Few of those attending one of the synchronous Live in HD broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera's fabled stage to cinemas around the world can have failed to notice that publicity for the series emphasizes the cinematic nature of the experience they afford. This is opera, but on the big screen; opera, but in larger-than-life surround sound. Yet, as Christopher Morris points out in his excellent new book, Screening the Operatic Stage, almost every element of a Live in HD ‘cinecast’ – this is Morris's preferred term for the format (p. 116) – can be traced back not to the cinema, but rather to television. The technology underpinning the cinecasts, the synchronous transmission of electromagnetic signals, derives from live television; the multi-camera array that captures the action from multiple angles and switches seamlessly between shots mid-transmission developed from television and its mission to capture reality as it unfolds. For all that the Met tries to obfuscate this medial ancestry, which brings opera together with lowbrow chat shows and populist sporting fixtures, it cannot but come to the fore in the fundamental grammar of the cinecasts, from their stilted presenters and live interviews with singers to the constrained, conventional camera language they employ. Signal-based transmission may have been replaced by digital streaming, television as a distinct medium may be in decline, but these trends only strengthen Morris's overall argument: that a persistent ‘televisual’ aesthetic has continued to structure multi-camera capture of live events and continues, therefore, to condition the production and reception of opera on video. Given that opera's valence as screen medium was first theorized primarily from a cinematic standpoint – prominently in the work of Marcia Citron, among others – and that the opera–cinema encounter remains a popular object of scrutiny today, this amounts to a significant disciplinary reorientation, as Morris is keenly aware.Footnote ¹ ‘Precisely because it is no longer confined to television’, he writes persuasively, ‘the televisual … demands the attention of opera studies’ (p. 117).

Far-reaching and insightful observations of this kind run throughout Screening the Operatic Stage, whose thoroughgoing analysis of the phenomenon of opera on video over the last half-century, more or less, will become required reading for all those interested in opera's mediation and remediation. For this is, at heart, the principal subject of Morris's study. What does it mean to capture the messy, inherently multi-medial form that is opera in an inherently audiovisual medium such as video? What relationship does opera video, whether relayed live from theatres or in the form of archived footage accessed on (say) DVD, bear to the experience of opera in the opera house? Morris's answers to these questions draw broadly on theoretical and historical writing in film, television, and media studies, not least Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's Remediation.Footnote ² According to Bolter and Grusin, new media simultaneously foreground the novelty of their intervention into the existing media landscape and seek to efface their own mediation: a ‘dual logic of remediation’ whereby ‘each medium promises to reform its predecessors by offering a more immediate or authentic experience, [yet] the promise of reform inevitably leads us to become aware of the new medium as medium’.Footnote ³ The application of this idea to screen opera, in Morris's hands, is highly rewarding. Live opera videos, in the rhetoric surrounding them and in their very construction, emphasize the faithfulness of their mediation of operatic productions and, in a broader sense, of operatic works; yet in so doing, they draw attention to their mediating influence, highlighting their vulnerability to accusations of having ‘betrayed’ the theatrical experience and laying bare the anxiety that opera on video might always, on some level, be a failure on its own terms.Footnote ⁴

The book is cast in seven chapters, not including the rich and erudite introduction or the brief conclusion. More salient than the chapter divisions, however, are the three ‘Parts’ that Morris uses to structure his text. Each Part, comprising a variable number of chapters, illuminates a distinct facet of the book's overall argument: thus Part 1, consisting of two lengthy and generously illustrated chapters, explores what Morris calls ‘awkward encounters between a critical, radical theater and the conventional, congealed practices of multi-camera production’ (p. 54). Chapter 1, ‘Screening the Stage/Staging the Screen’, focuses on productions in the continental Regietheater tradition (e.g., Frank Castorf's Ring for Bayreuth in 2016) that incorporate video directly or otherwise borrow visual effects and affects from screen media. Chapter 2, ‘Split Loyalties’, examines productions such as Katie Mitchell's staging of Crimp and Benjamin's Written on Skin (Aix-en-Provence, 2012), which feature split stages, grids, and compartments that recall the screen banks used in CCTV surveillance and the split screens deployed in live TV coverage. In Morris's critical view, video directors in hock to ‘the “documentary impulse of live multicamera production” are fundamentally constrained in their approach to such productions by their ‘hesitancy to challenge spatial coherence’ (p. 67), a reluctance to deploy the affordances of the host medium (i.e., video) that ultimately serves the disruptive intent of the original stagings poorly.

Part 2, comprising four shorter but overtly interlinked chapters, is a brilliant deconstruction of the televisual economy animating the Met's Live in HD cinecasts, to which Chapter 3, ‘What Time Is It in New York?’, functions as an introduction of a kind. Here Morris places the rhetoric of liveness, simultaneity, and synchronicity over long distances – quintessentially televisual values that have always attended what James Steichen has termed the ‘institutional dramaturgy’ of the Met's series – in a longer historical perspective.Footnote ⁵ The core of the argument, however, lies in the following three chapters, whose braided investigation of the ‘various states and intensities of presence implied and signalled by the cinecasts’ (p. 21) is indicated by variations-on-a-theme titles. Briefly stated, Chapter 4, ‘You Are Here’, examines how the cinecasts construct a sense of being at the Met, of participating in the ‘eventness’ of the performance; Chapter 5, ‘You Are More Than Here’, unpacks the cinecasts’ idealized, illusory audiovisual perspective on the staged performance that lies beyond what any real spectator could experience; while Chapter 6, ‘You Are Not Here’, shows how the local experience of the cinecast spectator stubbornly reasserts itself over the Met's claim to shared participation in a single event. ‘Video remediation’, Morris observes perceptively, ‘tells two stories: one about the event (a live performance), the other an adaptation of a dramatic narrative delivered on the stage’ (p. 118). Analysing the tension between these two stories is what enables Morris's cool dissection of the Met's promotional rhetoric and his skilful elucidation of a unique ‘house style’ of Live in HD video productions.

Finally, Part 3 – comprising only Chapter 7, ‘Hosts and Ghosts’ – examines opera's embrace of ‘site-specific’ productions whose disruptive relocation of canonic works outside the opera house is designed with video remediation in mind. Focusing primarily on Andrea Andermann's Rigoletto in Mantua (2010), a lavish recreation of Verdi's opera in its ‘real’ Mantuan settings, and Anja Horst's La bohème im Hochhaus, a socially conscious transposition of Puccini's drama to a high-rise tower block in Bern, Morris draws out the contradiction between the hyperrealist visual dimension of such productions and their wholly conventional sonic one. Sound in these ‘sight-specific’ operas remains ‘just another recording … in the late twentieth-century stereo tradition’ (p. 178), providing the illusion of listening within the resonant space of the opera house.

Morris's attention to sound and image capture as discrete sites of mediation within the overall presentation of opera on video is a particular strength of Screening the Operatic Stage, one that proceeds naturally from his decision to prioritize a televisual context for his enquiry rather than a cinematic one. As he declares early on, ‘video, unlike film, is a properly audiovisual medium rooted in the electromagnetic media of radio and telephony, not in photochemical process’ (p. 16, italics in source). There is, accordingly, an admirable technical precision in evidence throughout the book: it really matters to Morris that the 16:9 aspect ratio deployed in most opera DVDs ‘is native to television’ and more precisely ‘wide-screen television … in the early postmillennial period’ (p. 63), or that in Live in HD cinecasts ‘the video signal is the resolution of HD telecasts (1080i or 720p), the multichannel audio is the same 5.1 configuration that home audio systems and soundbars can process’ (p. 92). Such attention to detail likewise characterizes Morris's trenchant analysis of, for instance, the characteristic camera vocabulary deployed by Live in HD videographers, not least what he calls the Met's ‘signature shot’ (p. 133): a sideways moving mid-shot from below enabled by a special camera track installed at the lip of the Met's stage. Camera movement for the sake of movement, a particular bugbear of critics and audiences, is contrasted productively with the practice of the Met's sound technicians, whose audio mixing for Live in HD cinecasts – itself a mediating intervention, all but ignored by those same critics and audiences – keeps the action close and centred, making only limited use of stereo positioning effects.

Morris's obvious investment in doing right by the technical dimension of his subject is all the more striking given his openly stated ambivalence as to its artistic merits. In fact, it is unusual to come across an author so willing to express disappointment in his cultural materials and historical actors. ‘My abiding sense of remediated opera’, writes Morris regretfully, ‘is of opportunities missed, of turns not taken’ (p. 55). On the production side, for instance, Morris deconstructs the self-reported motivations of prolific opera videographers, such as Live in HD stalwarts Brian Large and Gary Halvorson, whose practice is characterized in Morris's estimation by ‘modesty of ambition supported by a rhetoric of deference and fidelity’ (p. 11). But he is equally uncompromising with the consumers of screen opera: critics who speak in ‘canards’ about ‘letting the music speak for itself’ (p. 60) when they complain about multimedia-enriched productions of canonic works, or audiences seemingly allergic to cuts and other inevitable traces of mediation. Morris politely but firmly dismisses the ‘fantasy underlying the persistent call for videos to feature only a static shot of the complete stage: the fantasy, that is, that the immobilized body of the theatrical spectator would find a proxy in the immobilized single camera’ (p. 64). One gets the strong sense that screen opera is trapped by history: by the televisual legacy Morris so skilfully draws out, which engenders an unwillingness to even acknowledge the processes of mediation at work, and by the historical prestige of the operatic canon, a millstone around the necks of practitioners that breeds timidity and banality in equal measure.

It is precisely in the way the book handles the historical dimensions of its subject that my few reservations lie. Scholarly interest in television within opera studies has been spearheaded by writers including Emanuele Senici and Danielle Ward-Griffin, whose work on the encounter between opera and television in the earliest decades of the latter is of a rigorously historical bent.Footnote ⁶ In contrast, Morris states plainly in his introduction that his intention is to provide neither ‘a history of televised opera’ (p. 13) nor ‘an ethnography of spectatorship’ (p. 14). This is a little misleading, because even in the more recent context that is the focus of Morris's study, these are surely not the only ways a historian or anthropologist might engage with the topic; there are questions about, say, the (waning) influence of the operatic canon and the work concept in contemporary society, something Morris broaches in passing in his conclusion (pp. 190–1), which are clearly relevant to the topic at hand and which are fundamentally historical in nature. The gesture is nonetheless telling. One striking feature of Morris's narrative, in fact, is its situation in a sort of extended present, an expansive ‘now’ in which television broadcasts from the 1990s can be discussed in the same breath as opera DVDs from the 2000s and alongside streaming video of the 2010s – as though these media and formats and platforms mutually implicate one another in chains of influence that stretch both backwards and forwards in time. It is not that Morris is insensible to the significant changes in the media landscape over the last several decades, such as the rise of digital media that has seen much discussion in film studies, in particular, with regard to the ontology of cinema in a post-photographic age: after all, such changes are central to his claim that ‘the televisual’ has outlived ‘television’.Footnote ⁷ He is, rather, not excessively concerned by linearity, or in the specific value that something like ‘the opera DVD’ might have held as a new medium in the year 2000 versus a near-obsolete one in the year 2020.

Regardless, this conceptual orientation is generally very effective, making the book's occasional forays into an explicitly historical mode all the more curious. In Chapter 3, for example, Morris takes pains to stress the affinities between Live in HD cinecasts today and the live broadcasts from the Met to cinemas that took place in the 1950s under the auspices of an experimental initiative called ‘Theater Network Television’ (TNT). The transhistorical echoes are undoubtedly ticklish. But how relevant is this historical precedent in reality, given that TNT is almost wholly forgotten today, and that it played no direct role in conditioning the form Live in HD later assumed? If anything, the TNT example provides a powerful demonstration of remediation in action, highlighting how quickly failed media experiments are effaced from public memory and how swiftly extraordinary technological advances become transparent. More broadly, one wonders whether Morris's nuanced readings of how individual productions fare in remediated form might not be more sensitive to the historical and cultural positioning of its consumers than he allows. Would a hypothetical Gen Alpha opera fan today, who has likely seen more opera on YouTube than in the theatre, whose parents possibly own a smart TV if they own one at all, and who has probably never owned a single DVD, be as liable to perceive the aesthetic compromises of the average opera video as readily as Morris or his readership?

These reservations do not, in the end, detract from Morris's significant achievement in the book overall, which remains a timely, perceptive, and highly readable study of opera in the contemporary media landscape. The chapters on the Met Live in HD alone constitute a major intervention in the not inconsiderable literature on this topic, and will remain a touchstone for students and scholars for many years to come. Meanwhile, by asserting the importance of the televisual for our understanding of mediated opera writ large, Morris has opened up a range of new avenues for the future study of opera on stage and on screen – something that will no doubt prove invaluable if, as Morris himself none too optimistically suggests, opera producers and audiences finally embrace the aesthetic potential of video remediation to re-illuminate and re-invigorate the constituent works of an aging operatic canon. In short, Screening the Operatic Stage deserves to find a wide audience within music studies and beyond.