![]() (Hunched in front of their giant consoles with all the knobs and widgets, they reminded me of the air traffic controllers in the NY TRACON, or sailors in control rooms.) Then the opera began in earnest. The broadcast switched over to some introductions with our host set backstage among the technical crew like the sound engineers. ![]() It was quickly clear that this was no cut-rate broadcast with one or two fixed perspectives zoomed back to cover the whole stage being aired at low resolution and jittery streaming, but one with a full complement of cameras & crew and dynamic movie-style directing yielding a rock-solid high-res video stream. ![]() The live audience was far younger than my remote audience, and I suspect most of them were tourists, benefiting from a tourist-friendly 1PM–5PM Saturday scheduling to see big city opera. The broadcast began sometime before I showed up as a live feed of the audience in the Met Opera House, switching between multiple angles and parts of the audience modern opera-going audiences appear to not dress up much, and selfies were much in evidence. I was not the youngest person there, but I was not far off. (Expensive, but it is not your ordinary movie, and much longer as well: 3h40m nominally.) I was surprised how large the audience was: I counted at least 120 people in the auditorium. So when I saw them on the Fathom Events website, I resolved to not let it slip this time, and fortunately for me, the first opera was Carmen, which I knew to be one of the most popular & exciting operas, and an excellent first choice, and scheduled a reminder to go.ĭay of, I showed up, and behind a crowd of elderly people, bought my $22 ticket. Once in a while I might think about finding a filmed version, but watching one on a TV or computer screen seems unfaithful enough to the original & sufficiently diminished/unrepresentative to hardly be worthwhile. (I was not bothered by the need for subtitles, as I have always needed & preferred them.) The broadcasts were a better approach, but I still needed to figure out when exactly any of them aired, how one gets tickets for them, which ones I might want to see, and so on, and unsurprisingly, I never did wind up going & soon enough forgot entirely about the Met broadcasts. But actually going into NYC to the Met would be an all-day trip on the train, quite expensive, and requiring planning. Even if I did not like them, I still ought to see at least one to know what they are like. Opera, while more of a topic for parody these days than anything else (even among urban elites), is nevertheless one of the major Western art forms and a major influence (or at least, assumed common knowledge) on so many important Westerners like Friedrich Nietzsche, and I’d always felt the lack of seeing one. I did and realized it was actually something I had intended to look more into almost a decade ago, way back in 2008, when I noticed that the local university theater had live opera broadcasts. While watching They Shall Not Grow Old in December 2018, I noticed it was done through a “Fathom Events” rather than the usual movie distributors, and made a note to look that up afterwards. I attended a live broadcast in my local movie theater of the NYC Metropolitan Opera’s performance of Carmen on in the Metropolitan Opera House (the titular role played by Clémentine Margaine with malignant splendor), which was part of their long-running “Metropolitan Opera Live in HD” broadcast series, one of a number of special screenings distributed through Fathom Events. Watching Carmen made me a believer in the Met HD broadcasts, and I resolved to watch more. The opera was interestingly “red pill”-like in depicting Carmen as demanding ever more sacrifices and ultimately abandoning her lover, leading to the final murder-suicide. I understand now the description of opera as a totalizing Gesamtkunstwerk: it combines all the art forms in an extremely technically-demanding combination, brutally punishing any imprecision, for hours on end, overriding the lack of realism to produce an exaggerated effect overpowering the viewer’s emotions, rendering it the most prestigious art of its era. ![]() The opera itself is wonderful: it makes a great impression to sing and play orchestral music the entire time through, and the character motivations are painfully realistic and believable. How does a Met HD live opera broadcast work? Extremely well! They are lavishly produced, with multiple cameras and live directing, subtitling, and bonus features like seeing backstage.
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