Magic on the Air Waves

Opera is hard enough to produce in the opera house, where the conductor is only 20-odd feet from his cast. On TV it is twice as hard: the conductor is in another room. This week the NBC Opera Theatre televised its 38th opera production, Mozart's masterpiece, The Magic Flute, two hours of soaring music and symbolic drama, beautifully sung and bewitchingly visualized in color.

On the podium offscreen was Musical Director Peter Herman Adler, wearing a particularly abstracted look because the music of his orchestra impinged directly on one ear, while the singing of the distant cast and chorus entered his other ear through a headphone. If he wanted to see how the action looked, he peeked at a nearby monitor TV screen. He was also watched by a TV camera, and his image was flashed on monitor screens in the chorus room and at various points in the block-long onetime movie studio that served as the stage. There, relay conductors glued their eyes to his baton and conducted the singers. Probably the most remarkable fact of all: more than on any stage. The Magic Flute's fairy-tale plot seemed perfectly at home on TV, the medium of Disneyland and space cadets (in fact, Tamino's costume resembled a space suit).

Top singer in a high-flying cast was Leontyne Price, whose liquid soprano never sounded truer or sweeter. The brilliant music was matched by TV Director Kirk Browning's elegant camera shots, and the designs made of heads and bodies by Stage Director George Balanchine. It was not quite matched by the singable but self-conscious English text by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, but it all added up to the finest TV opera to date.

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