The Phenomenal Side of Operatic Performance: The Implications of Promotion Strategies on Cinematic Representations of the 21st Century

Abstract

During recent decades, scholars have paid attention to the ways in which marketing strategies surrounded the participation of professional opera singers in 1930s/1940s Hollywood films. Opera singers used cinema to promote themselves as film stars, while Hollywood, in turn, made use of real-life celebrities in order to market films containing opera to a wider audience. Recent cinema, just like films from this earlier period, reflects cross-promotion strategies between cinema and the classical music industry through the participation of professional opera singers. When considering these singers' audio-visual appearances and the roles their performances play within the film plots, some films reveal interesting connections with the historical predecessors. This article investigates the use of cross-marketing strategies in three recent films and queries the broader tropes they adhere to through the configurations of the singers' performances and their roles in the fictional situations. Through exploring these films, I argue that they promote a representation of opera that combines two specific tropes in the process of marketing. An audio-visual display of the singers as real-life celebrities points to an elaboration of the aspect of singer promotion seen in films from the 1930s and early 1940s. Beyond this, the more recent trope of associating opera with an audience listening with rapt attention is included, which casts the opera singer in a new light and enhances this bodily promotion of the singer.