The Big Screen and Verdi's Stage

Abstract

This paper grows out of my attempt to come to terms with a certain frustration over traditional notions of the 'cinematic' in opera criticism and staging: the predictable emphasis on striking imagery and the vogue for modern adaptations and blunt, graphic realism at the expense of choreography, sound, and lighting effects. Rather than focusing on translations from one medium to another - 'Verdi on Screen' - I will address the re-mediation operated by the cinema - 'The Big Screen and Verdi's Stage' - for just as photography has altered our relationship to painting, the cinema has irreversibly changed the way we look at and listen to the theatre, and with it opera. As it were besieged from the outside of its venerable temples, opera sounds and looks differently than before, the differential factor increasing in direct proportion to one's exposure to other media. Cinema, understood as a narrative form as well as a medium, has played a significant role in this ongoing process. But while films have inevitably reshaped our understanding of opera as spectators, has their example also functioned, and will it continue to function, as a reservoir of ideas that will help sustain opera staging as a truly contemporary practice? And if so, can one redefine the 'cinematic' in opera as a quality encompassing more than naturalistic acting, visually enhanced transitions, contemporary settings, or the use of screened images themselves? If cinema is to be to treated by stage directors and set designers as more than a repository of visual tricks and striking sets, I wish to argue, editing techniques - including sound editing and mixing - must be taken into account, and suitable operatic translations found. Verdi's operas provide an ideal - and, one hopes, influential - testing ground for just such an approach to staging. In the interest of time, I will limit my analysis to three examples: the beginning of Act III of La forza del destino, the Amelia-Simone duet in Act I of Simon Boccanegra, and the final scene of Un baIIo in maschera.