Synopsis

On this day in 1952, thirty-one theaters nationwide offered the first pay-per view Met opera telecast. This was a regularly-scheduled performance of Bizet’s Carmen broadcast live from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, featuring Risë Stevens in the title role and Fritz Reiner conducting. The performance was relayed to the theaters by means of a closed TV circuit.*

Beginning in 1948, the Metropolitan Opera had experimented with live telecasts of their opening night performances, but relatively few people in the U.S. owned TV sets at the time. By 1952, most American households had TVs, but the Met’s manager, Rudolf Bing, was dead-set against any further free telecasts. The 1952 pay-per-view experiment was not successful, and it wasn't until 1976 — after Bing had resigned — that live telecasts of Metropolitan Opera performances resumed on public television.

The most successful of all commercial telecasts of a live opera performance occurred in 1951, when, on Christmas Eve that year, NBC-TV broadcast Amahl and the Night Visitors by Gian-Carlo Menotti on Christmas. NBC’s black-and-white kinescope recording of that premiere performance was broadcast annually for a number of years — until it was accidentally erased by a network employee.** Although Amahl is no longer an annual visitor to television, it is still staged this time of year by amateur and professional opera companies around the world.

*Currently the Metropolitan Opera offers a series of live opera performances transmitted in high-definition video via satellite from Lincoln Center in New York City to select venues, primarily movie theaters, in the United States and other parts of the world. The first transmission was of a condensed English-language version of Mozart's The Magic Flute on December 30, 2006.

**One surviving copy of the original kinescope did surface in a California archive, and was shown at broadcast museums on both coasts in 2001 to celebrate the work's 50th anniversary.

Music Played in Today's Program

Georges Bizet (1838-1875): Carmen Suite No. 1; Orchestre National de France; Seiji Ozawa, conductor; EMI 63898

Giancarlo Menotti (1911-2007): March from Amahl and the Night Visitors; New Zealand Symphony; Andrew Schenck, conductor; Koch 7005