The Case of The Met: Live in HD - Text 3
When Peter Gelb took over as general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in 2006, he found himself faced with a major challenge involving not just a significant deficit. He remarks: “Elitism was strangling the opera company. The Met was disconnected from the daily life of the culture. It was stagnant theatrically. The digital revolution was passing it by. Drastic measures had to be taken.”[5] Gelb then implemented an action plan touching on every sector of the opera house’s activities and seeking to revitalize the opera experience on every level. He recruited the best directors, obtained engagements by star singers and put together a seasonal program of canonical operas. He had these filmed for dissemination on a panoply of media platforms, the first of which was live transmission in movie theatres. In this he created the brand name which quickly became recognized around the world: The Met: Live in HD.
Gelb, with a background in both television production and classical music, had the idea of applying to opera the basics of the live sporting event on television: “For these transmissions, our perspective was to make them resemble a sporting event seen live by bringing the viewer backstage as soon as the curtain falls.”[6] In doing so, Gelb was taking up in cinema the method adopted in television in 1977 with the PBS series Live from the Met, with its “behind the scenes” guided tours during intermissions. These special broadcasts devoted exclusively to viewers in movie theatres took them through the performance starting from before the curtain rise and during intermissions. A presenter, usually a well-known opera singer, addressed viewers directly facing the camera, giving an overview of the opera’s plot and its next act, met up with singers and performers backstage and shared opera directing and production secrets.
Taking advantage of high-definition capturing techniques and of the digital networking of movie theatres, Gelb seized a completely unexploited niche and almost immediately reached a global audience. He avoided issues involved in television distribution, which is saturated with content, and could send his own content around the world without taking geographical rights territories into account. He straightened out the finances of an institution in debt and, in part, made his stage productions profitable and his production costs viable. Less than a year after his appointment, the new general manager of the Metropolitan Opera had created the new sector of live stage events on screen. The formula quickly set a precedent for other prestigious and emblematic institutions, first of all in opera and then in the performing arts (theatre and ballet) and in other “cultural series.”[7]
From conception to reality, several legal and technical hurdles had to be cleared before the first transmission. First of all, Gelb had to negotiate a profit-sharing arrangement with the Met labour unions for the capturing and digital dissemination rights of The Met: Live in HD programs. For their part, chief engineer Mark Schubin and his technical team got to work putting together a producing and directing team, establishing agreements with the satellite aggregators and, through the intermediary of the Met’s distribution partners[8], for selling the programming to movie theatre exhibitors around the world. Since the beginning of the transmissions, most captures have been directed by Gary Halvorson, a former specialist in directing live shoots of American sitcoms and televised special events.[9]
On 30 December 2006, the Met successfully launched the first season of The Met: Live in HD with a shortened version, in English, of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute, performed with giant marionettes created by Julie Taylor. The opera was captured in multiple-camera HD and transmitted live via four satellites to movie theatres in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Norway. Two months earlier the technical crew had carried out a digital transmission test in real time which had revealed a breakage in the transmission of the digital feed of sounds and images, meaning that it was sent correctly from New York but not received at every reception point. The crew then identified several factors causing the failure in the transmission and reception of the signal and developed a series of procedures still in use today. The Met produces each capture in-house to this day and supervises the entire transmission chain, from the moment the digital sound and image feed is sent to the satellite network to its reception in each movie theatre.
The Met: Live in HD initiative extends the Metropolitan Opera’s long history by bringing together creativity and technological innovation. It is one of a series of experiments in live transmission in the wake of the Théâtrophone, Radio-Telephone and Theatre TV[10], this time by combining voices and images which have been captured and digitized in order to be disseminated on the global digital network.
