The Case of Barbara Willis Sweete, Film Director for The Met: Live in HD - Text 1
In an article in the Montreal daily newspaper Le Devoir in March 2013, the critic and music lover Christophe Huss wrote about the Met: Live in HD transmission of Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal that
“Barbara Willis Sweete has begun to amalgamate the opera stage and the magic of the screen. The director has... found the balance between the wide-angle shot and the detail... [François] Girard’s Parsifal is magic when seen live and it is even more eloquent and poetic on screen.”[1]
A few years earlier, in 2008, the same critic was indignant over split screens in some scenes in the opera Tristan und Isolde, another work by Wagner also directed by Willis Sweete.[2] On this occasion, numerous other opera lovers also cried – literally – scandal, demanding Willis Sweete’s resignation on the spot.[3] Deemed too interventionist, Willis Sweete had gone against a fundamental and yet tacit norm in the transmission of operas: to preserve the expressive identity of the opera performance. In fact, from the moment The Met: Live in HD was launched in 2006, the opera house promised its audience that it would be transmitting operas captured as closely as possible to the experience of watching a live performance. According to Peter Gelb, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera and instigator of The Met: Live in HD, “Our goal is not to compete with opera films. We can’t, nor do we wish to.”[4] The Met has no plans, moreover, to mention that the transmitted capture is the result of switching between cameras with a view to a single assembly organized by a director who is not mentioned in the transmission’s credits, thereby breaking a solid norm in the world of cinema. In general, and during those years especially, all of The Met: Live in HD transmissions were reproached for an overabundance of close-ups, excessive camera movement, a frenetic découpage and cinematic virtuosity whose result detracted from the experience of watching an opera performance in a movie theatre. In fact, the film director is asked to erase all trace of visual expressiveness and to minimize any intervention in order to appear to show only the creativity of the theatre director and the talent of the singers.
