Televising Opera in Anglo-American Culture (1945-75)

FAIN: FEL-289525-23

Mary Danielle Ward-Griffin
Rice University (Houston, TX 77005-1827)

Research and writing leading to a book about British, American and Canadian broadcasters and televised opera in the second half of the twentieth century, and the reciprocal relationship between the performing arts and technology.

"Televising Opera" traces how British, American and Canadian broadcasters used television to respond to what they saw as a crisis in opera performance, production and composition in the second half of the twentieth century. Scholars have usually regarded the early years of opera on television as separate from the stage — and thus from opera scholarship writ large. Yet in this book project I show how experiments that took place on television changed the way operas were composed, performed, and experienced. Drawing upon media and stage archives, this book reconstructs how broadcasters intervened in operatic culture: it examines how television renewed realism as a stage aesthetic, maps out how broadcasters sought to stimulate new composition, and sketches out the early principles for co-production. Ultimately, this project offers not only a transnational history of opera on television, but also a new way of theorizing the reciprocal relationship between the performing arts and technology.