The Art of Singing: Golden Voices of the Opera

Throughout the year the Pharos Arts Foundation presents screenings of an eclectic range of films to showcase various ways of art expression and history. Screenings at the Shoe Factory promise some engaging and exciting evenings of music and art documentaries, rare sound and vision footage, as well as historical performances.

Twenty-six illustrious opera stars of the 20th century, among them Caruso, Gigli, Tetrazzini, Ponsele, Chaliapin, Flagstad, Melchior, Bjorling, Tebaldi, Sutherland, Corelli, and Callas, are featured in sound and vision in rare footage, much of it previously unavailable.

"Our noisy century began quietly in one respect - its moving-pictures went silent. The 'silent screen' they called it, and to our ears the phrase sounds like poetry. The cinemas themselves were a different matter. People laughed a lot, cried a little, held their breadths and let them out again, while the pianist played on. Occasionally, the heroine might be seen to sing a song, and though nothing could be heard the innocence of her face and the tears which coursed down leathery cheeks in response so touched the heart that old and young, sentimental and cynical alike, were sure they had heard the singer and were moved too. Sometimes the subject itself had to do with music and the character was supposedly a singer. To today's film-goers the obstacles to credibility might seem insuperable; our ancestors were less dependent.

The two grand houses, the Metropolitan and Oscar Hammerstein's Manhattan, played to large and eager audiences; their rivalry, their supply of new operas and new stars, were talk-of-the-town. Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco and other leading cities duly followed. For the very first time in operatic history, people had these very stars in their own homes: the phonograph or gramophone transported Caruso and Melba by miracle' not to the casual, taken-for-granted and never-given-a-second-thought acceptance of today's ears, but to ears that listened and concentrated in wonder. The opera singers became domesticated, almost an exotic and enchanted extension of the family. This opera-craze and the raise of the two essentially linked arts and industries - those of recorded sound and the motion picture - helped each other from the start, so that in films a pattern persisted even after its natural attractions had faded. It began with the greatest of the recording operatic stars, the tenor Enrico Caruso....''

Runtime: 116 min
Genre: Music
Language: English
Subtitles: English
Production Year: 2003

Limited Seating, Pre-booking essential