Opera on Screen, and the Question the Met Keeps Answering

Seventy-five years ago this season, Gian Carlo Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors was written for television and watched by an audience the Guardian puts at five million. The paper's culture desk marks the anniversary this week with a piece asking whether opera on screen can ever work, and it reaches back to that broadcast as the moment the question became unavoidable.

The Guardian's argument is not that the screen has failed opera but that it has rarely been used as Menotti used it — as a medium with its own grammar rather than a camera pointed at a stage. The piece credits Kombat Opera's satire with showing most clearly how that might be done, and treats the cinema relay as the weaker case.

For Italian houses the anniversary lands on familiar ground. The relay of a staged production into cinemas abroad has been one of the steadiest ways Italian opera has travelled for two decades, and it is the form the Guardian's writer regards with most scepticism.

The distinction the Guardian draws is between transmission and commission. Amahl was not a staging filmed for a wider public; it was conceived for the box in the corner, with a score and a libretto shaped by the running time and the intimacy of the medium. The paper notes that composers have harnessed television and cinema since that broadcast, which is to say the ambition has existed for three-quarters of a century without producing a settled repertoire of screen operas.

That is the useful provocation for the Cultura desk. Italy's operatic economy now depends heavily on the relay: a production at La Scala or the Rome opera reaches audiences in dozens of countries through cinema screenings, and the foreign press that covers Italian music regularly reports these relays as the principal channel through which non-specialist audiences encounter the repertoire. The Guardian's piece does not dispute the reach; it questions whether reach and form are the same thing.

The essay's own answer leans on satire. Kombat Opera, in the Guardian's account, works because it treats the screen as a place where opera's conventions can be turned inside out rather than preserved. That is a different proposition from filming a Traviata faithfully, and it suggests the anniversary is less about technology than about writing.

What the piece does not do is measure the cinema audience against the television one. It gives the five million figure for 1951 and leaves the contemporary numbers where the Guardian found them, which is a fair reflection of how thin the public data on relay attendance remains outside the houses themselves.

For an Italian reader the anniversary is also a reminder of how the traffic runs. Menotti, born near Milan, wrote his Christmas opera for an American network; the form he helped invent now carries Italian productions outward. The Guardian's question — whether the screen can ever work for opera — is, from this side of the Alps, really a question about whether the export can become a genre again.

The paper's closing note is modest: the argument is not settled, and the anniversary is offered as an occasion to reopen it rather than to celebrate a solved problem. That seems right. Seventy-five years of relays and commissions have produced one acknowledged classic and a great deal of transmission, and the Guardian is content to say so.