Let's return to our little "liveness" poem from earlier, to see if we can get any of those definitions to stick on Live in HD:

Sense of presence

Live in HD works overtime to create a sense of presence, namely a sense of presence within the Metropolitan Opera House. To better fix you in the Here-and-Now of a 7:30-pm-curtain-at-62nd-and-Columbus, Live in HD serves up highly specific spatial and temporal content alongside the opera. During intermission on the broadcast, Met stars like Renee Fleming and Deborah Voigt serve as backstage hosts, interviewing designers, craftspeople, and singers, sometimes immediately as they are stepping off stage (in this, the Live in HD broadcasts can take on something of a sporting event’s energy, a phenomenon written about by Eddie Paterson and Lara Stevens in their essay “From Shakespeare to the Super Bowl: Theatre and Global Liveness”)

During pauses for set transitions, the broadcast takes you once again backstage, showing a live feed of the stagehands changing the set over. All of this is done in service of creating and immersing you in the feeling of being present in the Metropolitan Opera House. This sense of presence, however, is not the sense of presence felt by the audience member experiencing the “genuinely live” piece of opera. That audience member does not see the explication of Aida’s stage lifts, or Elina Garanca in costume as Sesto sending love to her family in Latvia; while the set transitions happen, they just see the curtain, and the words “Brief Pause” on their supertitle screen, and during intermission they move through lobby spaces, not backstage spaces. 

In seeking to create a live-feeling sense of space for its simulcast audiences, the Met ends up opening some of its secret, locked doors. Some of the mystery that is integral to the “live” opera-going experience (the wondering what the singers are thinking, or what the set will look like when the curtain lifts) is gone, but a sense of presence remains — you may not be at the Met, but what you are not-at is a deeper and more open Met than you may have seen in a lifetime sitting in the orchestra section

People come together

People come together at the Met and they come together in movie theaters at malls to catch a dispatch from a togetherness that they are eager to join. My first Live in HD broadcast was Orfeo ed Euridice in 2009, at the Regal Cinemas in North Brunswick, New Jersey. My mother, an opera fan herself, took me. This year, I took my mother to the Metropolitan Opera to see La fanciulla del west. The togethernesses we experienced at these two events, one undeniably live and one potentially not, were largely comparable. 

Plunges into visibility and disappears into memory 

This one Live in HD certainly does not do — it plunges into visibility and then plunges into on demand streaming, from whence it typically plunges further into illegal downloads, uploaded to unlisted youtube videos and swapped around on tumblr.

A troubling trace of a precedent text

All of opera is haunted by this sort of precedence. This is particularly noticeable in older bootlegs, in which the prompter can be heard, flatly delivering the libretto in the half-second before the singer turns it into heart wrenching emotion, his voice an all-too present trace of a precedent text. Opera, I have argued, is also particularly haunted by precedent performances, in addition to text. Live in HD, with its remarkably small and often-recurring pool of canonical operas, does little to dispel these traces — in fact, it is uniquely difficult to argue for a romanticized notion of theatrical ephemerality (a “plunges into visibility and disappears into memory”, for example) after having run the numbers on a cultural institution that has performed the same production of La Boheme nearly every year since 1981.

Meaning only in relation 

Live in HD certainly exists in relation to live at the Met, but Auslander’s idea that mediatized technologies have created “liveness” by opposition is perhaps not so useful after all. Liveness and mechanization can indeed coexist. Marianne Doane, in her book Stillness and Time: Photography and the Moving Image gives the example of “live television” as feeling simultaneously instantaneous and replicated:

 When we watch live broadcast television we have the impression that something is happening only once: this is not going to happen again, we think, it is “living,” live, real time, whereas we also know, on the other hand, it is being produced by the strongest, most specific repetition machines. (p 24)

Doane’s formulation is a good description of the Live in HD experience, which is at once giddily immediate and slickly corporate. It is also however, an accurate description of the Met as a whole — to watch an opera at the Met is to experience something undoubtedly, thrillingly live, but to watch the thirtieth or so performance of La Boheme in one season and to know they staged the same production last year and will stage it again next year is to experience a repetition machine stronger and more specific than the cameras that will capture one of those Bohemes and beam it out across the world could ever be. Of course, this is not unique to the Met — from decades old productions to centuries old cadenzas, opera is a repetition machine, one of the strongest and most specific of them all.