Based on the theory Auslander creates on live and mediated performance and its use on the popular music, I try to see if his theory has an application on the other side, on classical’s music “big entertainment”, Opera, and especially mediated Opera, Opera for film. With the term “Opera for film” I refer to the opera that is made according to the need for mass-consumption. Opera that can be used in a festival and/or in a film. That means such a production first, needs to adopt the televisual ideology and second the development of sound and visual technology that dominates media and arts nowadays. I use as my framework Auslander’s Liveness. First I analyze his concept of live and mediatized performance and what he means with the term “liveness”. Then I examine his use of Benjamin’s and Baudrillard’s theory in his attempt to define “live” and reproduction in reference to real and then how the Baudrillardian paradigm of simulation helps him to establish that “mediatized” performance derives its authority from its reference to the live or the real”[1] and vise versa in an endless circulation in rock culture. Then I examine if his use of Baudrillardian paradigm can works for the opera culture and particularly in the production of Puccini’s Tosca at the Bregenz Festival in August 2007 which was also used in the filming of James Bond movie The Quantum of Solace and revived for a second season in the same festival in 2008. Moreover, I use the ideology of seduction of the camera, that emerged with television, in order to show the possibility of simulation in Tosca and the tendency to be produced in order to authenticate the recording.
Auslander in his effort to imbalance the live and mediatized abolishes the opposition between them creating an overlapping relation “whereas mediatized performance derives its authority from its reference to the live or the real, the live now derives its authority from its reference to the mediatized, which derives its authority from its reference to the live, etc.”[2]. His defines mediatized as non-live, contrasting on Phelan’s ontological fact of performance. And then liveness, as a product of the mediatized, is a construction. A construction of live performance, which exists only through circulating representations. The real is live. But, since live has overlapping relation with mediated then the real has a same relation with the mediatized too. They are not opposites. The Tosca at the Bregenz Festival is real, according to Baudrillard, because it can give an equivalent reproduction, and live because it can be recorded. The use of the media technologies as the mobile screen projecting the soprano Tosca, and the microphones amplifying the sound of the orchestra and the voice of the singers do not reduce the performance value. On the contrary, in the capitalist economy of repetition where the progress is associated with the development of the media technologies that shape our perception of the world and thus the real, the mediatization of performance become the real. Tosca is real because it mediates its message in the same way messages are mediated in reality. The reality as we perceive it today. The liveness of Tosca exists in the video and sound technology. The Baudrillardian paradigm of simulation used in the cultural realm shows that the opera culture is becoming a popular commodity loosing its artistic dimension. In an economy, as Jacque Attali showed (1985), which is based in repetition, the mass-production of its cultural objects enhanced by the development of technology is transformed in simulation. Following the “three orders of simulacra” and the ideology of seduction of the camera, that emerged with television, we formulated an insightful context examining and showing that opera culture tends to be produced in order to authenticate the recording.
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[1] Auslander, Ph., Liveness: Performance in a mediatized culture, 39.
[2] Ibid.