Opera House Versus Film(?)

Music professor, musicologist, and weblogger Charles T. Downey of Ionarts makes his (to my knowledge) debut as blogospheric provocateur:

I know that ACD has said "Basta!" to this topic, but Philip Kennicott's article (Opera and Film: Can This Union Be Saved?, January 9) in the Washington Post made me think about it again. Would ACD extend his definition of "live theater" to include live opera? Can a filmed opera present an opera better than an opera performed live? Furthermore, does the possibility of filmed opera obviate the live performance of opera? (I seem to recall that ACD has admitted on his blog that he does not attend many operas these days, because no production measures up to the perfect production running in his head. If I have that wrong, for which I conditionally apologize in advance, you can rely on the certainty of ACD's correcting response.)

First, no apology necessary as I did indeed declare (but not on this weblog) that I no longer attend live opera, in part for the reason correctly stated above by Dr. Downey, although "perfect production" is not the terminology I used, if I remember correctly.

In answer to Dr. Downey's question, "Would ACD extend his definition of 'live theater' to include live opera?", the answer is, No, he would not, for reasons that will instantly become clear.

In answer to the question, "Can a filmed opera present an opera better than an opera performed live?", the answer is, No, it cannot, and principally (but not exclusively) for the very reason given by me here concerning why a recorded performance of classical music can never equal, much less better, a live performance of the same music.

Having said all that, I have a single exception to put forward: Wagner's mammoth tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen. I've been a decades-long advocate of the idea (I like to think it original with me, but it probably isn't) that the only way to do this work full proper justice is via the medium of film. Or to put it more correctly, via the medium of the animated film. Wagner couldn't have known it, of course, but his inner vision of the Ring was fundamentally cinematic; could in fact be realized fully only by way of cinema. Wagner, were he alive today, would, I imagine, visualize such a cinematic realization in terms of live singing actors in natural settings rather than drawn animated figures and settings, but he would be wrong about that. The abstraction of animation is what's called for and needed here.

And I don't mean animation animated in 3D CGI fashion as the author of the article linked by Dr. Downey titillatingly suggested. And I don't mean animated in any fashion that would be familiar to anyone today. I mean animated in a fashion that today is still not feasible absent a budget that would equal the GNP of a medium-sized country. I mean animated — figures and settings — in the style of these illustrations in all their rich detail, employing single-frame-fluid, multi-plane-depth, drawn animation. Computer power today is still not powerful enough to do such a thing economically. But it will be.

For such a realization, I, for one, would readily and without complaint accept recorded music's inherent shortcomings. And who knows? By the time the needed computer power for such a realization becomes commercially available, perhaps audio technology will have reached a point where recorded classical music is indistinguishable from the live article.

Right. Dream on, sonny.