Opera's Screen Metamorphosis: The Survival of a Genre or a Matter of Translation?

Abstract

Might the screen provide opera with a kind of new skin—allowing it to survive, in our age of mechanical and digital reproduction? That is the underlying question of the ensuing discussion. In the first section, I will briefly unfold this question as a prelude to a more sustained development of my major hypothesis, which is that the concept of translation, as developed by Walter Benjamin, might shed light on the operatic-cinematic metamorphosis. Even though this hypothesis applies first and foremost to opera films (that is to say, to filmed versions of an entire opera), I believe that its full examination, not the least because Benjamin likens the task of translation to the exercise of criticism, is not without consequences for a more general discussion about the fate of opera as a genre. In the third and final section of the article I'll try to account for why I think so, in a way that nonetheless does not downplay the encounter of opera and film as a subsidiary question to that of opera's survival.

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