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. 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. The broadcasts are invaluable, of course, and the sophistication of the directing is beyond what would seem possible to accomplish live. My point is that the live radio broadcasts were (and for many people remain) the next best thing to being at the Met.īut 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. 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. There were many surprises, singers of less renown who proved unexpectedly amazing. And it was not just hearing the legends like Franco Corelli and Jon Vickers that excited me. 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. Living in the New York area, I was able to attend quite a few operas at the Met through my high school years. It is hard to imagine the broadcast of a 1914 Italian rarity, Riccardo Zandonai’s “Francesca da Rimini,” on Saturday, doing that well. The recent broadcast of Wagner’s “Parsifal” grossed $1.6 million in North America. An additional 125,000 saw the broadcast on 900 screens in 30 countries throughout Europe, the Middle East, Russia and Latin America. 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. In many ways the project, which started in 2006, has been an indisputable success. Gelb began the Met’s pioneering venture of bringing live performances to movie theaters with HD screening capacity.
Yet that comment gained attention because it taps into some reservations that many opera buffs and critics have had since Mr. 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.
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