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Television Opera: The Fall of Opera Commissioned for Television.

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By Jennifer Barnes. Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2003. [x, 124 p. ISBN 0-85115-912-5. $60.] Illustrations, facsimiles, bibliography, index.

Since the advent of the age of mechanical reproduction, opera production has exploited such modern media as television, video, and film as well as the traditional live stage. The proliferation of technologically mediated operas has stimulated critical inquiries, and the scholarship on these mediated operas has rapidly grown over the past few decades. Yet there are only a handful of book-length studies on the topic. While the existing scholarship has shown a tendency to focus on the opera-cinema encounter (for instance, Jeremy Tambling's inaugural work Opera, Ideology and Film [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987]; the collection Between Opera and Cinema [New York: Routledge, 2002] edited by Jeongwon Joe and Rose Theresa; and David Schroeder's Cinema's Illusions, Opera's Allure [New York: Continuum, 2002]), Jennifer Barnes's book is entirely devoted to the televisual mediation of opera.

Many opera scholars (and opera fans as well) have shown strongly negative reactions toward the technological mediation of opera. Sam Abel noted, "If film turns opera into a Hollywood epic, television turns opera into a nighttime soap opera, a lurid melodrama where the actors happen to be singing along with the sound track" (Sam Abel, Opera in...

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