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Director Yuval Sharon has repurposed Wagner’s ‘Götterdämmerung’ in an inventive, Covid-appropriate Michigan Theatre Opera production staged in a parking garage for an audience confined to their cars.

By Heidi Waleson

Oct. 19, 2020 4:50 pm ET

• Detroit

Leave it to director Yuval Sharon to come up with a thought-provoking, original way to do live opera for a live audience at a time when singing and gathering in large groups would normally be a recipe for Covid contagion. Back in 2015, Mr. Sharon, founder of The Industry, created “Hopscotch,” which was performed in 24 cars driving around Los Angeles; the last live opera I saw pre-pandemic was his outdoor “Sweet Land,” a fierce commentary on colonialism and erasure. Now artistic director of Michigan Opera Theatre, he has repurposed Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung” as a fable for our times.

Slimmed down to 65 minutes, sung in an English translation by Mr. Sharon, and performed in MOT’s parking garage for audience members in cars, “Twilight: Gods” manages to successfully evoke its host city, accentuate the opera’s message about cleansing a corrupt world, and offer a “Götterdämmerung” highlight reel featuring spectacular singers. Having soprano Christine Goerke (Brünnhilde) or bass Morris Robinson (Hagen) singing right outside your car window is an unusual privilege, to say the least.

The experience begins in the outdoor flat parking lot beside the Detroit Opera House, where a brief filmed prologue establishes the scene with poetry composed and spoken by Marsha Music, a Detroit writer and storyteller, who plays Erda, the opera’s fount of wisdom. Eight cars at a time are then guided into and through the multilevel parking structure next door. They stop for the staged scenes, most with live singers and instrumentalists. Car windows remain closed throughout; all sound is relayed via car radio, with each scene tuned to a different frequency.

Ms. Music’s text forms the connective tissue. Lively and colloquial, with diction that speaks to the moment (“gaslit gibberish,” “a grim, apocalyptic time,” and even “Come on baby, light that fire”), it distills Wagner’s complicated plot of greed, lust for power, betrayal and, finally, knowledge. Eliminating the human Gibichungs, it zeroes in on the gods, the Nibelungs, and their respective offspring. It’s still a lot to digest; “Ring” novices might find themselves confused.

The musical performances supply their own spin. On the first garage level, Catherine Martin, as Waltraute, recounts the problems in Valhalla accompanied by a sinewy solo cello, her despair naked without the usual big cushiony orchestra. The instrumentations of Edward Windels’s ingenious arrangements are apt. Bass clarinet, accordion and electric bass guitar make doubly sinister the murderous admonition of Alberich (Donnie Ray Albert) to his sleeping son Hagen (Mr. Robinson). Harp, marimba and vibraphone give the Rhinemaidens’ warning to Siegfried a suitably watery texture. (Vocal ensembles are tricky in this unconventional setup, and the handsome singing by Avery Boettcher, Olivia Johnson and Kaswanna Kanyinda felt a bit rhythmically stiff.) It was moving and novel to hear a lyric tenor, Sean Panikkar, give the hapless Siegfried’s death real pathos, since there was no need to bellow.

The breakout moment was Siegfried’s “Funeral March.” A hearse pulled into view, and the cars followed, lining up between rows of candles on the floor. The recorded Wagner music, arranged and performed by Lewis Pesacov, gradually took on a Motown beat and became a rollicking celebration, with the black-clad guides operating dancing colored lights. A more joyous vibe than what one experiences at that moment in the opera house, it set up the idea that death is not the end, but the beginning. Ms. Goerke’s ecstatic “Immolation Scene” on the open top deck, accompanied by the biggest band yet, carried that theme to its logical conclusion when she leaped into a Ford Mustang, the 10 millionth built, aka her horse, Grane, and drove off triumphantly. Audio of crackling fire represented the world-cleansing funeral pyre.

The production had numerous levels beyond the ones in the parking garage. Five of the eight singers, and Ms. Music, are people of color, appropriate for Detroit, a majority Black city; that the murdered Siegfried was one of them was surely not coincidence. The audience members, safely cocooned in cars, heard the pleas of singers and players outside in the symbolically virus-laden air, mediated through the occasionally staticky car radio. Alberich and Hagen’s dark corner seemed to harbor poisonous germs; on the roof, the scene of redemption, the fresh air seemed to blow them away. It wasn’t heavy-handed. The costumes, some of which came from Lyric Opera of Chicago’s “Ring,” did not shackle the show to any particular period, and the scenic, lighting and projection design by Jason H. Thompson and Kaitlyn Pietras also suggested rather than dictated. Things were kept simple but pithy: a bolt of blue cloth unrolled for the river; two burned-out cars on the roof.

Like “Hopscotch,” “Twilight: Gods” is a logistical feat. Twelve or 14 rotations of eight cars cycle through each of the four performances; scenes are played simultaneously. The company has also just added free digital screenings on Oct. 20 and 21 for a socially distanced audience inside the opera house. A co-production with Lyric Opera of Chicago, the show will be done there in April with a different text, written by the interdisciplinary artist Avery R. Young, reflecting not only a different city but, perhaps, a new time. Its ingenuity and mutability make “Twilight: Gods” an encouraging harbinger of opera’s future and our own.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

This GPS-enabled work of public art uses an app to create a unique sonic experience on your next stroll. 

By Heidi Waleson

Sept. 29, 2020 3:38 pm ET

New York 

After six months without live performance, plus the geographical claustrophobia imposed by barriers to travel, “Ellen Reid Soundwalk” offers both solace and liberation. Ms. Reid, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and sound designer, has mapped the 843 acres of Central Park with music, creating a GPS-enabled work of public art. It’s easy to use: You install the app, designed by Echoes.xzy, on your phone; download the walk; connect your headphones; and wander—the app then uses your location to trigger sound. 

The beauty of the piece is its nonprescriptiveness. There’s no right way to do it, no set path. Each experience is unique, depending on where you enter the park, the route you travel, whether you stop and rest or just keep going. You can spend 10 minutes or 10 hours exploring; the possibilities seem infinite.

One Saturday afternoon, I spent 90 minutes in the northern end of the park. During a slow saunter over the Great Hill in the park’s northwest corner, a soothing drone soon acquired an overlay of quick string figures; in the Conservatory Garden, bells, marimba, a flute ostinato and a choral vocalise seemed just right for the late afternoon autumnal light glinting through green and yellow leaves above the Burnett Fountain. There was even a poem, followed by a harp and flute interlude, as I left through the garden’s south gate; horns in a descending glissando emerged as I skirted the baseball fields.

A few days later, I wandered around the south end of the park. This time, I occasionally stopped and waited to hear some complete sections—a few minutes of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” symphony (along with Duke Ellington’s “Come Sunday,” the only music not by Ms. Reid) playing just opposite his statue near the netting-shrouded Bandshell at the end of the Mall; a nine-minute choral sequence slowly unfolding in Strawberry Fields. 

Remarkably, there’s just over an hour of music. It is programmed into 25 macro cells that blanket the park. Each macro cell has several overlapping micro cells within it, creating a layering effect; connective material between cells creates seamless transitions between locations. Ms. Reid explained in a phone interview last week that she used the same themes for certain kinds of locations, such as water or open fields, but in different keys and instrumentations, so that areas are related, but not sonic copies of each other. Musicians from the New York Philharmonic, the lead commissioner of the project, recorded individual tracks in their homes, as did members of the Soundwalk Ensemble (the harmonized choral vocalises were created with the voice of one singer, Eliza Bagg); the quartet Poole and the Gang recorded the jazz tracks that are scattered through the park. 

Ms. Reid had been thinking about “Soundwalk” as a future project, but the abrupt halt of live performance in March gave her idea new meaning and urgency. With the commission from the New York Philharmonic and four other arts centers, she embarked on a five-month process of writing the music, mapping it and walking endlessly to test it, first in her Brooklyn neighborhood and then in the park.

“Soundwalk” can be a treasure hunt. I went looking for “When the World as You’ve Known It Doesn’t Exist,” which Ms. Reid wrote for Project 19, the Philharmonic’s women-only commissioning initiative; it had its premiere on Feb. 20. I found a snippet of the archival recording on the terrace overlooking Bethesda Fountain and the Lake, where its tense, anxious harmonies and spiraling, descending woodwinds played in ominous counterpoint to the formal, manicured landscape. (It is one of three archive performances embedded in “Soundwalk,” along with the “Pastoral” symphony and Ms. Reid’s “So Much on My Soul,” performed by the Young People’s Chorus of New York City.) “So Much on My Soul,” discovered in a crowded playground, also felt like a commentary: The lyrics, written by chorus members, gave an unsettled, personal dimension to the children’s seemingly untroubled games. 

“Soundwalk” also encourages serendipity. Venturing into the wooded Ramble, I found a joyous explosion of birdsong expressed in voices, woodwinds, harp and string ostinatos. A walk through the narrow ravine beside a stream toward the North Woods was accompanied by a pounding drum solo that suddenly opened up, along with the landscape, into a smooth jazz tune. And on a cloudy afternoon, overlooking the Reservoir, the water theme felt impossibly rich and grand, its open chords and brass choir slowly rising above the placid water, with the New York skyline seeming to mirror its ascent. “Soundwalk” gives beloved, familiar places a new dimension and a welcome chance to travel freely within them. 

Residents of Saratoga Springs, N.Y., can experience their own version of “Soundwalk” at the Saratoga Spa State Park, in the Vale of Springs/Karista Path area, until Nov. 1. Next spring, it will arrive at the Mann Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia, Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts in Vienna, Va., and the Britt Music and Arts Festival in Jacksonville, Ore. Why stop there?

—Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

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Appeared in the September 30, 2020, print edition as ‘Scoring Central Park.’

American opera companies, including Houston Grand Opera, have begun to create original content for virtual viewing.

By Heidi Waleson

Sept. 22, 2020 2:47 pm ET

Live performance with audiences remains difficult for opera companies as long as Covid-19 infection rates remain too high to permit large indoor gatherings. In response, several American companies have embraced comprehensive digital solutions. Their challenge will be to create original content that is designed for the medium, not simply standard performance forms shoehorned into a different distribution channel.

Some tantalizing projects have been announced. Boston Lyric Opera’s operabox.tv will offer a commissioned eight-part episodic series, “Desert In,” developed by composer Ellen Reid (of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “p r i s m”) and director James Darrah. Planned for release in the spring, it will be built using a television-style writers’ room approach, with multiple librettists and composers. The Opera Philadelphia Channel plans cinematic productions of David T. Little’s “Soldier Songs,” starring baritone Johnathan McCullough, and Hans Werner Henze’s “El Cimarrón,” starring bass-baritone Sir Willard White, for later in the season. Coming up on Sept. 24, 25 and 26 is Opera Omaha’s “Miranda: A Virtual Steampunk Opera,” a VR opera experience with music by the ever-inventive Kamala Sankaram. Gamers owning sophisticated VR gear will have a viewing advantage; others will have to make do with YouTube. Several companies will be dropping opera music videos: LA Opera plans, among others, an animated adaptation of a suite from Du Yun’s one-act opera “Zolle” and an exploration of the death of Carmen by writer-director Lila Palmer and composer Tamar-kali. 

On Sept. 18, Houston Grand Opera launched HGO Digital, a partnership with Marquee TV, an on-demand streaming platform for arts and culture. Most of Marquee’s other content comes from European arts organizations. It is subscription based, but the HGO content will be free, and the programs, their creation underwritten by a $1 million gift, will be released twice a month. These include recitals and several original opera films, such as David T. Little’s delightfully eccentric “Vinkensport, or The Finch Opera” (Oct. 23) and a double bill of Mozart’s “The Impressario” and Lee Hoiby’s Julia Child opera, “Bon Appetit!” (Nov. 27).

HGO Digital’s debut program, a 40-minute recital by Tamara Wilson, part of the Live From the Cullen series, made for a disappointing start, however. Ms. Wilson’s powerful soprano is easy on the ears—creamy, voluptuous and seamlessly produced throughout her range. I first heard her in 2012 at HGO as a luminous Elisabeth in the five-act French version of Verdi’s “Don Carlos”; in spring 2019 she delivered an eloquent Desdemona in “Otello” at Canadian Opera Company. She was supposed to sing her first Isolde at the Santa Fe Opera this summer. But Ms. Wilson seemed stiff and uncomfortable in the more exposed and intimate recital format, especially without an audience to provide feedback. An odd background of purple light and some stagey makeup did her no favors either. 

She began with Purcell’s “Music for a while,” lightening her timbre appropriately, and then leaped from the 17th century into the 20th with “Sleep is supposed to be,” “The world feels dusty,” and “I felt a funeral in my brain” from Aaron Copland’s “Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson.” All three got overly assertive, relentless readings, magnified by some clangorous piano playing from Patrick Summers, HGO’s artistic and music director. André Previn’s Dickinson song “As Imperceptibly as Grief” got a more buoyant reading. Four Amy Beach pieces supplied some novelty: They were prettily tuneful, especially the moody “Night.” After an overwrought performance of the final Beach song, “Dark Is the Night,” Ms. Wilson’s voice bloomed more comfortably in Strauss’s “Morgen,” in a bit of welcome sunlight. More Strauss would have been preferable to the subsequent Rossini group, “La promessa,” “L’invito” and “La danza.” Ms. Wilson delivered their smooth, bel canto lines but not their playfulness, though she tried, and Mr. Summers did his best to push her along. She gave the concluding “We’ll Meet Again,” by Ross Parker and Hughie Charles, a low-voice, cabaret croon but couldn’t communicate enough sincerity in that evergreen anthem of hope and resilience to break through the screen and the artifice of the production. 

In Marina Abramović’s multilayered work for the Bavarian State Opera, the performance artist inserts herself into the stories of operatic icons; in a streamed recital as part of a series from the Met, the singer offered expressive renditions of Monteverdi, Mahler and more.

By Heidi Waleson

Sept. 15, 2020 5:05 pm ET

The premiere of Marina Abramović’s “The 7 Deaths of Maria Callas,” which opened the Bavarian State Opera’s season this month, was live-streamed on Sept. 5 and is available free of charge until Oct. 7. Though in development for several years, it seems made for this pandemic moment—it runs an intermission-free 90 minutes, and only one person sings onstage at a time. Rather than an opera, it’s an appropriation and an appreciation of the form. The Serbian-born performance artist inserts herself into the stories of some operatic icons—the soprano Maria Callas and seven famous heroines—and fashions a multilayered meditation on dying for love. Opera fans steeped in the tragedies of Violetta, Cio-Cio-San and their ilk, as well as the doomed Callas-Aristotle Onassis romance, will get the references as Ms. Abramović represents all of these women but chiefly herself.

In the diverting first hour, Ms. Abramović, as Callas, lies motionless in a bed at stage right, presumably dreaming her stage deaths as she awaits her own. (Marko Nikodijević composed the spacey interstitial music.) One by one, seven sopranos enter and sing famous Callas arias, starting with “Addio del passato” (“La Traviata”) and concluding with “Casta diva” (“Norma”). Each is introduced by a voiceover, spoken in English by Ms. Abramović, giving emotional context, and accompanied by a film, directed by Nabil Elderkin and starring Ms. Abramović and the actor Willem Dafoe as the lover who causes her death. 

The arias are eloquently sung, but the giant film images seize our focus and, together with the introductory narrations, make the deaths explicit. In the “Traviata” sequence, Ms. Abramović expires in bed; the other six grow progressively more violent and grotesque. In “Ave Maria” (“Otello”), she is strangled by a giant snake; in “Un bel di” (“Madama Butterfly”), she rips off her hazmat suit in a poisoned landscape and breathes in the air; for “Il dolce suono,” from the mad scene in “Lucia di Lammermoor,” she slashes herself with broken glass. Puzzlingly, in “Casta diva,” it is Mr. Dafoe who wears the signature Callas makeup (skinny eyebrows, red lipstick) and a gold lamé gown; he and Ms. Abramović, in a tuxedo, stagger into a fire, their facial expressions simultaneously agonized and ecstatic. (The narration cites bubbling and blackening skin and singed lungs.) Dying for love, it seems, is actually a lot more painful than the exquisite music of Verdi and Bellini suggests. 

The concluding half hour, lacking the arias and films, is tamer and duller. The bed is now part of a set, depicting the Paris bedroom where Callas died in 1977; Ms. Abramović’s voiceover narration and Mr. Nikodijević’s music take Ms. Abramović/Callas from semi-consciousness (“Breathe”) to a wander around the room, a glance through a pile of photographs, a smashed vase, and finally out a door. The sopranos reappear—their identical, demure outfits now explained as maids’ uniforms (the costumes are by Riccardo Tisci)—to tidy up and drape the room in crepe. One drops a stylus onto a turntable; the room disappears behind a scrim; and Ms. Abramović reappears downstage, in gold lamé, gesticulating along to Callas’s voice singing “Casta diva.” The line between homage and usurpation is a fine one; no doubt some Callas devotees will assume the latter and be offended. 

Hera Hyesang Park emphasized Violetta’s fragilty in “Addio del passato” and vulnerability; Selene Zanetti made Tosca’s pleading in “Vissi d’arte” a poignant contrast to the oddly serene film of Ms. Abramović falling in slow motion from a tall building. Leah Hawkins exuded resignation in the “Ave Maria” (“Desdemona knew. She was ready”). Kiandra Howarth was a powerful Cio-Cio-San in “Un bel di”; Nadezhda Karyazina, a seductive Carmen in the “Habanera.” Adela Zaharia brought sparkling coloratura to Lucia, and Lauren Fagan was a solid Norma. Conductor Yoel Gamzou ably welded the arias and Mr. Nikodijević’s music into a coherent whole. 

***

Joyce DiDonato’s performance, live-streamed on Saturday and available on demand through Sept. 25 for $20, was the most imaginative and personal of the Met Stars Live in Concert series so far. It was staged in the Jarhunderthalle, a soaring Art Nouveau industrial building in Bochum, Germany. Ms. DiDonato, barefoot and dressed in a silky black trouser ensemble, sang from a raised circular platform, artfully surrounded by spherical clay sculptures by the Mexican artist Bosco Sodi; lighting diffused through the cavernous space changed color along with the program’s mood. Her sensitive collaborators, the period-instrument chamber ensemble Il Pomo d’Oro for the Baroque repertoire and pianist Carrie-Ann Matheson for the rest, were placed adjacent to the stage, at opposite poles, allowing for multiple camera angles. 

Ms. DiDonato, vocally resplendent and expressive throughout, turned the 90-minute show into theater. Her first group was a powerful evocation of loss—a heartbroken “Addio, Roma” from Monteverdi’s “L’incoronazione di Poppea” was followed by a fierce rendition of Didon’s final scene from Berlioz’s “Les Troyens.” She finished the Berlioz on her knees, leaning against one of the sculptures, and segued right into an introspective Mahler song, “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen.” The bleak light warmed up for her second group, about the consolations of nature: “Oh Shenandoah,” sung a capella, was followed by a magical “As with rosy steps the morn” from Handel’s “Theodora,” more Monteverdi, and a joyous “Dopo notte atra e funesta” from Handel’s “Ariodante,” displaying Ms. DiDonato’s formidable command of Baroque ornamentation. 

In a pre-recorded Zoom call, the mezzo chatted with Sister Helen Prejean, who wrote about her crusade against the death penalty in “Dead Man Walking” (Ms. DiDonato played her in the operatic version), and the formerly incarcerated composer Kenyatta Hughes, whose bluesy, sweet “I Dream a World” then got its world premiere. Mozart’s “Voi che sapete” rubbed shoulders with Louiguy’s “La vie en rose.” Addressing the virtual audience, Ms. DiDonato talked about grief in the face of the pandemic and her belief that love is the answer; her final selection, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” ending with the camera close up on her face, felt like a gift and a promise.

—Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

Opera festivals have moved most of their programming online this year, but the offerings, such as Salzburg’s virtually viewable production of Strauss’s ‘Elektra,’ remain tempting.

By Heidi Waleson

Aug. 14, 2020

5:02 pm ET

Like so many other things, summer festivals and festival travel have mostly fallen victim to the coronavirus pandemic, but opera fans can still approximate the experience.

Some festivals in Europe are giving live performances under altered conditions. The Salzburg Festival, for example, is celebrating its 100th anniversary inside its theaters with a revised program, temperature checks, and socially distanced audiences. Six of the scheduled seven operas were postponed, but Strauss’s “Elektra,” in a new production by Krzysztof Warlikowski, went on as planned, and can be viewed for free for 30 days via medici.tv beginning on Aug. 16 (registration required). Mr. Warlikowski’s arresting modern-dress staging plumbs everybody’s trauma, starting with an interpolated spoken prologue in which Klytämnestra (the intense Tanja Ariane Baumgartner) explains why she murdered Agamemnon in the first place.

The whole household is a mess as a result—Mr. Warlikowski includes a mimed vignette of a naked woman being sacrificed to assuage Klytämnestra’s guilt. Ausrine Stundyte’s Elektra is fragile and unstable; her bright, crystalline soprano conveys vulnerability rather than stony fanaticism. Derek Welton’s Orest is a gentle soul maddened by the revenge murder he must commit. Unusually, Asmik Grigorian’s thrillingly sung Chrysothemis is the toughest of the siblings, and, it seems, the survivor. Franz Welser-Möst’s conducting of the Vienna Philharmonic is tensile and sumptuous by turns. We miss out by being unable to see at once the whole stage picture—which includes pantomimed scenes inside a plexiglass “house,” as well as video—but the character close-ups were compelling.

The festival’s history is examined in “Great World Theatre—The Salzburg Festival Centenary” at the Salzburg Museum. The website describes each exhibit room—one intriguing display, “Don Giovanni Buys a Pair of Lederhosen,” explores how Austrian traditional dress, or tracht, became a Salzburg style, symbolic of the perennial tension between conservatism and modernism in the festival. The exhibition is on through October 2021, so if Americans are able to travel to Europe next summer, they can see it—and the festival—for themselves.

In England, Glyndebourne took a more modest live performance route, presenting chamber concerts and an 18th-century opera in its gardens for small audiences. It is also offering free streams of archival performances on YouTube.

Through Aug. 23, you can catch another family murder fest—Brett Dean’s gripping “Hamlet,” commissioned by the company and given its premiere in 2017. With Matthew Jocelyn’s libretto, deftly extracted from Shakespeare, and a dramatically varied score (electronic effects, a whispering chorus, an accordion, and a pair of twittering countertenors as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are only a few of its elements), this skillfully constructed piece places the listener inside Hamlet’s precipitous mental disintegration. The stellar cast includes tenor Allan Clayton, mesmerizing as the beleaguered Prince; Barbara Hannigan as an unhinged, but never pathetic, Ophelia; and John Tomlinson as the Ghost, Player One, and the Gravedigger. Vladimir Jurowski sculpts the London Philharmonic. Next, from Aug. 23 through 30, is “The Fairy Queen,” in Jonathan Kent’s playful production that combines Purcell’s masque with Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” conducted by William Christie.

There’s no live Wagner at the Bayreuth Festival this summer, but you can revel in its often eccentric productions and always superb orchestra and chorus through recent and archival video performances presented in a partnership with Deutsche Grammophon via the news page of the festival’s website. Each opera stream costs 4.90 euros (about $5.75), is available for 48 hours, and is introduced by artists connected with the production. The final two weeks of the series feature “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” directed by Barrie Kosky (Aug. 19), “Tannhäuser” directed by Tobias Kratzer (Aug. 20), and “Parsifal” directed by Uwe Eric Laufenberg (Aug. 28). The touchstone event is the legendary “Ring” cycle directed by Patrice Chéreau and conducted by Pierre Boulez; these performances were filmed at its last outing, in 1980 (Aug. 24-29). The Chéreau “Ring,” with its social critique and explicitly naturalistic acting, caused a scandal at its premiere in 1976, but is now recognized as a landmark in Wagner production style.

The Edinburgh Festival has gone digital with “My Light Shines On,” a series of specially commissioned films, created on location under socially distanced conditions. Lyric theater is represented by the Scottish Opera’s witty version of Menotti’s comic short piece “The Telephone,” with singers Soraya Mafi and Jonathan McGovern, which demonstrates that technology’s siren call is even more potent today than it was at the time of the opera’s premiere in 1947.

American summer festivals have imaginatively made use of the virtual sphere as well. The Glimmerglass Festival is posting a series of “Glimmerglass Glimpses,” featuring its bucolic upstate New York landscape and new content linked to its 2020 repertoire and artists. In a charming, on-site film, bass-baritone Ryan McKinny sings Schubert lieder on the theater’s darkened stage and while rowing on Otsego Lake. Another gem explores Glimmerglass’s new youth opera, “The Jungle Book”: Composer Kamala Sankaram and dancer Preeti Vasudevan perform one of its arias and explain its underlying Indian music and dance techniques.

Across the country, the Santa Fe Opera posted five “Songs From the Santa Fe Opera” on YouTube via its website, a video for each of what would have been the opening nights of its Festival productions. Hosted by various artists and administrators in the open-air theater, framed by glorious Santa Fe sunsets, the segments combine anecdotes about the Santa Fe experience, background on the operas from dramaturge Cori Ellison, Zoom conversations, and solo performances, both on site and remote. Most bittersweet is the final edition, a celebration of what would have been the world premiere of Huang Ruo’s “M. Butterfly,” including the haunting aria “Awoke as a Butterfly,” sung from Paris by countertenor Kangmin Justin Kim. We can only hope to someday be able to hear the whole thing.

— Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

With tenor Jonas Kaufmann’s performance on Sunday, the Metropolitan Opera launched Met Stars Live in Concert, a recital series featuring the company’s most popular singers livestreamed from around the world.

By Heidi Waleson

July 21, 2020 3:04 pm ET

Among performing arts organizations, the Metropolitan Opera is in both the worst and the best position right now with respect to the pandemic shutdown. Its $300 million budget and 3,000 employees made it too large to get funds from the Paycheck Protection Program; its loss of earned income from cancelled performances from mid-March through the end of 2020 is estimated at $100 million; the company has furloughed its artists and much of its administrative staff in order to stay afloat. However, a sophisticated media operation, honed over 14 years of HD transmissions into movie theaters worldwide, has enabled the Met to remain firmly in the public eye, and even to extend its reach. Free daily online streams, drawn from the 200-plus videos in its archive, with performances reaching back to the Pavarotti “La Bohème” of 1977, drew an average of 250,000 viewers each night in the first months of the shutdown (that number is now closer to 100,000); its live, four-hour gala in April tallied 750,000 viewers. Streaming has produced some revenue—subscriptions to the Met Opera on Demand service have more than doubled, to 34,000—and helped to drive special fundraising. It has also made new friends for the Met. General manager Peter Gelb says that there are 140,000 new names in the company’s database and 30,000 new donors; he has anecdotal accounts of people who discovered opera through the program.

The Met has now harnessed its media operation for a new revenue-generating project. Met Stars Live in Concert was launched on Saturday, with tenor Jonas Kaufmann performing from Polling Abbey outside Munich. Sixteen of the Met’s most popular singers (all but two are sopranos and tenors) are being showcased in 12 live concerts, one every two weeks (all but one air on Saturdays at 1 p.m. EDT). Unlike the at-home, ad hoc renditions of the gala, with their handmade, iPhone production values, these concerts are being staged in unusual venues, mostly in Europe, with professional camera work, sound and lighting, directed from New York by Gary Halvorson, who helms the Met: Live in HD shows. They are offered as pay-per-view, at $20 per concert; each is available for 12 days after the live airing to purchasers for as many viewings as they wish.

Mr. Gelb urged the singers to choose familiar repertoire, and Mr. Kaufmann obliged with a program of blockbuster Italian and French arias from the likes of “Tosca” and “Carmen,” and the hit tune “Nessun dorma” from “Turandot.” As a result, the program came across like a steeplechase, with Mr. Kaufmann alternating between pouring on the power and throttling back for a bit of respite. His handsome, burnished tenor was always exciting at full tilt; softer moments sometimes sounded monochromatic. The full-throated Italian arias suited him best; those that engaged his theatrical storytelling skills, such as “Un di, all’azzurro spazio,” from Giordano’s “Andrea Chénier, ” were mesmerizing.

Production values were high, and if the camera work was sometimes overly busy—too many closeups that had us staring down his throat—the pillared, two story space, with its 18th-century ceiling paintings and creamy lighting, felt airy and acoustically friendly. The sound of both singer and pianist, the excellent Helmut Deutsch, was sensitive and authentic. My home setup—a MacBook Pro connected to an HD TV via an HDMI cable, with sound run through high-end stereo speakers via a digital audio converter—produced video as good as a movie theater; the sound was probably better.

Mr. Kaufmann needed breaks in this hefty program, so the live arias were interspersed with video excerpts from staged operas, charmingly introduced by soprano Christine Goerke from the New York control room, and intermezzos from “Manon Lescaut” and “Pagliacci” elegantly performed on piano by Mr. Deutsch. The videos were a striking reminder that the stage is Mr. Kaufmann’s element, whether as the desperate young Werther (at the Met in 2014) or, in a completely different vein, a terrifying Canio in “Pagliacci” (at Salzburg in 2015).

The rest of the series offers plenty to look forward to. Next up is soprano Renée Fleming (Aug. 1) at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, performing songs and arias including—from one of her signature roles—the Marschallin’s “Da geht er hin.” Roberto Alagna and Aleksandra Kurzak (Aug. 16, the only Sunday concert) will sing from an outdoor terrace overlooking the Mediterranean in Èze, France; their antics in the gala advertised their enjoyment of playful duets. I’m particularly looking forward to hearing the young Norwegian dramatic soprano Lise Davidsen (Aug. 29), who made her Met debut in the fall in “The Queen of Spades.” A major talent with an opulent sound and a huge range, she will offer some of her calling card repertoire, such as “Tannhauser” (her Bayreuth debut this past summer) as well as some Scandinavian songs, at a castle in Oslo.

Repertoire for the later concerts has not yet been announced, but the singer lineup is lively. Mezzo Joyce DiDonato (Sept. 12), who played a turbulent Agrippina just before the Met closed down, sings from Barcelona; another soprano-tenor pairing features bel canto superstars Pretty Yende and Javier Camarena (Nov. 7) in Switzerland, who made a scintillating couple in “La fille du régiment” at the Met last year; bass-baritone Bryn Terfel (Dec. 12), absent for too long from the Met, is doing a holiday program from Wales; and rising star Angel Blue (Dec. 19) will finish the series from New York.

As of Tuesday morning, about 27,000 people had bought tickets for Mr. Kaufmann’s concert, with nine days of availability remaining, and advance sales for the others were at 34,000. Pay-per-view is uncharted territory for the Met. Mr. Gelb expects that the series will break even (some of the costs are covered by sponsors) and hopes that it will do better than that. Still, he points out, “the pay-per-view series is a fiscal Band-Aid.” “It has artistic merit, and it helps fill the emotional hole that the opera company, the singers and the audience would like to fill, but bigger challenges lie ahead.”

—Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan)..

With the closure of the Met and other opera companies around the U.S., groups have taken to other means of entertaining, from livestreams to songs delivered one-on-one over the phone.

By Heidi Waleson

June 23, 2020 3:44 pm ET

On June 1, the Metropolitan Opera canceled its performances through the end of 2020. Two weeks later, Lyric Opera of Chicago and San Francisco Opera did the same. The challenges of rehearsing, producing and attending opera in large theaters in the era of Covid-19 seemed insurmountable, especially since phase 4 of reopening—which allows for large group gatherings—appears distant in these cities. Some European arts groups are resuming live performance with drastically revised programs; most notably, the Salzburg Festival will present “Così fan tutte” and “Elektra” in August, with stringent testing and contact-tracing protocols; reduced, socially distanced audiences; and no intermissions. U.S. groups are nowhere near that point, and the reliance on earned income in the U.S. means that the economics don’t work with such drastically reduced ticket sales. 

In the meantime, the Met and other opera companies have opened their archives, flooding the internet with performances. Remote “live” vocal experiences have also flourished, as singers turn their living rooms into stages. Back in March, when quarantine and its implications were still new, the poignant duo of Joyce DiDonato and Piotr Beczala performed arias and scenes from their abruptly canceled Met “Werther” in the mezzo’s living room for an online audience (the recording is available on YouTube).

The Met’s four-hour live online At-Home Gala on April 25 resulted in numerous delights, like Erin Morley excelling in both the coloratura and the piano accompaniment for her Donizetti aria and Jamie Barton’s explosive rendition of Verdi’s “O don fatale.” These homemade productions are charming and immediate, and the desire to share is palpable. 

Artists have been coming up with creative ways to turn limitations into opportunities. Composer Kamala Sankaram and librettist Rob Handel, working with HERE Arts Center, created an ingenious and entertaining 10-minute live Zoom opera, “All Decisions Will Be Made by Consensus”; one of the performances is available on Facebook.

The conceit of the piece is Zoom itself. Five activists trying to plan a demonstration appear in their separate windows; the joke is that each is repeating his or her own point, and none of them are listening. Instead, they are singing over each other. Because of Zoom’s issues with lag time, making it impossible for people in different spaces to be on the same beat, the piece is aleatoric, constructed out of looping vocal lines, with Ms. Sankaram, who also sings one of the roles, controlling the musical action with a pulse-less electronic background track. Would it work for a longer piece? If anyone can figure it out, Ms. Sankaram, who is also working on a virtual-reality opera, would be the one to try. 

Heartbeat Opera, which rethinks classics, had planned to workshop “Lady M,” a look at Verdi’s “Macbeth” from Lady Macbeth’s point of view, when the pandemic forced it to adapt. The workshop was done online: six singers and six instrumentalists and the creative team, headed by director Ethan Heard and music director Jacob Ashworth, participated from their homes via Zoom. Heartbeat also came up with an inventive way to share their work with an audience, selling a limited number of $30 tickets to 32 60-minute “virtual soirées” that featured live performances, Q&As with artists and creators, a behind-the-scenes documentary and a music video of soprano Felicia Moore performing Lady M’s sleepwalking scene.

The live performances were a little rough and ready, but the two prerecorded videos were gripping, especially Ms. Moore’s sleepwalking scene, which found high drama in her vibrant soprano, Daniel Schlosberg’s creepily brilliant musical arrangement (clarinet and trombone are two of the instruments) and the video component that she filmed herself. A video editor did the careful layering of images—hand washing in multiple sinks, shadowy corridors, candles—but Ms. Moore’s choices drove the scene. Heartbeat plans to perform the whole opera live next spring. If that’s impossible, they will move it online, which could be sensational. 

On Site Opera devised a more analog concept: personal performances via telephone. Baritone Mario Diaz-Moresco (with pianist Spencer Myer) and soprano Jennifer Zetlan (with pianist David Shimoni) are singing Beethoven’s song cycle “An die ferne Geliebte” to individual ticket purchasers, one listener at a time. Ticket buyers ($40) choose a time slot (100, split between the two singers, through July 6). The listener is not just the audience, but part of the show—improvising the role of the “distant beloved.” If you think this all sounds a little awkward, it is. 

I signed up for the baritone version. I received two emails in advance, both generic love letters (“Each day without you is like a day without breathing” is a typical line), concluding with English translations of the German texts, and signed “Your Beloved.” At 7 p.m. on Friday, I got my call from Mr. Diaz-Moresco, who gamely performed an introductory script by Monet Hurst-Mendoza (“Oh, my love, it’s so good to hear your voice!”) and elicited some equally banal responses from me. He also warned me that he has a big voice, so I should adjust the volume on my phone. I did, but both the speaker and headphones settings produced a tinny, intermittent sound that left much of the warmth and color of voice and piano to the imagination. 

Still, Mr. Diaz-Moresco captured the protagonist’s ardent spirit, his identification with the natural world, and his sorrow about the lengthy separation; Mr. Myer’s depiction of resignation in the piano introduction to the final song was particularly moving. For better aural fidelity, listen to them do the cycle on Mr. Diaz-Moresco’s website. That performance doesn’t have the lengthy, spoken anecdote, interpolated into the second song, about our first date at Coney Island, however. I’m all for breaking the fourth wall, and I enjoyed the unusual intimacy between singer and listener, but imagining myself into this slightly cheesy love story was finally a little too weird.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

There are many online resources that offer children an entertaining introduction to the world of opera.

By Heidi WalesonMay 26, 2020 4:10 pm ET

Years ago, when my daughters were too young for the opera house, they watched Ingmar Bergman’s enchanting 1975 movie of “The Magic Flute” (in Swedish) so many times that the videocassette wore out. Now, the opera house can only be the screen, but fortunately, there’s a lot more opera programming for children and teens available at home. 

The Metropolitan Opera is offering Free Student Streams. Each week, one opera is available for 48 hours, beginning on Wednesdays at 5 p.m. EDT. Preparatory materials are available all week, and live Zoom and Facebook advice sessions on Mondays and Tuesdays at 4 p.m. EDT offer teaching strategies. While these can be more geared to educators, parents do tune in and get suggestions on adapting the lessons. Also, on Wednesdays at 4 p.m. kids and adults can Zoom in for an enjoyable Artist Chat with members of the opera’s cast and production team. This week’s opera is Donizetti’s “La Fille du Régiment” in the madcap Laurent Pelly staging with two scintillating young leads, Pretty Yende and Javier Camarena. Spoiler alert: Mr. Camarena nails all nine high C’s in “Ah! mes amis” and does an encore. Beginning June 15, a new eight-week program, Met Opera Global Summer Camp, will have free weekly opera streams along with daily, hands-on creative projects led by teaching artists and educators. The first Camp opera will be Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Hansel and Gretel” in the creepily fabulous Richard Jones production. 

The Glimmerglass Festival has commissioned several delightful operas for performance by the company’s youth chorus. “Odyssey,” “Robin Hood,” and “Wilde Tales,” which combines Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince” and “The Remarkable Rocket,” are all under one hour long, rehearsed and produced at a high level, and available on YouTube via the company’s website. Each deftly combines catchy choral writing and featured roles tailored to teenage performers with more advanced music for two singers from the company’s young artist program. 

Kids 10 years old and up may also enjoy another contemporary opera: Stefan Weisman’s “The Scarlet Ibis,” available on demand from HERE on Facebook. This sensitive piece is about two young brothers, the elder of whom pushes his disabled sibling (played by an expressive puppet and sung by a countertenor) to be “normal” and goes too far.

Several opera companies have created digital content for children in quarantine. Each week, London’s Royal Opera House posts a new collection of lively, interactive lessons on the Learning Platform page of its website. These are tied to ballets and operas like “Hansel and Gretel” and “The Magic Flute,” but can be enjoyed even without access to a full performance. The skill-based lessons, geared toward specific age ranges, have precise instructional steps, videos, and “follow the bouncing ball” scores, and are easy for children and parents to follow. Kids can do physical and vocal warm-ups, learn a song (“Little brother, dance with me” from “Hansel”), compose music to tame animals in “Flute,” or do art projects, such as constructing food props or a scale model of the opera house stage. Entertaining supplementary short videos include a Monty Python-style animation of the story of “Carmen” and a visit with the Royal Opera children’s chorus.

LAOpera at Home, along with living-room recitals and streamed full operas, has regularly updated, kid-friendly features on the “Opera Family Time” section of the site. Singers Nathan and Jamie (and Esther the dog) post weekly “Sing Out Loud” videos. Each roughly 20-minute episode is a lighthearted look at how to have fun at home, whether it’s a pajama party or tidying up. There are arias (sung while exercising or cooking) and a singalong with familiar tunes (“On Top of Spaghetti”). You can also watch the time-lapse creations of an 11-year-old fan who built his own versions of LA Opera productions out of Legos, and abbreviated, child-friendly adaptations, such as “Figaro’s American Adventure,” which takes on “The Barber of Seville.” 

From the opposite coast, the Lincoln Center at Home page offers a new Pop-Up Classroom every weekday at 2 p.m. EDT: Lincoln Center teaching artists lead lessons in, for example, choreographing a dance in your living room, or creating and singing a recitative; the artists interact with the attendees through the Facebook comments feature. To practice some basic musical skills, Chicago Opera Theatre has brief videos about how to do a vocal warm-up, singing posture, and conducting a four-beat pattern. Lyric Opera of Chicago offers “Kids Corner,” featuring a downloadable family opera activity book suitable for children of elementary-school age, and brief videos on, for example, creating a one sentence opera.

For a quick, fun introduction to opera, the HiHo Kids video “Kids Meet an Opera Singer” on YouTube is charming: The soprano Angel Blue chats about her life, work and costume with several delighted children; demonstrates the soprano range; and attempts, unsuccessfully, to shatter a glass with her voice. And you can’t go wrong with the vintage Sesame Street opera singer cameos, easily findable on YouTube. Evergreen examples include bass Samuel Ramey’s fantasia on the letter L to the tune of “The Toreador Song”;Marilyn Horne, dressed as Cleopatra, performing “C is for Cookie” with lots of chest voice; and Denyce Graves singing Elmo a “Habanera” lullaby, aided by a posse of operatic sheep. Not “The Magic Flute,” but delightful. 

—Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

Nature provides the ideal backdrop for these operas that you can enjoy even during lockdown.

ByHeidi Waleson

April 28, 2020 4:29 pm ET

With the opera house off-limits and outdoor access limited, now’s the moment for online events that successfully combine the two. In March, the Industry, the boundary-breaking Los Angeles opera company, was presenting “Sweet Land” in Los Angeles State Historic Park when pandemic precautions forced the cancellation of half of the run. Fortunately, a video, available on demand, permits a much larger audience to at least approximate the experience of attending this remarkable work; the $14.99 charge helps the Industry weather the loss of its performances,

I saw “Sweet Land” live on March 7, and while the video can’t fully capture its visceral impact—the piece seemed to physically conjure the blood-soaked history of colonialism out of the land you were standing on—you can still get the idea. There are even a few pluses. The three-camera setup, with close-ups of individual characters, helps clarify the action in some of the more layered sections. Viewers can also take in both of the opera’s tracks: “Feast” (depicting Thanksgiving from the perspective of the conquered) and “Train” (doing the same for Manifest Destiny), which played simultaneously in the live version. Each video runs about an hour, and the double exposure to their common material, in addition to the scenes unique to each, deepens the experience and amplifies the raw, passionate violence of the tale, as the narrative of the Hosts is ruthlessly erased by that of the Arrivals.

Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes” is inextricably linked with its setting, an isolated fishing village on the Suffolk coast. In 2013, to celebrate the composer’s centennial, the Aldeburgh Festival staged the opera on the beach. In the film of that production—available on MarqueeTV, which has free trial offers, as well as on Medici.tv—you feel as though you are there, especially since the sounds of the sea and the waves breaking over the pebbled beach are audible in the interstices of Britten’s sea-inspired music. The set, hugging the water’s edge, is a ramshackle-looking assemblage of platforms and boats; the storm clouds, the wind, and the lights against the gathering darkness intensify the opera’s portrait of a community huddling fearfully against the elements and turning on the presumed evildoer, the fisherman Peter Grimes.

Director Tim Albery’s concept updates the opera to 1945, the year of its premiere, from the mid-19th-century original setting, and hints of the war add an extra tinge of menace. The musical performance, conducted by Steuart Bedford, is excellent. You would never know that the orchestra was pre-recorded, and the superb cast stars Alan Oke, beleaguered and desperate in the title role, and Giselle Allen as a touching Ellen Orford. The supporting singers deftly portray the complex village society (the busybody, the quack, the alcoholic preacher, the good-time girls) and the fine chorus is terrifying when its members, wielding flashlights and homemade weapons, coalesce into a lynch mob in Act III.

Outdoor venues define some summer opera festivals; one example is the Aix-en-Provence Festival’s airy Théâtre de l’Archevêché, the courtyard of a former archbishop’s palace. The 2020 Festival has been canceled, but several operas from past seasons are available on demand through the website. Simon McBurney’s riveting 2017 production of Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress” can be seen through July 10.

It boasts a splendid cast of young Americans: Julia Bullock is a luminous Anne Trulove; Paul Appleby, a tormented Tom Rakewell; and Kyle Ketelsen, a smoothly evil Nick Shadow. The updated production suits the open-air theater and the opera’s themes of false promises and the temptation of easy money and fame. The walls of the set, a plain white box, rip like paper as characters enter and exit, leaving gaping holes, and serve as screens for arresting contemporary video backdrops. Tom’s London establishment is a soaring glass penthouse against a crowded cityscape of lights; photos of Baba the Turk multiply like a giant Zoom meeting screen; tumbling stock prices scroll as Tom’s ruin is complete. In the haunting final scene, the mad Tom tries without success to tape the now-blank white walls back together. The poetic English text isn’t always as clear as one might like, and the only subtitles are in French and German, but it’s a small price to pay. Just Google the libretto and follow along.

The enormous floating stage on Lake Constance is the hallmark of Austria’s Bregenz Festival, and its “Turandot,” on YouTube, is all about spectacle. There’s an immense Great Wall of China, part of which tumbles down dramatically; boats deliver characters to the stage, which is filled with a swirling host of masked extras in Mao jackets, martial artists and fire jugglers; there’s a gruesome library of severed heads in transparent display boxes. Hang on for Act III and the show’s best singing: Riccardo Massi’s “Nessun dorma” and Guanqun Yu’s poignant rendition of Liu’s death scene. Then, for comic relief in a much more modest, but delightful, outdoor opera experience, try On Site Opera’s production of Mozart’s “The Secret Gardener,” staged in a New York City community garden, on YouTube through the end of June.

—Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal.

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.