Complete with spear-carriers and prima donnas, grand opera was launching a mass assault on television. ABC started it with ponderous telecasts from the Metropolitan of Otello and Der Rosenkavalier. Last week, in the first of a series, CBS and Artistic Director Lawrence Tibbett proved that opera could be sprightly as well as tuneful, in an 80-minute version of Bizet's Carmen on the Opera Television Theater.
Gladys Swarthout's fiery Carmen was played without the exaggerated gestures common to the Met's gigantic stage; Tenor Robert Rounseville brought a matinée idol's profile to Don José, but obviously had to work hard to restrain the grimaces that ordinarily go with a big voice. Like all the others, Baritone Robert Merrill as Escamillo had to unlearn one of the cardinal rules of opera—taking musical cues from the orchestra leader. The singers set the musical pace of the show because, roaming their nine sets, they were sometimes 200 feet from the 40 musicians jammed into a corner of the studio.
Tibbett feels that abbreviated, swift-paced TV operas will not do any serious damage to the venerable and tradition-encrusted body of grand opera. "To my way of thinking, we're evolutionists, not revolutionists," he explains. "We don't want to alienate what I would call good conservative opinion." The major purpose of TV opera, as Tibbett sees it: "To keep opera's present public, and develop a new one."
This week NBC plunges into opera with Kurt Weill's Down in the Valley (Sat. 10 p.m., NBCTV) as the first of ,a monthly series of operas in English. The others: Madame Butterfly, Tales of Hoffmann, and Strauss's The Bat.