The Staying Inside Guide: High Notes in Documentary

Behind-the-scenes views of the opera world for those experiencing theater withdrawal. 

ByHeidi Waleson

April 18, 2020 7:00 am ET

With live performance in theaters ruled out for the foreseeable future, opera houses around the world are working to maintain their relationships with their audiences and donors through performances and other programming offered online. Those relationships are essential to their post-pandemic survival: The great fear is that people who have done without live performance for weeks or months decide they can do without it forever. Nonprofit arts groups depend on both the ticket-buying public and the donors who believe in the public value of their missions; hence, the need to remain relevant and visible even in extraordinary circumstances.

“The Royal Opera House,” the six-part BBC documentary series first broadcast 1996, available on YouTube, demonstrates just how complicated and expensive it is to run an opera house even in normal times. The filmmakers had extraordinary access during nine months of the 1993-94 season, and their fly-on-the-wall perspective captures the perpetual existential tensions between art and commerce, and between accessibility and elitism.

Each segment has its own backstage drama. Some are artistic: A disagreement between director and conductor leads to the conductor quitting just days before a new production’s premiere. Others are managerial: The marketing director fires the box-office and shop managers; the new personnel director negotiates a contentious schedule change with the stage crew’s union. Budget-cutting is an overarching theme. As the ROH general director, Jeremy Isaacs, insisted to the Arts Council during a fraught meeting over funding, “you can’t provide art on the basis of the least cost option. The least cost option is no art.” With 25-year hindsight, one understands that the ROH was on the brink of a new age. Angling for public lottery money that would allow it to modernize and expand its facilities, it had to demonstrate that it was not simply a plaything of the rich. 

The ROH had some rocky years after 1993-94, but it did accomplish its facility expansion and, like its peers, worked successfully to change its image and demonstrate its public value. It is currently streaming operas and ballets on demand free from its website, with each new one beginning on Fridays at 2 p.m. EDT. Now running are Mozart’s “Così fan tutte” (to May 10) and Handel’s “Acis and Galatea” (to May 3); April 24 brings Britten’s “Gloriana.”

Another backstage documentary,“The Paris Opera” (2017), on Prime Video and DVD, looks at that theater’s 2015-16 season. Less revealing than its British predecessor, it is nonetheless packed with diverting storylines, like the arduous process of casting a live bull for Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron.” 

The Metropolitan Opera has produced several excellent behind-the-scenes documentaries by filmmaker Susan Froemke; all are available on Met Opera on Demand. “The Audition”(2009) is an engaging look at the Met’s National Council Auditions program. Twenty-two young semifinalists—chosen from 1,800 applicants through regional auditions—arrive at the Met. Eleven are chosen to perform in the 2007 Grand Finals concert on the Met stage, a career-making opportunity. Over the next week, as these gifted young artists work with Met staff to prepare their arias, the film chronicles their single-minded focus and drive. During the first rehearsal with the Met Orchestra, you can see them sizing up the competition. Three tenors are featured, including Alek Shrader, who made a last-minute decision to sing Donizetti’s “Ah! mes amis,” with its nine high Cs. His triumphant performance is a high point, as is Angela Meade’s voluptuous “Casta diva.” 

Hindsight is fun here: The winners (except for Ryan Smith, who died in 2008) have gone on to significant careers. For some of the contestants’ recent activity, check out mezzo Jamie Barton, bass-baritone Ryan McKinny and pianist Kathleen Kelly in “Das Rheingold: Coronadämmerung” on YouTube: Fricka and Wotan, in separate quarantines, sing their first scene in “Das Rheingold,” which features toothpaste, a sleep mask, cold pizza, and online emoji messages from Freia and Froh.

At the other end of the age spectrum is “Tosca’s Kiss,” a haunting 1984 film by Daniel Schmid that was restored and re-released in 2014 (on Prime Video). In the Casa di Riposo in Milan, founded by Giuseppe Verdi as a home for retired musicians, 65 residents, most in their 80s and 90s, evoke a vanished age with their memorabilia and recollections of performances long past and collaborators long dead. And there is still singing: An elderly woman with a terrible wig, a brilliant smile, and a pocketbook hanging from one elbow stops in a hallway and out comes “Vissi d’arte” from “Tosca,” astonishingly warm and lovely. “I lived for art” takes on new meaning in this context. 

Also in the historical realm is Tom Volf’s “Maria by Callas: In Her Own Words” (2018), on Prime Video, made up entirely of television interviews, footage of performances, home movies, and readings of the soprano’s eloquent letters and journals. Those not familiar with the Callas story may be puzzled, but the film has plenty of her magnetic singing and recalls a lost time when an opera star would walk off an airplane to bouquets and news cameras, and young fans slept overnight on the street to buy tickets to her performances. Especially touching are Callas’s letters about her lover, Aristotle Onassis (there are home movies of them on yachts in the Mediterranean), who abandoned her to marry Jacqueline Kennedy.

The excavation of the Callas story goes on: Terrence McNally’s recent death prompted memories of his 1995 play “Master Class,” in which Zoe Caldwell and Tyne Daly, among others, have brought the diva to life. And Marina Abramović’s opera “7 Deaths of Maria Callas, ” its April 11 world premiere at the Bavarian State Opera now postponed indefinitely, demonstrates that her mystique is evergreen.

—Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal.