of encounter between viewer and event while itself going unnoticed. Illuminating what prefers to remain unseen prompts a reconsideration of the practitioners responsible for this work. It might mean, for example, identifying a signature style with an individual multi-camera director, just as opera studies does happily when it considers the work of stage directors. But it may equally challenge opera studies to rethink the figure of the individual auteur-director and turn to models of agency and creativity more attuned to collaboration and co-production, not only here but in the work of opera more widely.

The peak of Maria Callas’s career occurred more or less simultaneously with the spread of television. Yet the singer had a complicated, indeed conflicted relationship with the new medium: “I detest opera done on the small screen by people with no taste,” she wrote dismissively in 1956. Nonetheless, and despite never broadcasting a complete opera performance starring Callas, it is only thanks to television that we have any video evidence of her on stage. This small but significant televisual archive includes six concerts transmitted between 1958 and 1974, and three broadcasts of the second act of Puccini’s Tosca, one abridged (as part of an episode of CBS’s Ed Sullivan Show in 1956) and two complete (from the Paris Opéra in 1958 and London’s Covent Garden in 1964). To date, however, Callas’s television appearances have received essentially no scholarly attention, even amid increased interest in the singer occasioned by the centenary of her birth in 2023.

This paper seeks to redress the balance, analyzing the Callas televisual archive collectively in order to show that television not only contributed enormously to the diva’s exceptional fame, but also shaped her image in unique ways. I first shed light on Callas’s distrust of the medium, arguing that it was specifically connected with the development of television in Italy, her country of residence between the late 1940s and the early 1960s. I then place this distrust in the context of the encounter between opera and television in the 1950s and 1960s, an encounter that was initially anything but cordial and remained ambivalent and complex. Finally, I discuss the three videos of Tosca, considering in particular how the televisual medium constructed Callas’s “diva” character. Callas’s conflicted attitude towards television, I suggest, can be traced back to the medium’s much-vaunted commitment to “reality” and especially “intimacy,” even in operatic contexts: a “realism” she may have experienced as intrusive or even predatory, depriving her of the control that she was used to exerting on other media involved in the construction of her iconic image.

The Fauré Requiem is well established in the American musical landscape as a popular selection in choral repertoires, community sings, benefit concerts, and memorial events. But the public is often exposed to classical music through mainstream contexts such as film or television, where new narrative meaning is assigned. For example, Orff’s Carmina Burana, Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra, and Barber’s Adagio for Strings have all become embedded in popular culture, and carry distinct associations through scenarios they have accompanied. I argue that the similar application of the Requiem suggests its potential to hold a comparable position in that canon. The 1990s marked the emergence of a trend in using the Requiem to illustrate circumstances of action, drama, noir, crime, and parody, as I have previously explored. The varied incorporation of “In paradisum,” “Pie Jesu,” “Sanctus,” and “Libera me” sometimes creates a deliberate disjunction between the on-screen action and the music's semiotics of consolation and humanity. Both film and television continue to offer rich opportunities to include the Requiem. However, as today’s television series have evolved into cinematic marvels, mirroring blockbuster films, Fauré’s music finds intriguingly fertile ground there.

This paper considers the expanded presence of the Fauré Requiem in American television. As streaming analytics reveal, the viewing habits of dedicated fans who binge-watch and re-watch series lead to quicker and deeper familiarity with soundtracks and their narrative roles. Over the past decade, audiences perhaps unfamiliar with Fauré by name have heard portions of his Requiem in the popular series Fargo, Mozart in the Jungle, Legion, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and Madam Secretary, among others. The inclusion of these musical extracts, whether in diegetic or non-diegetic contexts, yields sharply contrasting results. In one instance, the music is even purposefully warped to reflect a character’s mental instability, deepening its cinematic storytelling power. By recontextualizing the Requiem beyond its immediate association with death, the related scenes are lifted to a dramatic register that capitalizes on the presumed “emotional currency” of Fauré’s music. Such application underlines the flexibility and effectiveness of the Requiem to evoke an emotional response, regardless of the broader on-screen narrative.