Watching Opera Via DVD

(The underlined phrases in this essay are clickable links...)

Watching an opera on DVD is quite different from experiencing the performance live in theater. There are the 'perks' of getting a close-up look of the performance, the multi-lingual subtitle, the ability to skip tracks (hopefully just the boring spoken dialog or sung recitative!) or repeat them, and even some extra-features like a glimpse of the making of the performance and a backstage tour. There are a few things to keep in mind when you're watching an opera performance on DVD, however, and the chief among them is that the singers' target audience isn't you, but those live audience present in the auditorium. Occasionally there are singers who are versatile enough to actually play to both the live audience and the recording cameras at the same time, but they are the exceptions rather than the rule.

In most operatic performances the singers are not artificially amplified (they sing without the aid of microphone)... the exceptions being in some modern operas where the symphony-loving composer had written such a dense (loud) orchestration that he indicates that the singer has to be amplified in order to not destroy their vocal chords in the process of trying to be heard over the overpowering instruments...And also, in larger opera auditoriums, sometimes the singers are miked during the 'spoken' part of a 'Singspiel' (operas with spoken dialog connecting the sung arias), because it is harder for the opera singer to 'speak' loudly enough to be audible to the entire audience than when they sing. And sometime the off-stage singing need to be miked.

It takes a lot of practice and good techniques to be able to sing such difficult music loudly enough to be heard over the orchestra for hours on end like these singers do. Some of them have more unusual methodology than others and produce some rather weird facial expressions in the process (and that tends to seem more 'grotesque' than it really is when viewed on close-up shots).