TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

Between one Wagner and another, meaning from 2008 to 2013, Barbara Willis Sweete made eighteen transmissions^[9] in which she refined and asserted her approach to directing live opera:

You have to do it really artfully but also invisibly and that is an interesting master to serve. It got to be all about increasing the impact and also serving the vision of the composer, make the storyline clearer, protecting the singers that are not always good at close-ups. It’s like telling the story in ways that people understand. The public thinks it’s happening all by itself but the amount of care and attention that goes in to making it cinematic and artful is an interesting thing.^[10]

Willis Sweete positions herself, attentively, at the intersection of a number of mediations. From the storyline of the opera in question and the initial inspiration of its composer to the vision the theatre director has of it, the performance of each singer and the goals of the commissioning institution, she must evaluate the approach which will best ensure it is well received by an audience that has come to see an opera rather than an opera film. More precisely, she endeavours to do justice to the originality of the performances and of the staging, and adapts her cinematic approach to the musical colour of the composer. She also makes sure to protect the singers from extreme close-ups, in high definition on a large screen, of their physical peculiarities and the bodily fluids of the opera performer. She thus avoids capturing spatters of saliva and the necessary clearing of the respiratory passages, sweat from physical effort, the heavy stage make-up and the corpulence of some of the bodies.^[11] In this context, each production of The Met: Live in HD has its own particular colour. At times conditions make possible a fortunate compatibility with film art. At other times this is not the case, as with Tristan und Isolde in 2003, whose static staging, without depth of field, demanded to be made dynamic on screen. In this way, Willis Sweete gives a lasting filmed interpretation to one of the many stagings and performances of a given opera: as Gaudreault and Marion remark, “What they propose is thus their filmic interpretation of the stage interpretation of the libretto author’s opera – a plastic interpretation to the power of three.”^[12] The audiovisual document which derives from this interpretative mise en abîme gives this version a leading place in the history of this opera, including possibly in the field of opera.