Bizet and Menotti on TV in the 1950s

Synopsis

On this day in 1952, thirty-one theaters nationwide offered the first pay-per view Met opera telecast. This was a regularly-scheduled performance of Bizet’s Carmen broadcast live from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, featuring Risë Stevens in the title role and Fritz Reiner conducting. The performance was relayed to the theaters by means of a closed TV circuit.*

Beginning in 1948, the Metropolitan Opera had experimented with live telecasts of their opening night performances, but relatively few people in the U.S. owned TV sets at the time. By 1952, most American households had TVs, but the Met’s manager, Rudolf Bing, was dead-set against any further free telecasts. The 1952 pay-per-view experiment was not successful, and it wasn't until 1976 — after Bing had resigned — that live telecasts of Metropolitan Opera performances resumed on public television.

The most successful of all commercial telecasts of a live opera performance occurred in 1951, when, on Christmas Eve that year, NBC-TV broadcast Amahl and the Night Visitors by Gian-Carlo Menotti on Christmas. NBC’s black-and-white kinescope recording of that premiere performance was broadcast annually for a number of years — until it was accidentally erased by a network employee.** Although Amahl is no longer an annual visitor to television, it is still staged this time of year by amateur and professional opera companies around the world.

*Currently the Metropolitan Opera offers a series of live opera performances transmitted in high-definition video via satellite from Lincoln Center in New York City to select venues, primarily movie theaters, in the United States and other parts of the world. The first transmission was of a condensed English-language version of Mozart's The Magic Flute on December 30, 2006.

**One surviving copy of the original kinescope did surface in a California archive, and was shown at broadcast museums on both coasts in 2001 to celebrate the work's 50th anniversary.

Music Played in Today's Program

Georges Bizet (1838-1875): Carmen Suite No. 1; Orchestre National de France; Seiji Ozawa, conductor; EMI 63898

Giancarlo Menotti (1911-2007): March from Amahl and the Night Visitors; New Zealand Symphony; Andrew Schenck, conductor; Koch 7005

On This Day

Births

• 1803 - French composer Hector Berlioz, in Côte-St.-André, near Grenoble

• 1876 - Polish composer Mieczyslaw Karlowicz, in Wiszniew (Swiecany district), Lithuania

• 1908 - American composer Elliott Carter, in New York

Premieres

• 1726 - Bach: Secular Cantata No. 207 (Vereinigte Zwietracht der wechselnden Saiten) for the installation of philologist and jurist Gottleib Kortte as Professor of Law at the University of Leipzig

• 1873 - Brahms: String Quartet No. 1, in Vienna by the Hellmesberger Quartet

• 1908 - Delius: In a Summer Garden, by the London Philharmonic

• 1925 - Nielsen: Symphony No. 6 (Sinfonia Semplice), by Royal Orchestra in Copenhagen, with the composer conducting

• 1935 - Cowell: Mosaic Quartet (String Quartet No. 3), by the Modern Art Quartet at the 7th of the WPA Composers’ Forum-Laboratories, at the Midtown Community Center in New York

• 1950 - Hindemith: Clarinet Concerto, by the Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy conducting, with Benny Goodman the soloist

• 1959 - Dutilleux: Symphony No. 2, by the Boston Symphony, Charles Munch conducting

• 1981 - David Diamond: Violin Sonata No. 2, at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., by Robert McDuffie (violin) and William Black (piano)

• 1985 - Philip Glass & Robert Moran: opera The Juniper Tree, at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Others

• 1721 - J.S. Bach’s employer, Prince Leopold of Cöthen (27) marries Frederica Henrietta von Anhalt-Berngurg (19) at Bernburg. The new Princess of Cöthen does not share her husband’s passion for music, and one year later, Bach applies for a new job in Leipzig.

• 1918 - Russian-born conductor Nikolai Sokoloff leads the first concert of the Cleveland Orchestra at Gray's Armory, presented as a benefit for St. Ann’s Church. His program included Victor Herbert’s American Fantasy, Bizet’s Carmen Suite, two movements of Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4, Liadov’s Enchanted Lake, and Liszt’s Les Préludes.

• 1928 - The Society of Friends of Music organized by The Library of Congress;