Cambridge Opera Journal, 25, 2, 203–223 6 Cambridge University Press, 2013

doi:10.1017/S0954586713000074

At the Margins of the Televisual:

Picture Frames, Loops and ‘Cinematics’
in the Paratexts of Opera Videos
CARLO CENCIARELLI

Abstract: This article focuses on the paratexts of opera DVDs as a route into the status and
cultural placement of opera videos in contemporary visual culture. In particular, it analyses
the picture covers, menus and openings credits of four productions of Verdi’s Don Carlo,
arguing that, although the videos fall within the broader discourse of the ‘televisual’ (a dis-
course that encourages the viewer to conceive the image as a transparent document of the
performance on-stage), these paratexts put forward alternative ways of conceiving the rela-
tionship between medium and subject matter, imagining opera’s materials, however briefly,
in terms of narrative cinema and music video, video games and computer loops.

Opera DVDs should be handled with care. At first sight they may seem trivial, if
not dangerous, objects for academic enquiry. Storage devices do not have much of
a musicological pedigree, and focusing on ‘things’ always carries risks of fetishism
(methodological or otherwise), potentially obscuring the human and social context
within which they gain significance. Yet, as an object woven into the discourses of
digital media and the pleasures of home viewing, the Digital Versatile Disc, a once
cutting-edge format, offers extended opportunities for studying the meeting of
opera and key themes of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century culture.1
In particular, its material presence has much to tell us about the complex status
and cultural placement of opera videos.
The term ‘opera videos’ is typically used to indicate a range of phenomena such
as VHS and DVD releases of live performances, as well as TV and cinema broad-
casts, both live and relayed. Thus defined, these videos are placed within the
broader paradigm of the ‘televisual’, a category that Philip Auslander famously
uses to indicate what he sees as the dominant mode of media production today.
Auslander’s approach has been extremely influential and provides useful theore-
tical tools for the analysis of opera videos, but part of my argument here will
be concerned with suggesting that his emphasis on the televisual as ‘the cultural

My thanks go to Roger Parker, Emanuele Senici and the editors of this issue for their com-
ments on this article. I should also like to thank the Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani and the
Rotary Club of Parma, whose Premio Internazionale Giuseppe Verdi (2009) provided funding
for a broader research project on opera and digital culture, of which this article forms a part.
1 For a famous discussion, and defence, of methodological fetishism, see Arjun Appadurai, ed.,
The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, 1988), 3–64. In particular,
I am here taking heed from recent media scholarship that tries to account for the specificity of
the medium and its multiple materialities. For a critical overview of these theories, see Jussi
Parikka, What is Media Archeology? (Cambridge, 2012). My attempt is to combine a study of opera
videos as ‘representations’ with a consideration of their defining features – their distinctive
temporalities, their physical boundaries and technical limitations.
204 Carlo Cenciarelli

context’ of our age runs the risk of obscuring the complexity of the early twenty-
first-century mediascape, and, consequently, of opera’s placement within it.2
Writing in the late 1990s (just at the time when DVDs were making their mark
on the market), and taking as a starting point the relationship between live and
(what he calls) ‘mediatised’ performance, Auslander showed a range of ways in
which, within the framework of the televisual, the mediatised is priced for pro-
ducing a feeling of ‘liveness’, just as live performance increasingly includes the
mediatised.
Scholars have noted the way in which opera videos regularly tap into the ‘ideol-
ogy of authenticity’ that underpins this mechanism.3 The very use of tags such
as ‘live on DVD’, ‘live in HD’ (the motto of the extremely successful MET HD
cinema broadcasts) or, more recently, ‘live in 3D’ (employed by ENO’s first
broadcast of opera in three dimensions, in 2011), has the effect of insisting that
opera on-screen can be a valuable surrogate for live experience, the latter assumed
to be ontologically prior and superior.4 As Emanuele Senici has shown, this
assumption is articulated, in a more or less explicit form, by prominent opera
directors, critics and media theorists. Thus, Jürgen Kühnel’s theorisation of opera
videos as visual documents that do ‘not narrate an opera but rather ‘‘relate’’ a
performance of an opera’, is matched by the intention expressed by Brian Large,
one of opera’s most prominent video directors, ‘not to get in the way by being a
director’.5 The discourse largely finds confirmation in the standard practice that
developed in opera videos from the 1950s through the 1980s:6 in their deliberately
impassive camerawork, the camera’s parameters are set a priori, based primarily on
traditional formal patterns rather than specific narrative considerations. Although
in part influenced by pragmatic limitations (in particular by the presence of a live
audience during recording), this impassive style is in keeping with the aim of
providing a surrogate of the live experience: the unobtrusiveness of the camera is
part of the medium’s attempt to efface its own presence. Over the last few years,
scholars such as Melina Esse, Christopher Morris, Roger Parker and Senici have

2 Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 2nd edn (London, 2005), 2.
(Emphasis in the original.)
3 See, in particular, Emanuele Senici, ‘Porn Style: Space and Time in Live Opera Videos’,
The Opera Quarterly, 26 (2010), 63–80.
4 At the time of writing, the high-definition cinema broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera
House are arguably the most popular example of this ‘ideology of authenticity’. The phenomenon
would deserve a separate analysis, but here it will suffice to say that the broadcasts’ reliance on
Auslander’s ‘televisual’ paradigm is complicated by the fact that they are projected in cinema
theatres and framed by traditionally cinematic paratextual materials such as posters and trailers.
To the extent that the MET broadcasts show traces of competing televisual and cinematic
discourses, they could be discussed in keeping with the broader argument of this article. For
an ethnographic study of the ‘live in HD’ broadcasts, and an assessment of their spectacular
success, see James Steichen, ‘HD Opera: A Love/Hate Story’, The Opera Quarterly, 27 (2012)
443–59.
5 Senici, ‘Porn Style’, 64–5.
6 Emanuele Senici discusses the emergence of this visual rhetoric of ‘reproduction’, focusing in
particular on the case of Italian television. See Senici, ‘Opera on Italian Television: The First
Thirty Years, 1954–1984’, in Opera and Video: Technology and Spectatorship, ed. Héctor Julio Pérez
(Bern, 2012), 54–70, at 66.
 At the Margins of the Televisual 205

deconstructed this discourse of ‘liveness’ from two complementary standpoints.

They have alerted us to the specificity of the video experience (the way in which
the video constructs the performance), and they have warned us of the danger of
radicalising ontological differences between live and mediated performances.7
My aim here is to build on this analysis by taking a slightly different approach.
Rather than focusing on the relationship between the live and the mediatised,
I intend to consider other models of visual mediation at play in opera videos. I
begin by exploring the sense in which I see the televisual to be problematic. And
by this I do not mean that it is ideologically fraught (even though its political im-
plications certainly deserve closer attention). The problems that concern us here
have to do with a particular reliance on a conceptual separation between medium
and content that comes with undesired consequences both for the producers of
opera videos and for our understanding of the video’s cultural placement.
A first problem has to do with the fact that, within a context where unobtru-
siveness is the rule, the camera is at constant risk of drawing attention to itself.
A detailed study of this has yet to be undertaken, but the public reception of
opera videos features recurring complaints that the presence of the camera, and
particularly its proximity to the singers and the mise-en-scène, runs the danger of
interfering with the theatrical experience. As Esse has noticed, there is a marked
‘squeamishness about the uncanny proximity made possible by the camera’, with
critics ‘disturbed by its intrusive physicality and presence’.8 Particularly emblematic
in this sense is a series of online reviews, discussed by Senici, which includes com-
ments by bloggers that provocatively suggest links between opera videos and the
aesthetics of hardcore pornography, with the camera focusing upon the singers,
‘porn style, in the most exciting moments’.9
This insistence on the intrusive and fetishising qualities of the camera’s eye
draws attention to the problem of its presence as a matter not just of proximity
but also of phenomenology; it is a consequence of what we understand to be the
relationship between medium and subject matter.10 After all, the disgruntled
reviewers quoted by Senici do not compare the close-ups of videoed opera with,

7 Melina Esse, ‘Don’t Look Now: Opera, Liveness, and the Televisual’, 81–95; Christopher
Morris, ‘Digital Diva: Opera on Video’, 96–119; Senici, ‘Porn Style?’; and Roger Parker,
‘Giuseppe Verdi’s Don Carlo(s): ‘‘Live’’ on DVD’, 603–14: all in The Opera Quarterly, 26 (2010);
and Emanuele Senici, ‘Il video d’opera dal vivo: testualizzazione e ‘‘liveness’’ nell’era digitale’,
Il saggiatore musicale, 16 (2004), 273–312.
8 Esse, ‘Don’t Look Now’, 81.
9 Senici, ‘Porn Style?’, 63. See also Senici, ‘Il video d’opera dal vivo’, 273.
10 Complaints about the added ‘realism’ of the camera’s eye and its (negative) effects on theatrical
illusion have a long history, one that precedes the deployment of moving images and which, as
Sylviane Agacinski’s work shows, can be traced back to the nineteenth-century practice of
photographing tableaux vivants. While intending to generate a form of photographic fiction, the
photographed tableau was reproached by many critics for drawing attention to the singularity
of things and faces. As Agacinski shows, because of its strong association with scientific,
documentary and legal applications, photography was seen as unsuitable for allegorical topics –
being unable to shed off its indexical function and to do justice to the mimetic and idealising
world of the tableaux vivants. Drawing on Barthes, she locates the grounds of these complaints in
the difference between authentication and representation. See Sylviane Agacinski, Time Passing:
Modernity and Nostalgia (New York, 2002), 122–31.
206 Carlo Cenciarelli

for example, 1960s European art cinema, where the use of facial icons is a central
stylistic feature, or with classical Hollywood melodrama, where shot size and dis-
tance is typically part of broader patterns of emotional intensification. In both
these instances, the camera’s proximity is what we might call narratively motivated.
In the porn close-up, on the other hand (and notwithstanding the fact that the
pornographic scene usually has a fictional premise), the emphasis is not on repre-
sentation but on the showing of the sexual act. Without wanting to radicalise these
differences, we might say that, from a phenomenological point of view, the em-
phasis of the televisual camera is on authentication rather than on representation
(to paraphrase Roland Barthes’s famous analysis of photography).11 The televisual
camera has an ‘indexical’ function that is a direct consequence of its association
with the ‘live’, the documentary and the non-fictional, which puts it at constant
risk of parasitising the staged fiction. We can thus start seeing the implications
of conceiving opera videos in keeping with a ‘televisual’ logic as opposed to, for
example, a ‘cinematic’ model of visual mediation. The very fact that the camera
functions within an overall discourse of televisual transparency makes its presence
intrusive because it is alien to the subject matter. It does so in a way that does
not enter the discourse of the ‘cinematic’, where medium and content are highly
integrated – considerations about framing and editing being firmly rooted within
the film’s overall system of signification. A second, related problem of the tele-
visual is that this upholding of a conceptual separation between medium and con-
tent would seem to prevent opera from resonating with a significant sphere of
contemporary visual culture that has to do less with liveness and more with the
pleasures of mediation.
Yet opera videos do show traces of competing discourses and aesthetics. I want
to suggest that, while operating within a broader framework of the televisual,
opera video producers find ways of composing out this tension between medium
and content (however briefly), aligning opera with a wider range of visual styles
and genres. The desire to go beyond these conceptual separations and place opera
in a richer dialogue with contemporary visual culture is particularly visible in the
materials that surround opera videos. It is to these marginal materials that I turn
here. In particular, I focus on the paratexts that, as Gérard Genette would put it,
enable the videoed performance to become a DVD, surrounding and extending
the text, ‘in order to present it’ and prepare its reception.12

Framing the Frame

To show some of the ways in which the paratexts of opera videos mobilise
broader discursive matters, my discussion is limited to a single opera – Verdi’s

11 Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire (Paris, 1989), 139.

12 ‘Paratexts’, as Genette puts it, surround and extend the text ‘precisely in order to present it, in
the usual sense of this verb but also in the strongest sense: to make present, to ensure the text’s
presence in the world, its ‘‘reception’’’. Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree
(Lincoln, 1997), 1.
 At the Margins of the Televisual 207

Don Carlo.13 This focus is intended as a heuristic tool, a way of bringing into relief
the process of accommodation between the forms and materials of opera and
those of new media. It is also meant to raise some questions about the identity
of the operatic text (famously unstable in the case of Don Carlo), and the ways in
which the videos’ paratexts can complicate its boundaries. I focus, in particular,
on four versions: a 2005 Deutsche Grammophon release of a 1983 production at
the Metropolitan Opera House; a 2005 NVC Arts/Warner Classics release based
on a 1985 performance at the Royal Opera House; a 2000 NVC Arts/Warner
Classics based on a 1996 production at the Théâtre du Châtelet; and a 2009 Hardy
Classics release of a 2008 production at the Teatro alla Scala.
This list in itself conveys something of the complex, layered nature of opera
DVDs, giving a sense of their multiple agencies and chronologies. The first
example, the 2005 Grammophon DVD, is a good case in point. The video was
originally conceived as a telecast for PBS’s ‘Live at the Met’ series and directed
by Brian Large with a suitably unobtrusive visual style. Clearly born under the
aegis of the televisual, it was then released on VHS by Bel Canto Society in
1987, prior to its later DVD release. This periodic process of remediation offers
an opportunity to explore the different ways in which the VHS and the DVD
present the same video. In other words, it allows us to explore any change in the
discourse activated by the paratexts.
The front cover of the 1987 opera VHS (Fig. 1), like all others released by
Bel Canto Society at the time, adopts a picture-frame design. It features Plácido
Domingo and Mirella Freni, as Don Carlo and Elisabetta, side by side, singing
their love duet from Act I. The photograph is square-shaped, framed by a double
yellow line, and laid at the centre of the cover against a green background. On this
background, which takes up more than half the surface area, is overlaid the textual
information. Immediately above the picture, respectively aligned with its left- and
right-hand margins, are Verdi’s name and the date of the performance (26 March
1983). Immediately below, in three columns, are the names of the six principal
performers (on the left), those of conductor, stage director and orchestra and
chorus (in the middle), technical details concerning sound and subtitles (on the
right) and information about video extras (below the performers’ names). At the
top of the cover is a purple Metropolitan Opera logo, which spans the exact

13 I am here using the Italian title (even though the opera was originally written in French and
Verdi wrote his later revisions to a French text) because this is by far the most common for
videos, used on all but one of the DVDs (that from the Théâtre du Châtelet) analysed here.
There are four main versions of the opera: the five-act French-language version from the 1867
Paris premiere (which already contained some amputations with respect to an earlier 1866
conception); a five-act Italian-language version used for an 1872 production in Naples (with
relatively minor alterations aimed at correcting problems created by the 1867 amputations); a
four-act Italian-language version for a production that took place in Milan in 1884 (where the
original Act I is eliminated, in addition to other major changes) and a five-act Italian version for
an 1886 production in Modena (which essentially uses the 1884 version with the reinstatement
of the first act). For a detailed discussion of Don Carlo’s textual history, see Julian Budden,
The Operas of Verdi, 3 vols. rev. edn (Oxford, 2002), vol. 3, From ‘Don Carlos’ to ‘Falstaff ’; and
Harold Powers, ‘Verdi’s Don Carlos: an Overview of the Operas’, in The Cambridge Companion to
Verdi, ed. Scott L. Balthazar (Cambridge, 2004), 237–56.
208 Carlo Cenciarelli

Fig. 1: Front cover, 1987 Bel Canto VHS of Verdi’s Don Carlo. 6 1983 James Heffernan/
Metropolitan Opera and 6 1987 Bel Canto Society. All rights reserved.
 At the Margins of the Televisual 209

length of the photo. At the bottom, aligned to the right-hand margin of the
photo, is the logo of the video production company. The opera’s title is placed
between the MET logo and the top of the photograph. Plain white text is used
for the performers, with various combinations of font styles, sizes and colours to
differentiate the other kinds of textual information.
The primary aim of covers is not to make propositions about the ontology of
the image, but to foreground prominent singers while putting forward an idea of
what the opera is about. In this case, Don Carlo is allied to a readily available icon-
ography of operatic passion, while Domingo and Freni guarantee the international
status of the performance and the historical relevance of the VHS as an archival
document.14 In the process of providing a snapshot of the opera, however, this
cover also says something about the nature of the video itself. The picture frame,
which seems to invoke the near-square ratio of television screens at the time,
highlights both limitations and value. On the one hand, by cropping the photo-
graph, it implicitly acknowledges that the video can only present us with a partial
view of the live performance, reinforcing a notion of the latter’s ontological priority.
On the other, it amplifies the video’s documentary value by means of presenting
its mediation, quite literally, as a matter of framing. In keeping with a discourse
prizing the video for interfering as little as possible with the performance, limiting
itself to recording the event with precision, the photograph is kept clear of all
textual and graphic elements and tagged with a date. The picture frame, imagining
a conceptual separation between the medium and its content, allows the video
to be presented as an unmediated recording. The proliferation of font style-based
information (as the geometrical layout that graphically compensates for such pro-
liferation) plays into this attempt to make clarity between the various materials
and layers of mediation – the work, the performance, the staging, the video’s fea-
tures and extras. The medium’s minimal interference is also signified, indirectly,
by the strong geometrical layout, with all the text symmetrically arranged around
a photo that, in turn, is centred on the two main characters. In this sense,
although the discourse of the cover is, in principle, independent from the actual
visual codes employed by the director, it powerfully anticipates Large’s style.
The 2005 DVD remediation of Large’s video uses a very similar production still
from the love duet (Fig. 2). As with the picture-frame design, this cover epitomises

14 On the video covers of Don Carlo we find two main strategies at play. Mid-shots of the love
duet are used for performances based on five-act versions of the opera. Long shots of the auto-
da-fe scene tend to be used for performances based on the four-act version. This is the case in
the 2002 Sony Production of a 1986 staging at the Salzburger Osterfestspiele (part of a DVD
collection of Karajan’s ‘Legacy for Home Video’) and in the aforementioned 2009 DVD from
La Scala, which featured Stuart Neill in the title role, a last-minute choice after tenor Giuseppe
Filianoti was controversially removed. In these instances, the focus on public ritual, with the
protagonists dwarfed by the mise-en-scène, has the dual effect of foregrounding notions of
operatic spectacle and of drawing attention away from the singers, ensuring the prominence of
the conductor or side-lining a problematic casting choice. In this sense, the poles of public and
private and of pageantry and intimacy so often invoked when conceptualising Don Carlo and
its relationship to Italian and French conventions go hand in hand with the establishment
of hierarchies between the personalities involved in each production, and receive different
emphasis depending on the version of the opera that is being employed.
210 Carlo Cenciarelli

Fig. 2: Front cover, 2005 Deutsche Grammophon DVD of Verdi’s Don Carlo. 6 1983
James Heffernan/Metropolitan Opera and 6 2005 Deutsche Grammophon GmbH. All
rights reserved.
 At the Margins of the Televisual 211

a generic type. Its layout is shared by many Deutsche Grammophon DVD pro-
ductions of the time. The image, now full length, occupies the whole front cover
of the DVD. Indeed, owing to the spine and back covers being as black as the
stage behind the singers, the impression is that of the photograph stretching across
the whole case. The only exception is an orange stripe with the MET logo, placed
at the bottom of the front cover.
The textual information is laid out on the left-hand side of the photograph.
In comparison with the VHS cover, the amount of information and the range of
colours and font styles are reduced, and the graphics avoid any clear alignment;
each line of text is offset in relation to the others. The date of the performance
has disappeared, and so has technical information about the video and its extras.
The text colours are reduced to white, for the names of performers, production
manager and video director (Brian Large is now credited), and to orange (in keep-
ing with the colours of the MET logo), for the orchestra and chorus, the con-
ductor and the opera’s title.
Of course, it is hardly surprising that the style of opera’s paratexts, as with
any marketing material, would change over the nearly twenty years between these
two presentations of the MET video. The picture-frame design has today all but
disappeared from opera videos. The DVD cover is in keeping with a more fluid
combination of image and text and foreground and background facilitated by
major developments in graphic-design software during the late 1980s. The keyword
here is ‘convergence’, a term typically used in media studies to indicate synergies
between various digital technologies, but which has also been used to describe an
aesthetic of integration of visual (and, as discussed below, audiovisual) materials
made possible by those technologies.15 In this sense, and however slightly, the
DVD cover aligns itself with the aesthetic of convergence favoured by the intro-
duction of computers in the production and post-production of all visual design.
What I want to suggest is that such changes in design (thus in both software
and aesthetics) are connected to new ways of making sense of opera on-screen.
In this case, by downplaying the notion of mediation as framing, the DVD design
tempers the rhetoric of the video as a neutral vehicle for the performance. We
could thus say that the cover prepares us differently for the style of Large’s video.
If the VHS reinforced connotations of streamlining, neutrality and objectivity, the
DVD deliberately avoids symmetry and vertical alignments: its overlaying of text
onto a historical photograph communicates a slightly different set of qualities,
ones that could suggest a more dynamic, distinctive approach to the material.
The inclusion of Large’s name, and the disappearance of the date of the perfor-
mance as a guarantee of authenticity, might also play into this greater acknowl-
edgement of the layers of mediation. It is possible to conceive of this relationship
between design and discourse in two ways. In a weak sense, we could say that
changes in graphic-software technology, by promoting an aesthetic of conver-
gence, lead to designs that just happen to soften the televisual rhetoric. However,

15 For an example of the use of ‘convergence’ as ‘an umbrella term that refers to the new textual
practices’, as well as to ‘technological synergies’, see Michael Kackman, Flow TV, Television in the
Age of Media Convergence (New York, 2011), 1–10.
212 Carlo Cenciarelli

a stronger connection could be argued if we accept that such an aesthetic of con-

vergence, which is facilitated by extended possibilities for manipulating all media,
comes with ways of thinking about objects which make the conceptual safeguard-
ing of boundaries such as those between medium and content less fashionable, let
alone less tenable.
The disappearance of the picture frame can also be understood in relation to
the process of remediation. As Bryan Sebok reminds us, the introduction of
DVDs played a central role in explaining to the public the shift from analogue to
digital platforms, and, as such, it was associated with an argument for progress that
was evolutionary in nature and had the promise of better definition and greater
immediacy.16 This promise was at one with the DVD’s proclaimed ‘Hollywood-
ness’, a connection reinforced by the major role played by the film industries in
the so-called format wars.17 DVD immediacy was about bringing the home theatre
closer to cinema’s fictions. In keeping with DVDs’ broader cultural association
with the viewing pleasures of the ‘Big Screen’, the design of the Don Carlo cover
does not address the screen’s limitations. Indeed, those very limitations were
being stretched as part of the promise of transforming home theatres into immer-
sive systems. So whereas the VHS cover constructed the act of viewing as one in
which the viewer is in front of a screen-sized picture frame looking at a document
of the performance, the DVD cover places the frame outside the viewer’s sight.
The camera is so close to the singers that we cannot see the proscenium arch; the
viewer is too close to the image to see its borders.
In this sense, the VHS and the DVD designs put forward two different models
of immediacy: one linked to a notion of objective framing, and another that
makes the medium transparent by suturing the viewer to the image. These two
models, tied both to the evolutionary discourse of remediation and to changes in
the tools and aesthetics of graphic design, in turn, have different implications for
the material qualities of the VHS and the DVD. Whereas the picture-frame model
is a design rich in ‘neutral’ elements – a template that would be shared by all Bel
Canto Releases – the DVD is specific to the particular opera in question. The
image of the opera, by stretching all around the case, as a widescreen, or as wrap-
ping paper, coincides with the physical boundaries of the object.

Lovers and Cloisters, Glitches and Loops

These subtle and subtly shifting relationships between medium and content are
visible in the next threshold of opera DVDs, the menu. The menu is essentially

16 See Bryan Sebok, ‘Convergent Hollywood, DVD, and the Transformation of the Home Enter-
tainment Industries’, Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2007, 226–7. As Bolter and
Grusin show, this promise of immediacy is characteristic of the history of remediation, and
particularly strong in the case of digital media. See Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin,
Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 60.
17 As Sebok discusses, in the early 1990s press coverage about the DVD focused on the friction
between two industry factions, broadly associated with Toshiba/Time Warner and Sony/
Philips, who promoted different format standards for the new technology. This ‘format war’
was eventually swung by the Hollywood majors backing Toshiba. See Sebok, ‘Convergent
Hollywood’, 227–36.
 At the Margins of the Televisual 213

an interface, a multimedia paratext of the new generation, allowing users to inter-

act with a limited set of options. This ‘closed interactivity’ introduces a new kind
of temporality: a pocket of time of varying length during which the user might
linger at the margins of the video, navigating through options and title chapters,
exploring the DVD’s branching structure. This new, expendable and expandable
pocket of time is accompanied by images and sound. In this sense the interface
also functions as an enhanced ‘cover’, giving us an audio-visual preview of the
event to come. This dual function as cover and as interactive platform is crucial
when it comes to fitting the opera to the formal features of the menu. To accom-
modate the particular temporality of the menu while circumventing the storage
limitations of the DVD, video and audio materials are looped. In programming
language, we would say that the menu relies on a control structure affecting the
linear flow of data. This structure becomes a critical point for opera’s meeting
with the aesthetics of computer interfaces, providing an opportunity for us to
consider cultural meanings which lie beyond the framework of the televisual.
The particular pressures that the loop puts on the presentation of opera are
visible in the 2005 NVC release. This is a DVD deriving from a video of a 1985
performance at the Royal Opera House, based on an original production by
Luchino Visconti and again directed by Large. A video sample from the same
love duet, framing Luis Lima and Ileana Cotrubas as Carlo and Elisabetta in mid-
shot, is presented in a frame within a frame, roughly positioned in the middle of
the screen, laid onto a still of the wider stage – a long shot of the famous auto-da-
fe moment (Fig. 3). The textual elements are arranged around the frame: the title
is spelled vertically, along the left-hand side of the video, with the menu options
at the bottom. This design is a variation of the picture-frame layout noted in the
Bel Canto VHS.
The background to the love duet is here provided by a second image, a solution
that combines two of the opera’s most distinctive scenes, but with similar tele-
visual rhetoric: the emphasis is squarely on framing and on the video’s ability to
capture an operatic moment, with a distinctive passage foregrounded and kept
clear from all other textual elements. Within the multimedia menu, the logic of
the photographic moment is turned into one of operatic highlights. The cantabile
‘sparı̀ l’orror della foresta’, a passage in the duet characterised by the tight inter-
weaving of the singers’ lines, is pulled out of the scene and looped to accom-
modate the cyclic temporality of the interface. After a minute, the music skips
back to the beginning. The passage ends in the tonic of E major and restarts
from that same chord, with the two singers jolting back into position, and the
camera, which slightly zoomed in as the phrase unfolded, zooming back, trapping
the lovers inside an eternal climax.
In the process of turning a snapshot into a video sample, the televisual rhetoric
here comes into obvious friction with the temporality of the menu. As with the
‘digital failures’ cherished by so-called post-digital artists and musicians, this glitch
has undesired deconstructive powers.18 It calls attention to the DVD as a thing,

18 For a manifesto of post-digital artists, see Kim Cascone, ‘The Aesthetics of Failure: Post-
Digital Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music’, Computer Music Journal, 24/4 (2000),
12–18.
214 Carlo Cenciarelli

Fig. 3: Main menu, 2005 NVC Arts/Warner Classics DVD of Verdi’s Don Carlo. Video 6
1985 BBC TV, Royal Opera House Covent Garden Ltd and NVC Arts. DVD 6 2002
WEA International Inc., Warner Music Group. All rights reserved.

laying bare its digital body, making explicit the process of repetition and the limita-
tions of the format, not to mention the low production values of this NVC release.
Most importantly, the glitch highlights frictions in the process of accommodation.
It dramatises a mismatch between the DVD and the forms of nineteenth-century
opera, an awkward attempt to fit the temporality of the operatic climax onto a
loop. In this sense, the menu is unsuitable for putting forward a televisual preview
of the opera video. It calls for a set of formal operations that depend on a par-
ticular manipulation of the audio-visual materials and that have the power of
opening up a different understanding of what opera videos are.
This can be seen in an earlier release by NVC Arts, a 2001 DVD of a 1996 per-
formance of Don Carlo at the Théâtre du Châtelet. The chosen musical sample is
an excerpt from the orchestral prelude to Act II (in the 1867, five-act version
used in the Châtelet production). In the opera, the prelude introduces a scene set
at dawn, in a monastery housing the tomb of Carlo V, Don Carlo’s grandfather.
The horns, as well as playing important thematic material (a distinctive four-note
motif heard throughout the opera), establish the dark ‘tinta’ by means of a power-
ful, resonant unison and a chorale-like harmonic progression.19 In this sense,
the DVD produces an interesting variation on the textual history of Verdi’s opera.
Although the Châtelet performance of the five-act version starts with offstage,

19 See Budden, The Operas of Verdi, III, 55. For Budden, ‘the introduction to this scene establishes
the opera’s ‘‘tinta’’ in a most uncompromising way’.
 At the Margins of the Televisual 215

Fig. 4: Main menu, 2000 NVC Arts/Warner Classics DVD of Verdi’s Don Carlos. Video
6 1996 RD Studio Productions/NVC Arts/LA Sept-Arte/BBC. DVD 6 2000 WEA
International Inc., Warner Music Group. All rights reserved.

major-mode fanfares and galloping triplets, the menu starts with music from Act
II as does the four-act version of Don Carlo, using the thematic material and icon-
ography of the monastery scene to establish the opera’s soundscape and dramatic
tone.
The music is separated from its visual source of production but set to images
that are pertinent to its dramatic placement within the opera. We see a series of
elements of the mise-en-scène melding into one another: a calligraphic manuscript
fades in and out, illuminated by shafts of light in the shape of a cross; a skeletal
cube slowly revolves on its axis, projecting a complex shadow; the outline of a
monk in a white cowl emerges from the depths of a cloister. As the last of these
fades into the background, the calligraphic manuscript again comes to the fore
(Fig. 4). The menu options are overlaid on the shifting images, with the title of
the opera barely visible on the bottom left, partially transparent, and changing
colour with the slides of images, from gold and ochre to green and blue, and back.
In keeping with an ideal of convergence, this menu pursues an integration
between the various component media. The colour animations, the transitions,
the fading in and out, and the slight lack of focus put the emphasis on mediation
as layering and minimise the camera’s indexical function. The latter is also a result
of avoiding a focus on singers, lingering instead on mise-en-scène elements with
strong textural and pictorial features. The process of layering is further com-
plicated by the multimedia interaction in that the image and sound tracks have
216 Carlo Cenciarelli

different phasing patterns, with three cycles of the former spanned by one phrase
of the latter, which is cut so that a perfect cadence takes place across the edit.
The chosen excerpt suits the formal demands of the menu well. The musical
material assists the interface’s dual purpose as multimedia ‘cover’ and interactive
structure. As well as being a representative instance of Don Carlo’s sound world,
thus aptly promoted to the role of atmospheric ‘main theme’, it is suitable for
sampling. It is a closed section that starts and finishes on the same material, and
has much internal repetition. The way in which Verdi develops the material,
expanding it to an irregular period of twenty-five bars, and the way in which it is
slightly varied on each return help make musical sense of the loop and further
conceal the exact point of mechanical repetition. The loop is thus not just pre-
sented as grammatical, but as musically motivated. The choice of video footage
seems to follow a similar logic. That the images contain circular patterns plays
into the looping process, and their layered textures motivate the crossfading
between shots.
This aestheticisation of the interface brings this particular video in contact with
an important trend of late 1990s visual culture; it is an example of what media
theorist Lev Manovich would call ‘transcoding’, a move from the technological
properties of computing language to design.20 The loop is turned into a meaningful
motif, woven into the opera’s plot and materials; and potentially the exchange of
meanings can stretch further, as the semantics of rituals, religious chanting, prayer
and penitence are mapped on to the control structure of the menu, and thus on to
the temporalities of browsing and repeated viewing. This greater investment in
the look of the interface goes hand in hand with conceiving the DVD as a portal
to a wider kind of interactivity. It suggests different kinds of viewers and viewing
situations. Whereas the options in the Royal Opera House DVD were limited to
subtitles and audio settings, the Châtelet DVD imagines a viewer who spends
time at the margins. As well as including information regarding the cast and the
opera synopsis, the menu opens up to the functions of the PC and the interactivity
of the web, at least as these were conceived in 2001: the DVD functions as a CD
ROM, offering the chance to ‘view/print a full libretto in French as well as an
article and biographies’ and, ‘if you also have a web connection’, a link to the
NVC Arts’ website.
What is significant in this case is not so much the chronology of the DVD
releases but the way in which they place themselves in the home-video market.
The Châtelet DVD targets an ‘enthusiast’, someone who, as Sebok puts it, would
invest more in an ‘activity and interactivity with the technology’, ‘much more likely
to explore the content of the disc, finding hidden features . . . playing with random
access functionality’.21 With this ‘enthusiast’ consumer in mind, instead of fore-
grounding the performance’s production values (sampling, say, one of Roberto
Alagna’s solos, or a profile of Antonio Pappano conducting the prelude), the

20 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 46–7.
21 Sebok, ‘Convergent Hollywood’, 224. Sebok talks about an early split in the market between
‘enthusiast’ and ‘casual’ DVD consumers.
 At the Margins of the Televisual 217

DVD puts on display the medium’s own production values. The interface in this
sense becomes a way of aestheticising both the product and the opera’s inter-
section with digital culture. It is an opportunity to present opera video as con-
versant with the aesthetics and temporalities of new media, stressing opera’s own
relationship to contemporary culture as a matter of convergence, integration and
interactivity.

Places of Fiction and Fictional Places

As we move from the menu to the video itself, we find one last textual threshold:
the opera house. In spite of the video’s potential to extricate the work from the
broader social and cultural context of opera-going,22 or rather precisely because of
that, its paratexts typically work hard to contextualise the performance, dedicating
some screen time to the venue’s exteriors and interiors. Large’s video of the 1983
performance at the MET provides a typical example. In a way characteristic of the
MET telecasts of the time, the video starts with an external shot of the opera
house, centrally framed on its famous façade. In front of the wall of glass, with
its five soaring arches, the fountain reflects the electric lights of Lincoln Center.
A voiceover (‘The Metropolitan Opera House Presents’) and the superimposed
text (‘The Metropolitan Opera’) firmly anchor the referent of the image. Soon
the camera starts a slow zoom into the building, closing in on a crystal chandelier
visible through the façade, and then cross-fading to a shot of the same object, this
time from inside the house. For a moment, the camera lingers on the staircase,
looking over into the lobby, one of those crucial transitional spaces described by
Christopher Small: a space ‘through which we pass in the progression from the
outer everyday world to the inner world of the performance . . . a place to eat
and drink and socialize, to see and be seen’.23 Then, through another cross-fade,
we find ourselves in the auditorium, where patrons are starting to sit down.
The discourse of the televisual is here at its strongest. Openings such as these
testify to a desire (whether real or assumed) to be present (or, as a second best,
‘telepresent’), to the rituals of opera-going; they also draw on the cultural prestige
of the venue as a way of suggesting vicariously the video’s value as a cultural
product. Indeed, the approach to the opera house is central to the very definition
of opera videos in terms of a ‘radical conceptual difference’ from opera films, as
Kühnel puts it.24 Whereas in the latter the operatic text typically coincides with
the filmic text, stretching from the opening to the closing credits, in the former

22 During what could be called the first wave of ‘opera and screen’ studies, scholars such as
Jeremy Tambling looked at the filming of opera (at the distribution of opera on-screen) as one
of the ways in which opera could, potentially, be freed from the constraints of a ‘bourgeois
construction of operatic experience’ that he saw to be drastically limiting the music’s political
and semantic horizons. See Tambling, Opera, Ideology and Film (Manchester, 1987), 1–11. At the
time of writing, Tambling was particularly interested in the ‘democratising’ powers of cinema.
For a critique of this ‘first wave’, see Marshall Leicester, ‘Discourse and the Film Text: Four
Readings of Carmen’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 6 (1994), 245–82.
23 Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Hanover, NH, 1998), 23.
24 Jürgen Kühnel, quoted in Senici, ‘Porn Style’, 64–5.
218 Carlo Cenciarelli

there is a ‘buffer zone’ separating the two.25 It is in this buffer zone that the
camera’s indexical function is most emphatically established. The camera’s eye
acts as a pointing finger: ‘this is the MET’. Clearly its job is not to tell fictions
but to take us to the place where fictions are told. In the same way that the
picture frame on the VHS cover functions metaphorically as a line of demarcation
between medium and content, so too does the approach to the opera house. It
maps out the conceptual divisions of the televisual. Yet there is a particular visual
code used here by Large, the cross-fade, that immediately has the potential to
complicate this division. This gesture taps into a cinematic discourse, at least to
the extent that, by compressing time and space, it represents the journey to the
auditorium. The drive towards a narrative mode is, admittedly, minimal. It is
more a possibility intrinsic to the textualisation of opera (and, more specifically,
to the practice of filming the approach to the venue) than something fully carried
out by this example.
Its fuller implications for a conceptualisation of opera videos can, however, be
studied in relation to the 2009 DVD of Don Carlo at La Scala. The opening of the
La Scala video – directed by Patrizia Carmine, a household name at the theatre –
presents some clear televisual markers. After a brief, extreme close-up of a paint-
ing (Fig. 5), in which the camera tracks along the canvas to reveal details of a
horse clothed in regalia, we are presented with the ‘obligatory’ location shot: a
crane shot of the opera house by night, with the superimposed text ‘Dal Teatro
alla Scala di Milano’. From the start, however, a number of factors invoke alterna-
tive visual discourses. The use of a widescreen adds a cinematic ‘feel’ to the pro-
ceedings, and the footage immediately calls attention to the video’s production
values by engaging the camera in two contrasting, ‘marked’ shots. The partial
view of the painting, by withdrawing information, also has the effect of opening
a gap. In this sense, the use of a close-up is a trigger of narrative desire.26
Crucially, this narrative desire is here fuelled by music. The approach to the
opera house is underscored by the orchestral prelude to the last act, where
the opera’s dénouement infamously leads to Carlo V’s return from the grave.
The prelude opens with a juxtaposition of A-minor and A-major triads in the
trombones, horns and ophicleide, a re-orchestration of a chorale-like gesture pre-
viously sung by monks in the prelude to Act I of the 1884 four-act version
adopted by the La Scala production. (Opening the video with the prelude to the
final act in this sense adds to the circular qualities of this version of Don Carlo,
further adding to the opera’s fatalistic tone.) The solemn and enigmatic qualities
of this gesture, which is twice repeated, are mapped on to the two opening shots.
The brass fanfare suits the approach to the prestigious venue, as well as the icon-
ography of the painting. The passage’s unstable, under-defined harmonic ambitus

25 Zeffirelli’s La traviata and Otello are two examples of the typical convergence of operatic and
filmic texts. Even in opera films that do include the approach to the opera house such as, most
famously, Bergman’s The Magic Flute and Ponnelle’s La Cenerentola, the music’s overture typically
starts with the film’s opening.
26 For a theorisation of narrative gaps, see David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison,
WI, 1985), 55.
 At the Margins of the Televisual 219

Fig. 5: Opening credits, 2009 Hardy Classics DVD of Verdi’s Don Carlo. 6 2008 Rai
Trade Spa. All rights reserved.

plays into the ambiguity created by that painting and by the use of music and
‘cinematic’ signifiers in what, by convention, should have been a televisual ap-
proach to the venue.
As the video unfolds, the use of cinematic codes becomes stronger. We cut to a
perception shot (Fig. 6): a slightly unsteady steady-cam moves towards the main
entrance of La Scala. The edges of the image are masked, and its contours are
slightly off focus, the use of a wide-angle lens distorting the lines of the building
and exaggerating the sense of depth.27 Welcomed by the opening of three sets of
doors, and allowed inside the empty auditorium, the viewer is treated like a special
guest. The prelude marks the camera’s progress. When we enter the first set of
doors, a new phrase in C-sharp major starts; as we walk along the corridor there
is a tonic-dominant alternation, building in dynamic level and underpinned by a
long timpani roll. Then, as the camera crosses the threshold to the main audi-
torium, the harmony reaches a decisive cadence in A minor, returning to the initial
fanfare.

27 These shots also have the effect of adding a monumental quality to La Scala, thus aligning the
eighteenth-century Italian building with the prevailing popular iconography of the opera house
as grand and imposing (epitomised by nineteenth-century buildings such as the Paris Opéra or
the Bayreuth Festspielhaus). In this sense, at least to the extent that it tries to exploit the
building’s dramatic potential, Carmine’s video can be compared to the beginning of Large’s
videos for the famous Chéreau Ring Cycle where, as Senici notes, ‘each day starts with a
tracking shot of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, without any trace of human presence and in total
silence’. Senici, ‘Il video d’opera dal vivo’, 20.
220 Carlo Cenciarelli

Fig. 6: Entrance to Teatro alla Scala, Milan, opening credits, 2009 Hardy Classics DVD of
Verdi’s Don Carlo. 6 2008 Rai Trade Spa. All rights reserved.

After this, one more close-up reveals the painting in full: it is Titian’s famous
portrait of Carlo V on a horse. From a close-up of the king we cross-fade to shots
of the statue of Verdi in the lobby. A number of complex tracking shots around
Verdi’s bust, set against walls that are flooded with light, alternate with extreme
close-ups of the composer’s eyes, of floral decorations on the pedestal, and of
light reflections, with much use of soft focus. The editing is cut to the music in
a way that sets off a range of iconic and symbolic relationships across media. A
timpani stroke matches the cut to a dramatic, low-angle, full-size shot of the
statue. Generic signifiers of lyricism instil the statue’s gaze with a generic, un-
defined dramatic intensity: a new musical element, a descant of broken phrases
for violins and cellos at the octave, featuring prominent melodic suspensions, is
cut to the close-up of the composer’s eyes; the strains of a 6̂-5̂ resolution are
synchronised with the intensification and dissolution of white sunlight through a
blue window.
Music and visuals thus converge to dramatise the approach to the opera house.
This is a trait of Carmine’s videos, found in her other DVDs for La Scala, and one
that resonates with the broader aesthetics of music video. Images are edited to the
pre-existing soundtrack in such a way as to invest the music, in a typical inversion
of hierarchies, with the function of underscore. This has the effect of storytelling
without a specific story, a move that, as Carol Vernallis has shown, is common in
music video, or at least in a certain type of music video that draws on cinematic
techniques and gestures to ‘flaunt narrativity’, creating ‘the appearance of narrative
 At the Margins of the Televisual 221

rather than delivering one’.28 This resonance with the aesthetics of music video
also extends to extreme close-ups and soft focus to create a sense of open-ended
suggestion. The music’s presence, favouring the establishment of an iconic rela-
tionship with the visual patterns and the editing, motivates many of these pictorial
techniques, allowing the camera to transcend its indexical form.
This ‘appearance of narrative’ has the effect of confusing levels of fictionality.
The opera house, seen through a perception shot and wide-angle lens, and under-
scored by music that brings connotations of chorales and military fanfares, is
constructed as a strange, quasi-fictional place, with the very open-endedness of
the audio-visual relationship playing into its mysteriousness. The music, matched
with the ‘marked’ camerawork in a way that invokes generic notions of authority
and awe, seems to be about the status of the venue, about the importance of the
visitor and about the subjectivity of the composer. For viewers familiar with Don
Carlo, the confusion of fictional levels is augmented by the way in which Carlo’s
return from the dead resonates with the solemn entry into the opera house and
the use of Verdi’s statue as a dramatic persona.
In this sense, if the style of this visual prelude can be compared to that of music
videos in general, its function is what, in video-game terminology, would be called
‘cinematics’.29 In keeping with the conventions of video games, Carmine’s opera
video features an opening sequence that, thanks to its freedom from the pragmatic
constraints of the genre in question (here, the ‘live’ element of the performance,
in gaming, the ‘interactive’ element), draws on cinema’s language to suture in the
viewer. Manovich talks about ‘cinematics’ as one of the ways in which cinema, in
late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century culture, ‘teaches’ us how to relate to
new media. As he puts it, ‘cinematic ways of seeing the world, of structuring time,
of narrating a story, of linking one experience to the next, have become the basic
means by which computer users access and interact with all cultural data’.30
The ‘cinematic’ is thus not about cinema, just as the ‘televisual’ (in Auslander’s
framework) is not about television. It is rather a ‘cultural interface’, a term that
Manovich uses to emphasise the centrality of cinema as a mode for interacting
with digital culture at large.
In the case of the La Scala DVD, the invocation of a cinematic rhetoric has the
effect of dramatising the act of video-watching. Opera-going, which in the 1983
MET telecast was presented as a social ritual, is here a unique and private experi-
ence. The notion of cultural privilege still applies, but it is taken to extremes, with
ushers at the service of a sole patron who is welcomed into the special place of
the theatre and immediately comes in contact with the composer’s subjectivity.
In this sense, the sequence prepares Don Carlo for home consumption. Instead

28 See Carol Vernallis, Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context (New York, 2004),
4–11.
29 Manovich, The Language of New Media, 83. As Manovich explains, by the 1990s, game designers
were increasingly drawing on cinematic language, and, particularly, they started to incorporate
‘lavish opening cinematic sequences . . . that set the mood, established the setting, and intro-
duced the narrative’.
30 Ibid., 78–9.
222 Carlo Cenciarelli

of simulating telepresence at a live event, it narrativises the experience of watch-

ing opera on-screen – placing viewers, metaphorically, inside the space of the
opera video, ushering each of them to an ideal, privileged point of vision and
audition. This puts a particular spin on the relationship between the social and
the aesthetic dimensions of opera-going. If the televisual emphasis on the opera
house is a reminder that the aesthetic experience of the work and its performance
is not everything that there is to concert-going, this cinematic approach comes full
circle, as it were, making that social dimension part of the aesthetic experience of
the text.

Conclusion
By zooming in on covers, menus and opening credits, I have tried to explore how
the paratexts of opera DVDs can prepare the reception of the video; how they take
part in a broader discourse about the music’s mediation and put in place various
templates for making sense of the performance on-screen and of the viewer’s
spectatorial position. One of the methodological implications of this ‘paratextual
analysis’ has consisted in placing a degree of emphasis on the materiality of the
DVD, whether its packaging or its processual qualities. At a time when there is
much talk of the perceived immateriality of digital data and of the convergence
between disparate media platforms, it might seem counter-intuitive to insist on
the medium-specificity of opera videos, particularly considering that the medium
in question is on the wane. Yet precisely because of its increasing historicity, and
its role in the popularisation of home theatre systems and digital culture, the
DVD proves to be a good starting point for studying opera’s journey through a
shifting mediascape.
This takes us to a second methodological consideration and to a broader, if
provisional, conclusion regarding the current status of opera videos. What I have
been implicitly suggesting, following an analytical trope with an illustrious tradi-
tion, is that the margins of a text are a privileged place for identifying emergent,
and often contested, cultural meanings. In the case in question, the framing (both
literal and metaphorical) of the opera invites us to look beyond the televisual and
alerts us to the role played by the cinematic as a cultural interface. In the video’s
paratexts the cinematic is not just the model for specific visual gestures or for the
use of instrumental excerpts as main themes in menus and opening credits. Rather
it is, more broadly, an alternative model for engaging with opera videos, one in
which the camera transcends its indexical role and the music becomes one of the
mediating elements. In other words, it is a model that bridges over the gap
between medium and content, opening up opera videos to a wider range of
resonances in ways that can redefine their cultural placement and value.
If it is true that the importance of the cinematic becomes clearer by focusing on
the paratexts, it is also true that this use of the cinematic complicates the very
boundary between text and paratext. Practices of suturing (whether connected
with the promises of remediation, the aesthetics of digital convergence or the
blurring of fictional and extra-fictional levels) by means of eroding the buffer zones
 At the Margins of the Televisual 223

between medium and content, shift our understanding of what should be con-
sidered the text of reference. Minimising the recurring graphic features on
covers, aestheticising the menu and dramatising the approach to the opera house
cause a conceptual slippage between the medium as a neutral container of the
performance and the DVD as the ‘thing’. And this comes with a foregrounding
of the production values of the video itself, values which add to and, as we have
seen, are potentially in conflict with, a televisual presentation of a performance’s
production values. The cinematic thus acts as a temporary, local antidote to the
conceptual strictures of the televisual, facilitating links with competing visual
genres and aesthetics that in most cases remain at the level of suggestion. In this
sense the paratexts are most useful for understanding the shifting cultural mean-
ings of opera videos precisely because they remind us that these meanings often
remain on the surface – they cannot (or maybe they cannot yet) carry over into
the main body of the performance. That these alternative notions of opera videos
often remain at the level of framing is partly a function of the DVDs’ material
qualities, and of the fact that the discourse activated by the paratexts is not the
result of systematic theorisation but of multiple agencies operating at different
stages and with different agendas. Glitches and aesthetic ‘mismatches’ in this
sense draw attention not just to the way in which different visual paradigms differ-
ently shape opera’s materials, but also to the amount of ‘work’ needed to present
the relationship between opera and digital culture as a matter of integration and
convergence. The hybrid qualities of these paratexts thus speak to their value as
a testing ground. Exposed to the demands of marketing, and relatively free from
pragmatic limitations and from the abstract pressures set by performing traditions
and the ontology of the work of music, the margins of the video become a privi-
leged space for imagining opera’s media future.
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