On Saturday October 7, Berlin’s opera lovers had a tough choice to make.  It was between Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges, at the Komische Oper, Puccini’s Tosca at the Staatsoper unter den Linden and a new staging of the Johannes Strauss operetta A Night in Venice when up at the alternative theater HAU 1. A final option was to head over to the CineStar at the Sony Center in Potsdamer Platz to catch the live HD broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera’s matinee of Richard Strauss’s Salome.
 
The Metropolitan Opera began its Live in HD series two years ago at the initiative of house’s then-new general manager Peter Gelb, and was an unexpected success. This season, 11 productions will be beamed into over 800 cinemas across America and in over 20 counties.

Opera is a medium that demands to be enjoyed live. Its sheer physicality cannot be grasped on a movie of TV screen. For this reason, filmed operas rarely – if ever – succeed as anything more than a compromised record. But I was keen to see what all the fuss was about, especially the crisp HD technology. Would the HD cameras add texture and depth to the picture, or would it look as flat and washed-out as the PBS Great Performances broadcasts I grew up with?

And then there was the opera itself, which I saw at the Met in 2004, when this production by Jürgen Flimm was new and the soprano Karita Mattila was being praised as the greatest Salome of a generation. That heart-stopping performance had left an deep impression, which was nursed by repeated listening to a bootleg recording that was circulating the Internet. When I heard that Mattila would be reviving Salome this season, I seriously considered booking a flight.

Adapted verbatim from a German translation of Oscar Wilde’s play, Salome scandalized audiences with its brutality and perversity when it premiered in 1905. Over a century later, it still packs a punch. The opera’s climax is a ten-minute-long striptease that Salome performs for her stepfather (and uncle) King Herod in exchange for the head of John the Baptist, with whom the girl has developed a feverish obsession.

 I was skeptical when the “Met Live in HD” program was announced. Where’s the audience, I wondered. Besides, who would be willing to pay 25 dollars (or Euros, as the case is in Berlin) for a movie ticket? Still, Mattila’s Salome is dynamite and 25 Euros is a far cry from a roundtrip ticket to New York.

At the CineStar, one of the city’s grandest multiplexes, “patrons” milled about in an elegantly decorated champagne bar with live piano music playing. There was even a complimentary coat check.  But despite the cinema’s preparations (including an impressive amount of advertising), the theater was less than half full.

My impressions of the broadcast were mixed. The sound was stellar and the HD projection was indeed as sharp as hoped for, and fared much better as capturing the thrill of live performance more fully (and consistently) that most of what I’ve come across on video. A tight zoom-in of an opera singer on a 30-foot screen is an odd perspective. At moments, viewers were welcome to details better left unseen, like saliva foam forming on Mattila’s lips during an impassioned moment. The cinema audience let out a few chuckles when Mattila praised Jochanaan’s beauty, for the bass portraying the Baptist was Juha Uusitalo, a riveting but rotund singer. The sound, also, was a bit too good at times: it picked up the prompter’s voice on at least one occasion.  

The most striking detail about the transmission, however, was that the notorious Dance of the Seven Veils was censored. On the Met’s stage, Mattila went for the full monty. Inside the CineStar however, the camera cut to Herodias’ face for the two-seconds of full-frontal nudity. According to the L.A. Times blog, the decision came from Mr. Gelb himself, who wanted to keep the rating below an “R” to appeal to families. Apparently, seeing a naked soprano is more damaging to kids than the grim spectacle of Matilla making out with a severed head, while blood trickled down her chin. Censoring Salome was an error in judgment, but it was hardly a deal breaker. Despite this wrongheaded decision, the broadcast made it possible to enjoy the performance halfway round the world.

Berlin enjoys a position of prominence when it comes to opera. No other city can lay claim to three full time opera houses. There were astonished gasps from the audience as the camera panned across the Met’s cavernous interior during the curtain calls. Even in this opera-rich city, it was a thrill to spend a night at the Met.