Met's Tristan und Isolde Transmits Live

The staid old Metropolitan Opera has gone high-tech.

The Met will air a live HD transmission on March 22 of Wagner's romantic opera Tristan und Isolde via satellite to movie theaters worldwide. The opera will deploy live editing techniques to bring viewers into the onstage action. Conducted by music director James Levine, the Met will use multiple-frame effects so that global audiences will see as many as six frames on the screen at once. Thus they will see simultaneous close-ups, wide angles, and reaction shots—all cued to the music.

The transmission is Saturday, March 22 at 12:30pm/ET, 9:30am/PT. This presentation will be re-edited for later broadcast on public television.

Tristan und Isolde is the sixth of eight performances to be transmitted live from the Met in New York via satellite to more than 500 movie theaters around the world. Here's more info.

Comments

[UK viewer]

I really enjoyed this. I wish I had caught the name of the director in charge of the live edit who I believe was interviewed as part of the presentation.

[Christopher Stephens]

The singing, the production, the conducting and orchestra playing were great but the cinema presentation was appauling. With the constant gimmicks of split screens etc. the whole performance was wrecked. I wished I had stayed at home and listened on BBC Radio 3.

[Helle Helin]

I enjoyed the performance in a cinema in Copenhagen yesterday - very very much. Just a pity that the producer did not trust Wagner to be able to keep the public's interest - she had to pop photos up and down which especially was bad in the very quiet 3rd act.

Helle

[Mike]

The director ruined the opera, and I wouldn't have thought that was possible. Rather than directing, she threw up a bunch of boxes and asked the viewers to self-direct. That's what you're paid for, you silly woman. The effect drained all the emotional intensity from key scenes.

[Kenneth]

Recommendation to Ms. Sweet, Live relay director of Tristan und Isolde.

Get a job more suited to your undoubted talents. I suggest designing computer games for five year olds suffering from attention deficit.

[Charles Talleur]

The director spoiled this oprea for me. I got a headache from trying to follow all the boxes. The 3 boxes of the flame were particularly exciting. What a mess. Hey, just show the opera as the audience sees it. It's not an art film.

[Diana Souhami]

the point of screening the opera live should be to make the cinema experience as close as possible to being at the Met. The use of multiple cinematic frames created an insurmountable barrier between the viewer and the production.
It was a big conceptual failure. Hopefully it won't be repeated. If we go to Tristan and Isolde we know we're in for `a long song' as Deborah Voigt put it. We don't need to be distracted or patronised by visual gimmicks.

[Dave]

My reaction to the multiple boxes differs from those of other posts. The difference may be in that I sat in row 3. I was close enough to be able to focus on one box (of my choosing, of course) at a time. I was not distracted by the others.

A friend sitting in row 23 had quite the opposite reaction.

Though the sychronization, shot selection and mixing, and screen composition were far, far from perfect, they were generally OK by me, considering that this was a live, on the fly editing job, not a post-produced effort. A director more versed in the music would have done a better job with the takes and tableau, however.

[Ruth]

I agree that the framing was appallingly bad. At one point I started giggling because the singers looked like they were on Hollywood Squares - and that is NOT what you want to do during Wagner. It was distracting throughout. For parts I closed my eyes to avoid it (and then missed the subtitles). Really awful. The transmission director, whose name is Sweete, directed Hansel and Gretel in January and it was wonderful. I don't know what they were thinking.

[Clif]

I agree with most of the critics quoted above. The cubist fragmentation of the screen was not only distracting but downright offensive, a case of modern technology run amok. The staging (or filming) of an opera can be as tragic as the plot, and this was one of those occasions.