Televising Opera Broadcasting and Performance in the North Atlantic

Televising Opera offers fascinating new insights into the early years of opera production on television in the United Kingdom, United States, and Canada. Examining both new operas written for television and repertory operas remade in the studio, the book tells the story of how English-language broadcasters remade opera in an effort to reshape performance, production, and composition in the mid-twentieth century.

Author Danielle Ward-Griffin argues that opera on television may prove to be the missing piece in the historical debates that continue to swirl around the so-called “opera crisis” in the mid-twentieth century, as the experiments that took place in television studios influenced the way operas were composed, performed, and experienced. Drawing upon previously unexamined material from media and broadcasting archives, Televising Opera reconstructs how broadcasters intervened in operatic culture. Ward-Griffin examines how television renewed realism as an aesthetic, outlines how broadcasters sought to stimulate new composition, and delineates the early principles for co-production. In doing so, Televising Opera not only offers a new history of opera on television, but a broader reconceptualization of the relationship between the worlds of opera performance and broadcasting technology.

Danielle Ward-Griffin is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Rice University. Her articles have won the 2019 Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award from ASCAP, the 2020 Westrup Prize from Music & Letters, and the 2020 Ruth Solie Award from the North American British Music Studies Association. Her research has been supported by a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as grants from the Society for American Music and the American Musicological Society.