Popcorn with your Puccini: can opera on screen ever work?

Composers have harnessed TV and cinema since Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors pulled in five million viewers 75 years ago but for my money Kombat Opera’s satire showed us how to do it best It’s not even Halloween, but here’s an operatic Christmas story for you.

This is the 75th anniversary of the first opera made for television: Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors, broadcast at Yuletide in 1951 and watched by five million people across the US in a production sponsored by Hallmark.

You can watch the original broadcast on YouTube : it was introduced with wit, self-deprecation and early 50s elegance by Menotti himself (vastly less charmingly, the role of King Balthazar was played by a singer in blackface).

Chet Allen’s performance as the boy, Amahl, is staggering, and even more moving is Rosemary Kuhlmann’s Mother, especially in her aria, All That gold!.

Amahl is “an opera for children because it tries to recapture my own childhood”, Menotti said.

It was played on US TV every Christmastime throughout the 50s, and was recorded and remade in new productions the next decade, while the BBC picked it up in 1953, and there was even an Australian TV version.

Less than an hour long, Menotti’s festive fable works because of the intimacy of its story, and its refusal to patronise its intended audience.

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