Critic’s Notebook
A Success in HD, but at What Cost?
Sara Krulwich/The New
York Times
The “Parsifal” HD broadcast, with Katarina Dalayman and
Jonas Kaufmann, grossed $1.6 million in North America.
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Published: March 14, 2013 Comment
Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera,
now says that it was not the most fortunate choice of words when he recently
attributed a decline in attendance at the house to the “cannibalization” of the
audience by the company’s high-definition broadcasts.
Yet that comment
gained attention because it taps into some reservations that many opera buffs
and critics have had since Mr. Gelb began the Met’s pioneering venture of
bringing live performances to movie theaters with HD screening capacity.
In many ways the
project, which started in 2006, has been an indisputable success. The Feb. 16
broadcast of the Met’s wildly colorful new production of Verdi’s “Rigoletto,”
updated to Las Vegas
in the early 1960s, grossed $2.6 million in North American movie theaters
alone, with an estimated audience of 113,000 in more than 800 outlets,
according to the Met. An additional 125,000 saw the broadcast on 900 screens in
30 countries throughout Europe, the Middle East, Russia
and Latin America.
The recent broadcast
of Wagner’s “Parsifal” grossed $1.6 million in North
America. It is hard to imagine the broadcast of a 1914 Italian
rarity, Riccardo Zandonai’s “Francesca da Rimini,” on Saturday, doing that
well. But you never know.
Still, if opera fans
in the greater New York
area get used to the convenience and affordability of seeing performances in
their local movie houses, will they eventually stop coming to the Met? And will
live video performances, with close-up camerawork, vivid sound systems and
intermission interviews, become more appealing to some than seeing an opera
from a top balcony seat in a big house?
Mr. Gelb made his
“cannibalization” comment late last month when the Met announced a slight
reduction in ticket prices for the 2013-14 season as an inducement to
operagoers. In a recent phone interview Mr. Gelb said that in describing the
impact of the HD broadcasts on attendance at the house he had meant to
emphasize the positive.
Looked at in context,
he said, “we have quadrupled our paying audience.” The decline of ticket-buyers
at the house is just a couple of percentage points, he explained. The total
“paying audience” is slightly over three million, which includes up to 800,000
attendees at the Met each season.
Who is going to the
HD broadcasts, especially in the New
York area? The Met has done some surveying, Mr. Gelb
said. The results suggest that most attendees are already interested in opera.
Whether the HD venture will convert new audiences into operagoers is another
question.
For decades the Met’s
live Saturday matinee radio broadcasts were incalculably beneficial to the
growth of opera. Countless famous singers and conductors grew up listening to
those broadcasts. Especially in the days before opera on television or on video
became more common, there was something magical about those broadcasts. It was
almost like being there, even though you had to envision the sets, the
costumes, the action. You imagined what Birgit Nilsson as Turandot or Joan
Sutherland as Lucia looked like as you listened enthralled to their vocal
artistry.
That was certainly my
experience. Living in the New York
area, I was able to attend quite a few operas at the Met through my high school
years. But on Saturday afternoons, when I did not have a track meet at school
or was practicing the piano, I was tuned in to the Met. And it was not just
hearing the legends like Franco Corelli and Jon Vickers that excited me. There
were many surprises, singers of less renown who proved unexpectedly amazing.
Like the day in 1982 (by then I was teaching in Boston) when the soprano Ruth
Welting in Offenbach’s “Tales of Hoffmann” absolutely nailed the
mechanical-doll Olympia’s showpiece aria: here was a tour de force of brilliant,
effortless coloratura singing and comic delivery. The audience went crazy.
My point is that the
live radio broadcasts were (and for many people remain) the next best thing to
being at the Met.
But the HD broadcasts
are like an alternative opera experience, with sophisticated camerawork,
high-quality sound systems and the ambience that comes from being part of an
audience in a movie theater. The broadcasts are invaluable, of course, and the
sophistication of the directing is beyond what would seem possible to
accomplish live.
Somehow, though, the
HD broadcasts do not stoke your desire to see the production in person, as the
radio broadcasts did in the old days. Many critics and fans have felt, and I
often agree, that some of the Met’s recent productions come across better on HD
than in the house — Robert Lepage’s staging of Wagner’s “Ring,” for one.
Those young people
who see their first operas in HD broadcasts might easily conclude that they get
what opera is all about. It might be a hard sell to convince these newcomers
that no matter what they thought about seeing “Parsifal” in a movie theater,
opera is not opera unless you hear those amazing voices live in a house with
splendid natural acoustics, like the Met.
I remember as an
adolescent sitting in the stratosphere of the Met where the beautiful sound of
Leontyne Price’s pianissimo high notes as Aida would float up and surround me.
You cannot have such an experience in a cinema.
It makes sense that a
majority of those attending HD broadcasts are already hooked on opera. They
know how to enjoy the special qualities of the video broadcasts because they
know what the real thing is. And, as Mr. Gelb said in the phone interview, the
Met can rightly take pride that broadcasts have “extended the operagoing life
of older customers,” those people who have become too frail to make as many
trips to Lincoln Center as they used to.
Surveys have shown
that the decline in the Met’s audience has come from “outlying areas of New York,” Mr. Gelb
said, with people who used to visit the Met now simply finding it easier to
stop by the local movie house on Saturday.
The Met’s statistics
on the project are impressive. Consider this: In Austria and Germany alone, some 39,000 people
went to movie theaters to attend the HD broadcast of “Rigoletto.” But the
questions linger over the long-term effects of this success.
The HD broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera’s production of
“Francesca da Rimini” is on Saturday in movie theaters; metoperafamily.org.