Voice that Fills the House: Opera Fills the Screen, The

"My intention," Thomas Edison predicted in 1893 in the New York Times, "is to have such a happy combination of photography and electricity that a man can sit in his own parlor, see depicted upon a curtain the forms of the players in opera upon a distant stage and hear the voices of the singers." Even if Edison never fully realized his own predictions-his attempts at synchronized-sound opera and musical films ended after a disastrous studio fire in 1914-subsequent events have borne him out. Most of us, declares Richard Fawkes in Opera on Film, have first experienced opera not in the opera house, but on our television and video screens at home. And as Ken Wlaschin writes in his invaluable compendium, Opera on Screen: A Guide to 100 Years of Films and Videos, "We are the heirs of Edison's dream, the first generation to have access in our homes to a century of screen opera" (vi).

Among all the theatrical events rendered in and on film, the opera film is one of the most challenging and problematic. It presents a challenge in the commingling of the disparate elements of theatrical artifice, vocal music, and cinematic realism that is perhaps unique in the history of film adaptation. But then, as Mario Cavaradossi sings in Puccini's Tosca, "Art, in its mystery, blends different beauties." As a theory, it is perhaps workable; but as a practicality, it yields some occasionally dubious results. ...

In the era of the silent film, for example, beginning as early as 1897, the lack of synchronized-sound technology did not daunt filmmakers like the Lumiere brothers, Georges Melies, and D. W. Griffith from releasing hundreds of brief adaptations of grand operas-some of them only a few minutes in length. Charles Gounod's Faust, particularly, provides a suitable case history. It has been adapted to the screen (for better or worse) more than any other opera. In 1897 the Lumieres produced two short scenes from the opera-Mephistopheles's supernatural apparition and Faust's transformation from wizened old scholar to stalwart youth. In 1904 Melies's Faust et Marguerite stomped the opera into a twenty-minute adaptation in twenty short tableaux. Melies, who portrayed Mephistopheles, thoughtfully distributed a compilation score along with the silent film (the first such compilation made available in this fashion), since the pianist down front could hardly be expected to be conversant with grand opera. A more scenic, "cinematic" Faust was released by Film d'Art in 1910, employing exterior location shooting and extra scenes deriving from Goethe rather than from Gounod. Inevitably, Hollywood followed suit and found plenty of appropriately melodramatic potentials for mainstream entertainment in the opera. Elements of the opera formed the musical backdrop for Lon Chaney 's legendary The Phantom of the Opera (1926) and for the MGM classic epic, San Francisco (1935), when Jeanette MacDonald indulged herself in the Trio of the finale. Whether the music or MacDonald brought the town to its knees is a matter of open debate.

Meanwhile, it is not generally known that there were many attempts during the so-called silent era to produce opera films accompanied with cylinders and discs of recorded sound. Performers had to lip-synch their roles to prerecorded music (rather in the way it is done today); and the sound cylinders and/or discs were later synchronized to the projection systems in the theatres. Baritone Victor Maurel, the creator of the title role of Falstaff, appeared and sang excerpts from the role in the Phono-Cinema Theatre at the Paris Exposition in 1900. Three years later a British company produced about fifty sound films, including excerpts from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. As part of a series of so-called "Phonoscenes," Alice Guy Blache produced her version of the aforementioned Faust. In 1906 a French company called Chronophone released excerpts from Leo Delibes's Lakme and Verdi's Il Trovatore. Other processes at the time included euphonious names like Synchroscope, Vivaphone, and Cinephonograph, and Edison's short-lived experiment, Kinetophone. It was an unwieldy, generally imperfect procedure; and when Enrico Caruso performed in the Sextette from Lucia di Lammermoor in the Edison studio, a commentator for the Scientific American complained of its inferior sound quality and poor synchronization.

Ironically, no such process was utilized for two of the most esteemed singers of the day, Geraldine Farrar and Enrico Caruso. Farrar's first of many films was Cecil B. DeMille's rough-and-ready adaptation of Carmen in 1915. The role was nonoperatic and the film was silent, although musical adaptations from Bizet's opera were performed and sung by a pit orchestra and three singers. It is reported that Farrar was so influenced by her screen acting experience that the next time she sang Carmen at the Met, in 1916, she scuffled and fought her costar, Enrico Caruso, in a most "realistic" manner. Caruso, in the meantime, appeared in several films in which his voice was not heard. In My Cousin (1918), an Artcraft release, he played two roles-as a great opera singer and as his poor cousin. A second film, The Great Romance, released the same year, featured him as an aristocrat named Prince Cosimo. The films failed at the box office, and Fawkes reports that the critic for Photoplay Journal dismissed them: "If you cannot hear his marvelous tenor voice you cannot possibly enjoy it much. . . . You cannot help but wish the star would step through the silver sheet and offer just one tiny song."