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Don’t Look Now: Opera, Liveness,and the Televisual

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In 2005, on the occasion of the “Opera Goes to the Movies” festival in Washington,

DC, Philip Kennicott, a writer for the Washington Post , assessed the state of opera onfilm in an article entitled “Opera and Film: Can This Union Be Saved?” Arguing

that the “relationship” between opera and film is “long-standing” but not entirely

“fruitful,” Kennicott echoed the dissatisfaction of many critics. “Where are the great

films of opera?” he asked. “Yet to be made. The form has never conquered what

might be called the tongue-and-teeth problem. While it makes perfect sense within

the opera house that everything is sung, when transferred onto film, the opera illu-

sion often breaks down. Suddenly one is wrenched from a world where it’s normal

for people to say hello and good night and I love you in song, into a world where

you notice huge gaping mouths, swelling diaphragms, quivering tongues and glis-tening teeth. . . . Rather than assist in the creation of theatrical intimacy, the camera

usually punctures the basic illusion essential to opera.”1

Kennicott argues that although musicals seemed to have escaped this predica-

ment, the “tongue-and-teeth problem” plagues opera on video as well. Indeed, his

diagnosis echoes earlier critiques of televised opera; in a 1989 essay entitled

“Death by Television,” for example, Henry Pleasants complained about producers

and directors, asking “What makes them think that the enjoyment of opera is

assisted by an examination of a prima donna’s molars or the mole on her cheek

or the agitation of her tongue and soft palate?”2

Though Kennicott’s primary subject is opera films, and Pleasants is discussing televised opera (both live

broadcasts and studio productions), their objections are remarkably similar. Both

authors display a kind of squeamishness about the uncanny proximity made pos-

sible by the camera, embodied in their preoccupation with an image they find

equally grotesque and disturbing: the close-up of a singer’s working mouth.

Instead of portraying filmed or televised opera as somehow lacking, or claim-

ing that it just isn’t the same as “being there,” these critics are disturbed by its

intrusive physicality and presence. Exposing the singer’s technique in all its cor-

poreality, which is akin to a revelation of the means of operatic production, rends

The Opera Quarterly Vol. 26, No. 1, pp. 81 –95; doi: 10.1093/oq/kbq014

Advance Access publication on May 15, 2010

# The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

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the veil of illusion that shrouds live performance. Common to these complaints

is the notion that opera and technologies of visual reproduction and dissemina-

tion are simply incompatibleopera is an inherently fantastical medium, where

disbelief must be radically suspended, while contemporary film and televisionmore often convey a realist (even hyperrealist) aesthetic.3 As Philip Auslander has

argued, television has become the realm of the live, while in the movie theater,

Dolby-enhanced sound is typically meant to lend gritty reality to the images

onscreen.4 Kennicott concludes that “the best guide to [making] film opera may

be to avoid realism at all costs.”5 Distance helps foster the suspension of disbelief

as well as the illusion of Romantic transcendence. Getting up close and personal,

in other words, is antithetical to the work of opera as fantasy. These critiques

confer a special status on live opera, cordoning it off from the commercial

pandering to short attention spans represented by cuts and close-ups. In doingso, they also celebrate the glamour and magic of admiring a singer from afar as

she fills a large hall with beautiful noise.

Now would seem the moment for the obligatory nod to Walter Benjamin and

to assert that modern critics are merely enacting a kind of negative proof of his

mechanical reproduction essay, which famously claimed that cinema, in bringing

the art object closer to the viewer, eliminates the mystique of the original and

effaces its aura.6 However, in this essay I would like to do something slightly dif-

ferent: namely, to reconsider the distinctions being made here between the live

and the mediated, between televisual immediacy and lively distance. For these cri-tiques rely on the assumption that opera as experienced live is somehow funda-

mentally different from opera translated into the medium of film or television.

This seemingly innocuous assumption (who could argue with such an apparent

truth?) is worth probing. While critics have been debating the merits of filmed

and televised opera, the boundaries between mediatized forms and the unsullied

“live” have become increasingly blurred. Whether through actual film footage pro-

jected on the backdrop, the presence of video screens, turntables, or radios on

stage, or more subtle techniques such as rotating stages to imitate tracking shots,

opera has been taking account ofeven bringing aboutits own mediatizationfor years. Simulcasts of opera in movie theaters and the recent operas filmed in

European capitals with a steadicam and broadcast in real time are perhaps the

most current manifestations.

Auslander has dubbed this phenomenon “liveness”: the persistent interpenetra-

tion of the live and the mediatized such that there remains no clear distinction

between the two. He presents a slew of evidence to support his claim that the live

event itself is a product of mediatizationfrom jumbo video screens at baseball

games (where fans can watch instant replays and close-up simulcasts) to theatrical

productions of television series and movies. “To put it bluntly,” he writes, “thegeneral response of live performance to the oppression and economic superiority

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of mediatized forms has been to become as much like them as possible.”7 One

moment in the history of operatic liveness will serve here as a kind of test case:

Harry Kupfer’s production of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice , first

conceived for the East German stage in 1987, filmed at Covent Garden in 1991, andsubsequently released on video by Kultur. It may seem strange to revisit a produc-

tion whose visual language has, by now, become something of a cliche. But

Kupfer’s production thematizes the very issues of presence, distance, intimacy, and

liveness that have preoccupied scholars of opera, performance, and media in

recent years.8 In particular, I want to explore the particular cultural freight that

Kupfer’s mediatized staging still carries today. What might his production tell us

about the way we have come to experience opera in the age of television?

Icon of performance

The myth of Orpheus is one of music’s origin stories, and as such, it is all about

efficacious performancein particular, the potential of musical performance to

conquer death and transcend loss. Orpheus’s wife Eurydice is struck down in her

youth, bitten by a venomous snake, and the mourning hero travels to the under-

world to win her back, convincing the gods with his songs that his sorrow is

sincere. They relent and agree to return Eurydice to life on one condition:

Orpheus must not turn to look at his beloved while they journey out of the under-

world. He is unable to resist gazing upon her, however, and she dies a secondtime. Orpheus gives himself over to despair and is ultimately murdered and dis-

membered, his head still singing as it floats down the river Hebrus.9

The plot of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice differs from the source myths in a few

crucial ways. Here, Euridice pleads with Orfeo to turn and acknowledge her, and

he is unable to resist her sorrow and scorn. Despite Orfeo’s illicit gaze, Gluck’s

opera ends happily: the hero’s final lament for the twice-lost Euridice convinces

the gods to relent, and they agree to release her from death and allow the two

lovers to unite. This lament, the famous “Che faro senza Euridice,” has some-

times puzzled listeners thanks to its major-mode refrain: Gluck himself admittedthat it would be easy for a performer to turn it into a kind of puppet dance,

stressing the importance of the performer in creating appropriate sentiment.10

Operatic treatments of the Orpheus myth are by nature self-referential, in that

convincing singing becomes the subject of the work. As such, they seem to lend

themselves to speculation about the nature of musical performance: Carolyn

Abbate, for example, has used the image of Orpheus’s severed head as a meta-

phor for performance, one that both acknowledges and questions the notion of

the performer as a mere vessel for sound that originates from elsewhere. She

writes, “The singing head represents the uncanny aspects of musical perform-ance, operatic performance in particular, precisely because one cannot say how it

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sings, who is in charge, who is the source of the utterance, and what is the

nature of the medium through which musical ideas become physically present as

sound.”11 Orpheus’s singing head is a kind of “master symbol” that “summarizes

the complications of the performance network: its instability, the deadnessimplicit in any object that has been animated by music, the living noise in the

channels that run between compositional thought and the structures inscribed in

a score, the creation of music by performers, and the sound that strikes the lis-

tener.”12 The severed head “represents singing that travels far from the body in

which it originated” and is a reminder of the “enduring quality of live sound,”

thus evoking echoes, repetition, and the mechanical.13

But Kupfer’s production of Orfeo adds another variable to the equation: how

do operagoers come to hear these echoes of the live? The Orpheus myth serves

as an excellent point of departure for considering the media of mechanical repro-ductionthe ways in which operas are captured and stored for repeated listening

and viewing (e.g., CDs, tapes, and DVDs), as well as the technological dissemina-

tion that allows live opera to enter homes and movie theaters as it comes into

being. This storythe mediation of operais one that needs to be told.

Euridice, lost and found

A cryptic note at the end of Abbate’s In Search of Opera suggests that Kupfer’s

staging of Gluck’s opera may have been the catalyst for her thoughts onOrpheusand no wonder.14 Abbate sees the Orpheus myth as pointing beyond

the notion of performance as always already scripted toward a notion of a “double

work,” co-created by performers and composers.15 Indeed, the multiple versions,

revisions, variants, and editions of Gluck’s operain Italian and in French; for

castrato, countertenor, or mezzo; with the refurbishments by Berlioz or in the

edition by Ricordiremind us that operatic texts are fluid and changeable, even

as we attempt to fix them in critical editions and “complete” recordings.

Although it is the first, Italian-language version (mounted in Vienna in 1762) that

serves as the basis for Kupfer’s production, the existence of multiple Orfeos callsinto question the very notion of a fixed or stable original. Kupfer’s production

plays up this tension between the fixed and the changeable, the already scripted

and the spontaneous.

The action is set in the present day: Orfeo (played by Jochen Kowalski) is a

leather-jacketed rock musician whose lover, Euridice (Gillian Webster), is killed in

an accident. Kupfer is known for his tendency to emphasize psychological narra-

tives and hidden motivations; this production, which had its premiere in East

Berlin two years before the wall fell, is no exception, and in many ways it is repre-

sentative of his status as a darling of the Regietheater crowd. Set designer HansSchavernoch, Kupfer’s collaborator throughout the 1980s, was likely responsible

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for the sparse landscape of the stage and the focus on revolving stage machinery,

which featured larger-than-life photographs and walls of mirrors. The stark,

radical look of Kupfer’s Orfeo made it both highly successful and controversial

and, as we might expect, the production drew a certain amount of criticism forits modern orientation.16 However, the choice to set the action in a kind of

abstract “present” has other, more interesting consequences. With its prominent

television set, portable tape player, and even scores, which the performers consult

at crucial moments in the drama, Kupfer’s production seems preoccupied with

technologies of inscription and recording (see figs. 1 and 2). Indeed, during

Orfeo’s attempt to escort Euridice back from the dead, the television set becomes

something more than a prop. Pushed onstage by a member of the chorus, the set

remains still, anticipating Euridice’s arrival, and it flickers to life only when she

is revived by the gods. Crucially, the music of the recitative (“Vieni, segui i mieipassi”) seems to emerge from the set, as if turning it on has activated the scene.

Amor ensures that Orfeo grasps the set, and then the god places his own hands

on either side of Orfeo’s head. Both Orfeo and Euridice writhe in pain, as if the

return to life (or perhaps the conversion to video) is a kind of torture.

Throughout the long journey out of Hades (which includes both a duet for the

Figure 1 Amor’s body double with the tape player from which singer-Amor’s voice

emerges.


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principals and Euridice’s aria “Che fiero momento”), Euridice pleads with her

husband to look at her and embrace her, while Orfeo carries the television, dis-

playing a live-feed image of Euridice, across the stage. He does not look at the

set; in fact, Kowalski’s every gesture is an embodiment of the injunction “Don’t

look now!” At best, television is perhaps an incomplete or unsatisfying replace-

ment for his lover, yet he also seems burdened with it, hauling it around, fraught

and troubled, pained by the presence of both the televised and the live Euridice

(figs. 3 and 4).It would be easy to read the televisionstarring as it does in a scene that

traces the borders between life and death, presence and absenceas a symbol of

loss, of Orfeo’s forced separation from his beloved.17 Those who are familiar with

the final scene of Kupfer’s Gotterdammerung (staged at Bayreuth the year after

Orfeo), which famously showed the destruction of Valhalla via television sets

watched by a well-heeled onstage audience sipping champagne, perhaps cannot

help but read this television as yet another symbol of callous distance from, and

disregard for, the suffering of others.18 To be sure, one could argue that here,

mediation is configured as a kind of death: Orfeo has no access to the “real”Euridice, he cannot look at her or touch her, and she remains trapped in the

Figure 2 Amor and Orfeo consult the score.

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netherworld of the not-here. Instead, he can only lug around her simulacrum.

The television could thus be construed as a barrier to joyful immediacy, a kind of

emblem of the insufferable distance that Orfeo must endure. At times, the ges-

tures of Kowalski and Webster explicitly acknowledge this distance, as they reach

for each other but never touch. Euridice is present yet absent, the way a televised

image is both there and not thereits source always removed in space and some-

times in time as well. The fact that Orfeo does not look at the image on the

screen perhaps only underscores the fact that the televised is a poor substitute, abarrier to the real.

However, there is another way of viewing the televised Euridice, one that

emerges when we compare the new burden Orfeo clutches with this production’s

other fetish objects. After Euridice’s death, Kowalski carries around several mate-

rial traces of the missing woman: a high-heeled shoe, her pocketbook, and a wig

of dark, teased hair that she wore at the opening of the opera. The rather overde-

termined symbolism clearly portrays Orfeo as a man unable to accept his lover’s

death.19 He retains those objects most closely associated with her, taking them

out of his jacket from time to time to hold them and sing to them. The classicFreudian account of the fetish, however, is less concerned with particular objects

Figure 3 Orfeo’s agony and the televisual Euridice.


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than it is with a kind of magical thinking, a double consciousness in which the

subject “knows very well” something disturbing is true or real, “but all the same”

pretends it is not so.20 Orfeo, of course, knows very well that Euridice is gone,

but by clinging to her material traces, the staging suggests, perhaps he is able to

imagine that she has not disappeared forever. But the contractual thinking that

characterizes fetishistic attachment also reminds us of the oath Orfeo makes to

the gods in order to win his lover back. Orfeo knows that Euridice is a living

woman when she is restored to him in the underworld, but he must act as if sheisn’t. In fact, he must effect a reversal of his previous fetishistic thinking: he

knows she has been brought back from the dead, but in order to retain her, he

must act as if she is still gone, at least until they exit the underworld. Orfeo,

unlike Freud’s classic fetishistic thinker, is aware of the doublenesshence his

pain. Read this way, it is Orfeo’s tragic inability to accept the televisual Euridice

as a temporary substitute for the real that causes her second death.

Orfeo, who agrees to act as if Euridice is not there, is perhaps the inversion of

the television viewer, who, although knowing the figures on the screen are not

“real,” is caught up in their story and reacts as if they are. Kupfer thus neatly transforms the contract dramatized in Gluck’s opera into a parable about the

Figure 4 The journey from the underworld.

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fantastical, fetishistic thinking of the modern television viewer. This small detail

opens up another interpretation of the television set onstage. Perhaps the televi-

sion is not entirely or merely a symbol of corruption and loss, a barrier to real

immediacy. On the contrary, this may be a moment where, as Auslander hasargued, the presence of mediating technology is itself what creates the impres-

sion of liveness. Even the use of the television in this scene is a kind of clever

imitation of split-screen or picture-in-picture effects: when the camera focuses on

Orfeo’s anguished reaction to Euridice’s pleas, we can see both her face and his,

despite their physical distance from each other. The onstage television also makes

reference to the viewers at home watching their own sets. In this sense, the televi-

sion, despite its status as an obvious symbol of loss, is perhaps the most strik-

ingly real, material object onstage: it places in the scene a piece of technology

that most viewers probably possess and devote significant attention to. Whereaselaborate backdrops, red curtains, and gilded woodwork may serve to distance the

spectator ( perhaps even pleasurably), the homely television set (and modern

dress) draws in even those watching the production at a distance of several

decades.

It seems fitting, then, that in order to watch Kupfer’s production, which my

library only had available on VHS, I had to resurrect a piece of antiquated technol-

ogy from my attic and haul it downstairs to my office, its cord trailing behind me.

The no-name all-in-one TV/VCR upon which I watched Kupfer’s Orfeo was ubiq-

uitous a few decades ago, and it created some uncanny nesting effects, as whenthrough the frame of my own small-sized, somewhat portable television I watched

Orfeo embrace his own television screen framing Euridice’s face. Moreover, the

fractious materiality of my little set made for some interesting echoes or amplifica-

tions of the drama unfolding on screen. I’ve long since lost the remote for this

machine, so I was forced to sit quite close to it in order to control the volume or to

rewindat times it felt as if the set were in my lap, a burden only slightly less

onerous than Orfeo’s. I also had to touch the set much more than normal, feeling

the cranky “plick” of the cheap buttons and praying that it would actually decide to

operate without eating the tape. Whenever I pressed rewind or play, perhaps six times out of ten there was an ominous pause, followed by the sound of mechani-

cal vomiting as the tape was ejected. I would pull out the videocassette only to find

that the fragile ribbon of tape was still caught within the guts of the machine. I

had to work my fingers inside the player to delicately disengage the ribbon and

then carefully rotate the cassette wheels to draw the wrinkled tape back into its

case. After several viewing sessions and several interludes like this, the tape, not

surprisingly, was slightly the worse for wear. This meant that, at certain moments,

the image would flicker and catch, and narrow horizontal bands would travel up

the screen for several seconds, then disappear. When Euridice died and Orfeo’stelevision flickered and expired in concert, the trauma and intensity of the


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moment was only amplified by my real fear that soon my machine would do the

same, destroying the tape once and for all (fig. 5).

I don’t mean to be flippant here. On the contrary, Rick Altman’s work on

cinema as event has taught us the importance of taking account of the physical

experience of spectatorship.21 Moreover, Kupfer’s meditation on the nature of tele-

visual presence suggests that technologies of reproduction are the very means we

use to access the real. Perhaps it’s not quite as simple to draw distinctions as

we’d like it to belive versus recorded, real versus fictional, here and now orgone forever. As Auslander and others have argued, the cultural dominance of tel-

evision means that it can no longer properly be understood as simply an element

in our visual environment: it is an environment.22 And since television has

defined itself as a live medium, it has become the realm of the livethe place

where the live happens. In an interview published in 1988, Kupfer acknowledged

that he believed the televisual Euridice brought the scene’s trauma somehow

“closer” [naher ] to the spectator: “For me, Orpheus with the television in his hand

is today closer and more comprehensible than if he had the living actress in his

hand.”23 Kupfer seems to gesture toward the intense immediacy of the televisualenvironment by radically eliminating it at Orfeo’s end. The gods have relented

Figure 5 Euridice’s second death, televised.

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and restored Euridice to her husband, but Kupfer’s staging works against

this happy ending by splitting Orfeo in two: one Orfeo ( played by a body

double) commits suicide in a phone booth after “Che faro,” while the other

Kowalskicontinues to sing, but out of character.24 Kowalski briefly steps off-

stage, reemerging in tuxedo jacket and tie. He is joined by Euridice and Jeremy

Budd, the boy soprano who sings the part of Amor, who steps onstage for the

first time to replace his double. Euridice is tellingly dressed in the same black

robe she wore in the underworld. Her wig is in place now as well, no longerfetish but appropriate attire. The three sit in plain chairs onstage, standing to

sing their parts in turn, faces expressionless (fig. 6).

The choir trumpets the triumph of love, but it seems a curiously hollow

victory. We remember that we have seen one Orfeo (the body double) kill

himself, and, though the chorus sings of the gods’ decision to bring Euridice

back to life, the lovers seem to be united in death. This death is not any recogniz-

able Elysium but rather a cold, imageless placethe realm of slavish fidelity to

the work. The three singers in concert attire sit stiffly in a row and sing their

parts from scores. The drama, it seems, is over, though the music continues. Theperformers have become automatons, puppets animated solely by the score,

Figure 6 The triumph of love as recital.


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merely reenacting, repeating, reiterating what has already been written; their

detachment makes the happy ending ring false. It is tempting to read the very

intensity of the singers’ commitment to performing from the score as yet another

moment (like Orfeo’s earlier attempts to appease the Furies by singing by the

book) that exists only because it is necessary to represent Gluck’s opera faithfully

for the audience. Throughout the final scene the television set now lies cold and

still on the edge of the stage. Such an ending suggests that perhaps the most

problematic technology of reproduction is the work concept itself. No surprisethat the chorus sings of love’s tyranny, of the painful bondage that is preferable to

freedom, and the enslavement to which we willingly submit.

One visual detail of this final scene is particularly compelling. Kupfer has

called for the rotating panels at the back of the stage to roll around, revealing mir-

rored facets that reflect the opera audience back to itself (fig. 7).25 Fantasy, illu-

sion, and distance have been abolished. The space of the stage has collapsed, and

the work is presented as a recital for the delectation of the spectators, implicating

them (and us) in this different kind of death. It seems that the distance

affordedor representedby Orfeo’s television (Fernsehen in German) wasactually necessary to create the illusion of immediacy. It was what allowed us to

Figure 7 The production’s final gesture: mirrors collapse the stage space.

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see far beyond the mere realization of the workit actually opened a space

between the two characters, a space that could be filled with Orfeo’s grief and

Euridice’s longing.

The collapse of distance between Orfeo and Euridice brings to mind apassage of Jean Paul: “Ah, how much we love one another in the distance,

whether it be the distance of space, the distance of the future or the past, or,

more than all, that double distance beyond the earth!”26 Jean Paul’s meditation

on the distances of time, space, and death brings us full circle, back to the

Romantic distance I argued that critics of opera film were so keen to maintain.

Kupfer’s production encourages us to rethink simple distinctions between media-

tion and immediacyhere the up-close presence made possible by televisual

technology is steeped in poignant and productive distance (because the real

object is absent, unattainable), while live, unmediated presence is stripped of fantasy, closing the distance so necessary for operatic illusion. In Kupfer’s retell-

ing, the Orphic myth is yet again a story about the origins of opera, and it relies

on the televisual to make sense. Watching televisually, we have the sense that

things are happening for the very first time. Faced with the unsettling spectacle

of mediated opera, we, like Orpheus, have been urged “Don’t look now.” But

everyone knows that “Don’t look now” is not a prohibition but an invitation: to

look intently and look closely, because something important is happening. Like

Orpheus, we can’t help turning our heads.

n o t e s

Melina Esse is an assistant professor of musicology at Eastman School of Music. Herresearch interests include opera and melodrama,film sound, performance theory, and genderstudies. She has published in the CambridgeOpera Journal, Nineteenth-Century Music , andCurrent Musicology.

This essay is based upon a paper presented at

the Syracuse International Film Festival Forum onMusic and Sound in Film in October 2009. Iwould like to thank Theo Cateforis and StephenMeyer, organizers of the symposium, as well asAlessandra Campana, Sam Dwinell, David Levin,David Rosen, Mary Ann Smart, and HollyWatkins, for their assistance.

1. Philip Kennicott, “Opera and Film: Can ThisUnion Be Saved?” Washington Post, January 9,2005, http://www.washingtonpost.com /wp-dyn/articles/A56556-2005Jan7.html (accessed January15, 2010).

2. Henry Pleasants, Opera in Crisis (New York:Thames and Hudson, 1989), 45. Pleasants alsocites a 1988 letter from Robert Donnington to the

Musical Times: “Jessye Norman was giving atechnically and musically magnificentperformance . . . and half the time she was beingbrought so close, with her vocal apparatus all toovisibly at work and her mouth (naturally) open,that she might almost as well have been doing acommercial for toothpaste.”

3. Jennifer Barnes associates this “hyperrealist”

turnin particular, the taste for reality showswith the decline of operas written expressly fortelevision. See her Television Opera: The Fall of Opera Commissioned for Television (Woodbridge,Suffolk, UK: Boydell Press, 2003), 99– 100.

4. Philip Auslander, Liveness (London:Routledge, 1999), 12 –16.

5. Kennicott, “Opera and Film.”6. See the discussion of Benjamin and

proximity in Auslander, Liveness, 34 – 35. WalterBenjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” can be found inBenjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn(New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 217–51.

7. Auslander, Liveness. 7 .


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8. The literature on this topic is growing andincludes scholars with widely varying agendas, as across-section of recent publications demonstrates.See Carolyn Abbate, “Wagner, Cinema, and

Redemptive Glee,” Opera Quarterly 21, no. 4(2005): 597–611; Michelle Duncan, “The OperaticScandal of the Singing Body: Voice, Presence,Performativity,” Cambridge Opera Journal 16, no. 3(2004): 283–306; David Levin, Unsettling Opera:Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007);Stephen C. Meyer, “Parsifal’s Aura,” 19th-CenturyMusic 33, no. 2 (2009): 151 –72; Fred Moten, “ThePhonographic Mise-en-scene,” Cambridge OperaJournal 16, no. 3 (2004): 269–81; AnthonyJ. Sheppard, “Review of the Metropolitan Opera’sNew HD Movie Theater Broadcasts,” AmericanMusic 25, no. 3 (2007): 383–87; Mary Ann Smart,“Defrosting Instructions: A Response,” CambridgeOpera Journal 16, no. 3 (2004): 311–18; AlexandraWilson, “Killing Time: ContemporaryRepresentations of Opera in British Culture,”Cambridge Opera Journal 19, no. 3 (2007): 249–70.

9. For a discussion of the different versions of the Orpheus myth and their incarnation in opera,see F. W. Sternfield, The Birth of Opera (Oxford andNew York: Clarendon Press [Oxford UniversityPress], 1993), 1 –30. See Marcel Detienne’s TheWriting of Orpheus: Greek Myth in Cultural Context,

trans. Janet Lloyd (Baltimore, MD: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 2003) for an in-depth examinationof how stories of Orpheus both shaped and wereshaped by the culture of ancient Greece.

10. See Patricia Howard, C .W. von Gluck, Orfeo(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981),37–38.

11. Carolyn Abbate, In Search of Opera (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 5.

12. Ibid.13. Ibid.14. Ibid., 249.15. Ibid., 18.

16. Critics complained that Gluck’s music wasmade superfluous by the staging (or that the operawas no longer Gluck’s but an entirely differentwork), and one claimed that the production was “arepulsive example of artistic error.” See AnnySchlemm, “Harry Kupfer im Meinungsstreit: AmBeispiel seiner Inszenierung von ‘Orpheus undEurydike,’” in Harry Kupfer : Musiktheater , ed.Hans-Jochen Genzel and Eberhardt Schmidt(Berlin: Parthas, 1997), 138.

17. Compare Kupfer’s use of television with, forexample, the stage productions discussed in Greg

Giesekam, Staging the Screen: The Use of Film and Video in Theatre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,2007).

18. See John Rockwell, “Review/Opera: The Final2 Parts of Bayreuth’s Ring ,” New York Times, August5, 1988, http://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/05/arts/review-opera-the-final-2-parts-of-bayreuth-s-ring.

html?pagewanted=all (accessed January 15, 2010).19. Linda and Michael Hutcheon have described

this portrayal of Orfeo as particularly modern in itsmedicalization of grief. See their Opera: The Art of Dying (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,2004), 112.

20. See Laura Mulvey, “Some Thoughts onTheories of Fetishism in the Context of Contemporary Culture,” October 65 (1993): 3–20.

21. Rick Altman, “Cinema as Event,” in Sound Theory/Sound Practice (London: Routledge, 1992),1–14.

22. Auslander, Liveness, 2.23. See Michael Lewin and Harry Kupfer, Harry

Kupfer (Vienna: Europaverlag, 1988), 42. Thiscomment emerges from Kupfer’s description of his effort to portray “the meeting of a living manwith a shadow, whom he wants to bring to life.”Kupfer states that he wanted to suggest that theconflict between Orfeo and Euridice might be takingplace inside Orfeo. The television, inspired by theradio in Jean Cocteau’s film Orphee, assists in thisinteriorization, Kupfer maintains, because it can be“presse[d] . . . to one’s body”: “Orpheus can haveher directly in the middle of his body, one can

provide an image of that which is really found inhim.”

24. One of the most talked-about aspects of theproduction (after the modern setting) was Kupfer’ssplitting of Orfeo into “man” and “artist”: whileOrfeo the man gives in to his despair, Orfeo theartist transforms his pain into art. See EberhardtSchmidt, “‘Mein Kunst ist mein Leben’: DerRegisseur Harry Kupfer,” in Genzel and Schmidt,Harry Kupfer : Musiktheater , 21. To me, thistransformation feels anything but triumphant.Before the appearance of the suicidal double,Kowalski sings as “artist” (in tuxedo jacket or with a

score) a number of times, and it is as if he turns tothe score to find direction (or to placate theFuries)there is always a predetermined quality tothese moments, thanks to Kowalski’s deliberatelywooden gestures.

25. Michael Lewin has discussed a different kindof mirroring in the final scene of Kupfer’sGotterdammerung , staged soon after Orfeo ed Euridice; there an eerily lit cityscape became, inLewin’s words, a “hall of mirrors,” reflectingcontemporary concerns about urban apocalypse.See Lewin, Der Ring: Bayreuth 1988–1992

(Hamburg: Europaische Verlagsanstalt, 1991),107–8 (photographs on pp. 305–12). Clemens Risihas written about the use of techniques (including

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similar “mirroring” final tableaux) that make theaudience part of the spectacle in his “SheddingLight on the Audience: Hans Neuenfels and PeterKonwitschny Stage Verdi (and Verdians),” Cambri-

dge Opera Journal 14, nos. 1–2 (2002): 201–10.

26. Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Flower, Fruit and Thorn Pieces; or, the Married Life, Death, and Wedding of the Advocate of the Poor, Firmian StanislausSiebenkas, trans. Edward Henry Noel (Boston: James

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