Opera on Screen.(Review)

Opera on Screen. By Marcia J. Citron. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. [x, 295 p. ISBN 0-300-08158-8. $35.]

Here and there in this survey of opera movies, you come across the sort of vital insight that made Marcia J. Citron's Gender and the Musical Canon such a groundbreaking book. This author is not a feeble seeker of the masculine and feminine in music, interpreted in vague and stereotyped ways, like many contributors to gender studies. She is aware of postmodern ideas, temporality, deconstruction, and popular culture.

For example, she brilliantly compares Desdemona's lack (in Franco Zeffirelli's film of Verdi's Otello) with the concealed lack of reality in the medium of film itself (pp. 104-5). Zeffirelli omits the one number that attributes a background, an origin, and in particular a mother to Desdemona--the "Willow Song." In doing so, he makes her resemble the sham of reality in film, apparently so real and yet so profoundly disinherited.

This is Citron at her virtuosic best. Otherwise, it is a surprise to find her giving attention to this rather marginal genre after her scaling of the intellectual and political heights in her previous book. As she freely admits, the opera movie is largely a phenomenon of the seventies and eighties; economic restraints in more recent times have made opera films too risky as ventures. In any case, the big screen is steadily yielding place to television and videotape, more recently to the Internet and CDROM.

It seems likely that this clever writer has chosen the topic simply because she enjoys movies. The bulk of this book consists of comparative reviews of six productions: the Zeffirelli Otello compared with the television production of a Royal Opera version directed by Brian Large; the early Tales of Hoffmann film, made in 1951 by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, compared with Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's Parsifal (1982); and finally Francesco Rosi's Bizet's Carmen (1983) and Joseph Losey's Don Giovanni (1979). These are famous works that most movie-opera buffs will have seen (though I confess I missed Parsifal). We should not cavil, perhaps, at the choice of Otello rather than Zeffirelli's much more successful La traviata, or the relegation of Large's extraordinary Tosca project, filmed in various parts of Rome within a single day, to the introduction, for Citron has much to say about her chosen movies.

Too much, one might almost think. This book has no program or argument; it shines many different lights on its subject--political, technical, cultural, and gendered--often contradicting itself (as though it originated as a collection of essays or conference papers, as most books do nowadays). The author enjoys Hoffmann because of its exuberant interventionism, its use of dancers, puppets, and animation, with unseen singers to whose voices the performers lip-synch--though in some cases the lips do not move, and Offenbach's lines are heard as dismembered voices. Everything is permeated with a sense of theater, of performance, the spaces always seeming like portrayals rather than locations, and the touch is light, even humorous. It looks arch and dated today; nevertheless, Citron finds it "an ideal interpretation of the opera" (p. 114).

When the two versions of Otello are compared, she cold-shoulders Zeffirelli's interventionism. The director rearranges Verdi's score, omitting some passages and adding others. The effect is to make much more of a "film" of this work; at times (such as the end of Iago's "Credo," which Citron mentions, where the music suddenly cuts to an instrumental passage) it seems as though the operatic score is merely non-diegetic incidental music. This Otello was strongly visual, strongly filmically situated (there was no trace of the theater ...