The Opera House

Opera is, in its pure sense, a uni­ver­sal art. The uni­ty of orches­tra and cho­rus in heav­en­ly song can rever­ber­ate through any­body, nev­er dis­tin­guish­ing social bound­aries. Return­ing to this inclu­sive expe­ri­ence is the agen­da of direc­tor Susan Froemke, who has painstak­ing­ly com­piled this trove of footage from the archives of the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera, (“the Met”), in New York. Her inter­vie­wees hard­ly come from priv­i­lege, most hear­ing their first operas from the con­fines of the stand­ing bal­cony. As Alfred Hubay, a box office man­ag­er, remarks, that is where you find the peo­ple who come to listen.

Ever since the Met became a hive of dia­mond-encrust­ed patri­cians, opera has strug­gled to remove its rep­u­ta­tion as ​‘high’ cul­ture. Froemke’s cru­sade is admirable, but she does not offer an alter­na­tive, instead show­ing ​“mas­ter builder” Robert Moses bull­doz­ing homes to make way for con­cert halls and con­ser­va­toires. He is depict­ed as an unflinch­ing vil­lain, laugh­ably accom­pa­nied by thun­der­ing extracts from Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle. For a doc­u­men­tary sup­pos­ed­ly cel­e­brat­ing the Met, it spends a rather long time reveal­ing how the cul­tur­al class­es stamped out the work­ing peo­ple who got in their way.

The Opera House is an unde­ni­ably banal title – the impli­ca­tion being that there will be a shared focus on music and archi­tec­ture. It is incred­i­bly frus­trat­ing to see these aspects con­sis­tent­ly seg­re­gat­ed, as the film refus­es to mar­ry their styl­is­tic sym­me­tries. There are a few love­ly anec­dotes, includ­ing the acci­den­tal design of a chan­de­lier when paint was flicked onto a con­cep­tu­al draw­ing, but by fail­ing to dis­cuss its rela­tion to music, the artis­tic syn­the­sis that cre­at­ed New York’s Lin­coln Cen­ter is alarm­ing­ly absent.

Things get going in the final act, with a furi­ous recre­ation of the New Met 1966 debut of Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopa­tra. Burst­ing with ten­sion, the back­stage mania makes for more dra­mat­ic view­ing than the opera itself. It is a sud­den rush that arrives all too late, end­ing with a ran­dom leap to a con­tem­po­rary per­for­mance of Wagner’s Tris­tan und Isol­de. Its heart­break­ing ​‘Liebestod’ aria draws tears from the eyes – a swan­song to missed opportunity.