LIVE OR ON SCREEN?
“I can’t stand it!” was among the first the answers received on Twitter when I asked readers to tell me how they feel about opera on screen. “It sounds and looks better than the live experience” was the reply that followed, from a proponent of contemporary and electronic music. When I embarked on my research into the enjoyment people get from live versus recorded performance, I wondered if I’d discover an equal split between opera luddites and opera techies. Between the fans who only thrill to live sound and those who don’t make a distinction between opera mediated by recording technology and opera (likewise) mediated through seat position, hall acoustics, surtitles or opera glasses.
But no, as it turns out, the luddites are extremely rare, and probably only found in a handful of global operatic centres where there are multiple live performances on offer every day. A large majority of us have discovered opera and continue to enjoy it as much in its electronic formats as in live performance—and sometimes even more.
Where we differ is how we prefer our
