TY - JOUR AU - Ward-Griffin, Danielle AB - On April 25, 2020, the Metropolitan Opera broadcast its first “At Home” Gala online. Functioning as a fundraiser for the institution, the gala showcased singers performing from their homes via personal devices. The Metropolitan Opera orchestra and chorus were also featured in prerecorded excerpts conducted by music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin. With only a couple of minor glitches, the event rivalled the Met’s in-person galas in both length and star power, and reviewers praised it as an unparalleled musical and technical feat.1 Of course, the Met has not been alone in experimenting with streaming performances during the COVID-19 pandemic. With opera houses unable to welcome patrons, many institutions have opened up their archives of pre-recorded performances for at-home audiences.2 Orchestras and choirs, too, have filmed themselves in “virtual” ensembles synchronized to a click track or a video of a conductor.3 But the Met “At Home” Gala was different: it provided new content; it was “live,” and it was, perhaps most importantly, broadcast from and to the home. This last element even set it apart from the Metropolitan Opera’s popular “Live in HD” broadcasts from the stage to the cinema.4 Instead, the Met “At Home” Gala recalled an older form of broadcasting, that of opera on television, particularly in its attempts to cultivate an immediate, intimate experience. And yet, despite or perhaps because of these efforts, the “At Home” Gala was permeated by an overwhelming sense of absence and distance, on the part of both the performers and the viewers. Although 2020 was the first time the Met streamed a gala online, it was not the first time the opera house had broadcast such an important event. In the 1950s, the opera house experimented with broadcasting operas on network television and to the cinema,5 and in the 1970s, it began to feature opening nights as part of the long-running “Live from the Met” series on public television.6 Like other “media events,” these broadcasts compensated for the fact that the audience member was not on site by stressing the immediacy of the event, particularly its “liveness.”7 Such was the case for the gala: it was broadcast live and available on the Met’s website for fewer than twenty-four hours after its end.8 In a media landscape increasingly shaped by on-demand viewing, this gala placed unusual demands on viewers, asking them to devote significant time and energy to watching a four-hour show within a limited time period. In this respect, the gala was in keeping with early opera on television, which, even once it ceased to be “live” in the early 1960s, still treated the broadcast as a one-time event that should interrupt the flow of daily life.9 The result was an “occasion,” in which the “liveness” of the broadcast was not necessarily inherent in the performance, but rather found through the shared audience experience of watching the performance at (or nearly at) the same time. Such engineering was key to the Met “At Home” Gala. With much of the audience under stay-at-home orders, when one day can feel like it bleeds into the next, the gala offered a weekend occasion that seemed more “immediate” and “real” than the blur of everyday life that surrounded it. But while being “live” may have created the sense of occasion, it was not enough in itself to provide a sense of engagement. This is where the other key component of early broadcasting came in: that of intimacy. Producers of television broadcasts frequently stressed how the medium’s reception in the home required a different, more personal mode of address, as though the singer were offering you a private, life-sized performance at your fireside.10 From the outset, this gala recalled earlier attempts to personalize television performances. Although Met Opera manager Peter Gelb introduced and hosted the broadcast, conductor Nézet-Séguin functioned as his more charming interlocutor, thus continuing a long tradition of putting a charismatic conductor front-and-center in music broadcasts on television.11 Like Leonard Bernstein in his appearances in the Omnibus series on television in the 1950s, Nézet-Séguin not only provided musical leadership, but also embodied the music—or, more specifically, the emotional effect of making and listening to music in a group.12 This was clear in Nézet-Séguin’s comments; he often recalled the joy of making music with the Met orchestra and chorus, explaining to Gelb, “I’m a man from the chorus, this is how I came to music, in a group and this is why these times are so strange when we cannot make music together, really.” His warm presence also came to stand in for the joy of making music: in the prerecorded segments, his smiling face was often the first one seen in a large screen shot as he raised his baton, recalling similar opera video shots of conductors in the pit at the start of the overture. The prerecorded segments also reconstructed the group atmosphere that Nézet-Séguin missed, even though each member of the orchestra had recorded their track separately. For example, the orchestra’s performance of the Prelude to act 3 of Wagner’s Lohengrin began with the musicians in “Brady Bunch” squares counting down in unison before offering a full screen shot of Nézet-Séguin giving the downbeat. Throughout the piece, his “square” was surrounded by those of the other players, almost as he would be in the pit. But such “togetherness” was a post-production fiction, only available to the viewer, as Nézet-Séguin made clear in his comments: “Hearing them now and conducting from a distance like this makes me miss them even more.” By using technology to overcome spatial and temporal distance, the video belied this separation so as to create the feeling of togetherness for the audience members watching on their own at home. It thus epitomizes the COVID-19 experience of being “alone together,” in which such “togetherness” can, paradoxically, only be found in the individual experience. The singers, too, were key to creating a sense of togetherness, even as they lamented this forced separation. Whether or not they performed in formal dress or jeans, all took the opportunity to address audience members directly. In the piano introduction to the “Ave Maria” from Verdi’s Otello, Met Live in HD host Renée Fleming used the opening chords to offer some commentary on the suffering of Italy during the pandemic and of the country’s role in opera history.13 Its curated intimacy recalled similar moments when the host speaks directly to the audience in the Live in HD series, but now shrunk to the size of the computer monitor.14 Other singers also made connections between their song selections and the sentiment of the moment: Elza van den Heever focused on celebrating “the simple life” in Stephanus le Roux Marais’s “Heimwee”; Nicole Car and Étienne Dupuis sang a duet about washing your hands, “Baigne d’eau mes mains et mes lèvres,” from Massenet’s Thaïs; and Joseph Calleja made a somewhat forced connection between the pandemic and “Ah! Lêve-toi, soleil” from Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, because “we need the sun to shine on this problem.” Others related their memories of singing these songs in the past, thus assigning them a more individual and intimate meaning: Sonya Yoncheva shared that Dvořák’s “Song to the Moon” from Rusalka was the first song she had sung in public at the age of fifteen, while Roberto Alagna and Aleksandra Kurzak chose to perform the aria that “had made them a couple,” before launching into a campy send-up of “Caro elisir” from Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’amore. Such commentary represents a departure from stage etiquette, seeking to personalize the musical performance by investing it with little-known details of the singer’s own life. Like interviews and “behind the scenes” features in earlier opera broadcasting, including from the Met, it compensates for the lack of physical proximity by promising a closer relationship to the singer than what would be available in the opera theater. It also confirmed what Guardian reviewer Tim Ashley called the rule of any gala: “it is more about the singer than the song.”15 Indeed, although the theme of the gala and the Met fundraising campaign, “The Voice Must Be Heard,” suggested that the voice itself was sufficient to create an emotional response in the viewer, it was often guided by the singers’ own confessions of how they felt listening to or singing these arias. Before launching into “Pena tiranna” from Handel’s Amadigi di Gaula, Anthony Roth Costanzo shared, “I’m just overwhelmed by this beauty today. I’ve cried twelve times. I’m going to try not to cry now.” Following her a cappella version of Bernstein’s “Somewhere” from West Side Story, Isabel Leonard revealed to viewers that “it’s hard to keep all of my emotions out of that one,” and Jamie Barton declared that “it’s fun to sing again” after a spirited rendition of “O don fatale” from Verdi’s Don Carlo. Such comments went beyond the idea that “the voice must be heard” by a passive audience member. Instead, the focus on the act of singing—especially the emotions it may engender—almost seemed to allow viewers to tap into the performers’ physical experience of performing. This is in keeping with what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin have called the “insatiable desire for immediacy” that drives media: “the logic of immediacy dictates that the medium itself should disappear and leave us in the presence of the thing represented: sitting in the race car or standing on a mountaintop.”16 But this sense of immediacy is often created by using additional layers of mediation, what Bolter and Grusin call “hypermedia.” Much the same logic applies here, in which the commentary on (or “mediation”) of the song by the singer is meant to make it more transparent, so that the audience member can feel the (simulated) thrill of singing. The immediacy of the music, then, is somewhat, and ironically, contingent on the singer explaining its effect. The gala also benefited from showcasing the intimate relationships between singers. The singers introduced one another and doubled as audience members, providing “real time” feedback. After Erin Morley’s brilliant, self-accompanied performance of “Chacun le sait” from Donizetti’s La fille du Régiment, Michael Volle spoke for many online viewers: “Erin, I’m speechless. What are you doing? You not only sing great but you play the piano. I’m really . . hoo, you make me nervous!” The connection between the singers also allowed many of them to reminisce about past performances together—and, whether by design or accident, each singer seemed to be close friends with the one that followed, at least as seen by the effusiveness with which they described their colleague. Another strategy designed to manufacture intimacy was to invite the viewers into the homes of the singers. Whereas “Live in HD” broadcasts have showcased the grandness of the Metropolitan Opera House in what James Steichen has called “institutional dramaturgy,”17 the Met “At Home” Gala emphasized the more private side of the opera world. In this respect, it recalled early television opera’s focus on the domestic setting, but with a difference—now it was the opera singer’s home that was the site of attention, showcasing the individual’s space on a (virtual) world stage. This allowed the opera fans to look around, a point not lost on Gelb, who called it an “opera fan’s fantasy come true.” Singers, too, took advantage of the occasion and provided Easter eggs in the background: Günther Groissböck placed a mask on a statue of Wagner; Anita Rachvelishvili sang next to a “no autographs” sign on her piano; and Alagna and Kurzak even shared the “staging” of their living room in a Facebook live post. In many ways, such “staging” reveals the extent to which the entire relationship between audience member and singer is always curated, even in such “off-stage” spaces. Ironically, efforts to close the distance between audience and performer are the most prone to manipulation, as can be seen in the Met Live in HD’s own highly controlled and often scripted “behind the scenes” features.18 Although some reviewers enjoyed the “sneak peek” into the singers’ homes, others wanted greater intimacy, asking for a more unvarnished view of the singer’s home life. As Telegraph reviewer Rupert Christiansen put it, these on-location shots failed to “offer any tantalising peeks into their domestic circumstances . . almost everyone stuck primly to best behaviour and their pianos.”19 Despite or perhaps because of the promise of immediacy, the Met “At Home” Gala could leave the viewer wanting more. In staging the homes of the singers, this dramaturgy was meant to make the private more public, but in so doing, it made those “unseen” elements—the “true” private world—all the more intriguing. And although the singers’ homes were on display, it was, ultimately, the Metropolitan Opera that was positioned as the real star of the show. In a special appeal before the gala, Nézet-Séguin had identified the Met as the “home” for artists—and this theme was echoed by the singers. Speaking from their kitchen in France, Diana Damrau and Nicholas Testé expressed the wish that we “all will be reunited soon, at home at the Met,” while Michael Volle said, “Let’s hope next time [we perform it’s] live again on stage at our home at the Met.” This theme of “home,” of course, has been taken up by many arts organizations in order to connect with the stay-at-home situation of their patrons: the Royal Opera House hosts the “our house to yours” series, while other organizations have created “living room” concerts.20 But for the Met, it went far beyond a play on words. Instead, the gala and the campaign characterized the Met as the global home for opera, with Nézet-Séguin remarking, “It’s like a big family. We all love each other but also we respect our skills and we come together as this force that is absolutely not comparable with anything else in the world of the arts.” This messaging permeated “The Voice Must Be Heard” campaign, which identified the stage crew, instrumentalists, make-up and costume departments, and other essential workers as members of the Met family (Although, as the press noted, some members of the family were being better taken care of during the pandemic than others).21 According to Nézet-Séguin, the audience is also a member of this family, as they get a “feeling of belonging to the same world, belonging to a community.”22 To be sure, such inclusive rhetoric is smart strategy, as this gala needed to inspire audience members to donate money to their operatic “home” or “family.” But, with the gala broadcast to 162 countries and watched by 750,000 viewers, the Met is not simply the local house or repertory theater. Instead, this rhetoric of family and home helped to increase the sense of intimacy, while simultaneously positioning the Met as the mecca for opera lovers around the world. This nexus of family and home reached its apex in the selection of “Va, pensiero,” which reunited the Metropolitan Opera chorus and orchestra for the first and only time during the gala. Within the plot of Verdi’s Nabucco, this choral tribute to “homeland” is sung by the Hebrew slaves during the Babylonian captivity, but it is most famously associated with a nascent Italian nation. In the gala version, it had now been reconfigured to symbolize the Metropolitan Opera. Beginning with the rolling opening chords, the prerecorded video alternated between highlighting instrumental groups and offering composite shots of the choristers. The finale ended with a screen with countless squares, each containing a musician, thus representing the immense forces behind the performance. These faces were then replaced with a still image of the chorus in Elijah Moshinsky’s nearly twenty-year-old production of the opera at the Met. Stage, chorus, orchestra, and audience are all to be reunited in their longing for the Met. The opera house could have asked for no more sympathetic a reading than that of the Observer’s James Jordan, who wrote that the “number’s sense of loneliness and isolation [was] expressive of the artists’ enforced separation from their home company.”23 Indeed, the overwhelming effect of the sung selections in the Met “At Home” Gala was one of nostalgia for live stage performance. Not only did the singers sing arias from roles they had performed at the Met, but, for many of them, their broadcasted performances were overlaid with still images of them in costume and on stage. This strategy seemed intended to prompt the viewer’s memory of having seen these performers at the Met. If this weren’t clear enough, Gelb made the point explicitly, reminiscing with Elīna Garanča, who sang the Habañera, about her turn in the title role of Carmen in 2009, or telling Renée Fleming that “it’s so great to hear you revisiting one of your signature roles [from Verdi’s Otello].” Even when the singer had not yet performed the role at the Met, Gelb made the connection to the opera house, treating it like a “teaser” for a performance to come. After nearly cutting off Javier Camarena before the cabaletta of “Nel furor delle tempeste” from Bellini’s Il pirata, Gelb remarked, “If you were singing this on stage at the Met—and you will sing it at the Met—I’m sure the audience would demand an encore.” This emphasis on the stage was further reinforced by the absence of a live performance by Anna Netrebko, whom Gelb called the Met’s “reigning diva.” Instead, she submitted a prerecorded, polished performance of Rachmaninoff’s “Ne Poy Krasavitsa” from a studio in Vienna. But even here, the Met seemed determined to rebrand it (and her) as part of the opera house. From the very first notes on the piano, the video included a cascade of still images of Netrebko in various productions at the Met. Unlike every other singer in the gala, she was not identified with the role that she was performing, but rather with the institution of the Met—and with opera writ large. However, this performance, along with her husband Yusif Eyvazov’s rendition of “Che gelida manina” from Puccini’s La bohème, was set apart by the professionalism of the filmed recording, thus erecting the very barriers of distance and absence that the “At Home” Gala sought to overcome. Such foregrounding of absence and physical distance is perhaps inevitable in this format. The gala’s greatest technological feat—the criss-crossing between the homes of performers across the world—was central to the presentation of the Met as the “global” home for opera. And yet, it was only possible because of the absence of in-person stage performance.24 Bolter and Grusin have argued that each new media seeks to reform and improve upon the inadequacies of the previous one; what is fascinating about this broadcast is how the very “improvement” is simultaneously the barrier.25 In this respect, the Met “At Home” Gala was not unusual, but rather part of the history of broadcasting opera, which has always struggled to create a more immediate, and arguably self-effacing, presentation of opera by using greater technological means. And yet, as I have argued elsewhere, the audiovisual broadcasting of opera has often reinforced, rather than replaced, the stage.26 Although these streaming performances may be marketed as a way to experience the comfort of the arts during the pandemic—the Met called the gala “its most ambitious effort yet to bring the joy and artistry of opera to audiences everywhere”—the lingering effect is one of longing. And perhaps that is the intent. With opera houses facing a perilous future, they need not only the current support of audience members, but also the desire to return to the opera house. A few weeks before the gala, Gelb had written an article in the New York Times, in which he celebrated the “alchemy of the performing arts” when the performer and audience are in the same space.27 This argument is a common one in performance studies: scholar Peggy Phelan has asserted that “bodily co-presence” is key to and distinguishes live performance from mediated art forms.28 But for a manager who has staked much of his reputation on the success of the Met Live in HD broadcasts, Gelb seemed to walk back his signature program, saying that as much as he “celebrate[s] the proliferation of streamed shows . . nothing compares to the real thing.”29 At every turn, the Met “At Home” Gala served to promote this message, legitimizing the stage as the “real thing” and all else as pale imitations. Despite its high musical and technical quality, the “At Home” Gala does not satisfy the craving for opera, but instead makes the longing for in-person stage performance all the stronger. The Met can only hope that audiences will indulge this craving as soon as it is possible to do so. Danielle Ward-Griffin is an assistant professor of musicology at Rice University. Her research focuses on Benjamin Britten, opera on television, and the relationship between opera production and the place of performance. Articles on these topics have appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Cambridge Opera Journal, Opera Quarterly, Journal of the Society for American Music, and Music & Letters. She has also contributed chapters to various Britten collections. For her writing, she has been awarded the ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson award (2019) and the Westrup Prize (2020). She is currently writing a book on opera on television. Footnotes 1 See, for instance, Anthony Tommasini, “The Met Opera’s At-Home Gala: Informal Yet Profoundly Moving,” New York Times, April 26, 2020; James Jorden, “The Met’s ‘At-Home Gala’ Unites Opera Stars from Around the World,” The Observer, April 28, 2020; David Nice, “Classy Joy and Sorrow in Domestic Settings,” The Arts Desk, April 27, 2020; Tim Ashley, “Thrilling Singing, Live from the Stars’ Living-Rooms,” Guardian, April 26, 2020. Note that the Met “At Home” Gala was originally broadcast on April 25, 2020 at 1 pm EDT and received an “encore” the weekend of June 12−14, 2020. It is now available as part of the Metropolitan Opera’s “On Demand” subscription service. 2 For a list of opera companies offering streaming services, see operawire.com/a-comprehensive-list-of-all-opera-companies-offering-free-streaming-services-right-now/. Opera America has also compiled a schedule of programming, with an emphasis on North American offerings: operaamerica.org/applications/schedule/index.aspx. More recently, various opera houses have begun streaming new performances that are taking place in a house free of audience members; see Imogen Tilden, “Live Music Returns to Royal Opera House for an Online Audience,” Guardian, June 4, 2020; ShaCamree Gowdy, "Houston Grand Opera to Launch Free Digital Shows," Houston Chronicle, August 11, 2020. 3 The performances are too numerous to list here, but among these performances are a number of concerts by opera orchestras, including Opera North’s performance of Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, the Lyric Opera of Chicago Orchestra’s performance of Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” from Walküre, and the Royal Opera House Orchestra and Chorus’s performance of Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus from Messiah. For more on virtual ensemble and choir concerts, see Helena Asprou, “Self-isolating choirs and orchestras are performing powerful at-home concerts during coronavirus outbreak,” Classic FM, May 11, 2020, available at www.classicfm.com/music-news/coronavirus/self-isolating-choirs-orchestras-perform-concerts/; and Imogen Tilden, “Bittersweet Symphony: The Best Lockdown Orchestras and Choirs Online,” Guardian, April 15, 2020. On the prominence of solo concerts, see Joshua Barone, “For Classical Music, Spring Was the Season of Solos,” New York Times, June 18, 2020. 4 Notably, “Live in HD” broadcasts have also been available as “Nightly Met Opera Streams” during the pandemic. 5 The early broadcasts on ABC television and to the cinema consisted mostly of opening nights. Although not identified as a “gala,” in 1954 the Met offered a “potpourri of arias and scenes” to audiences in thirty-two cinemas. For more on these broadcasts, see Richard Cullen Burke, “A History of Televised Opera in the United States” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1963), 23−42; and Marcia J. Citron, Opera on Screen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 43. 6 This series was later known as The Metropolitan Opera Presents and then Great Performances at the Met, and was available on PBS. For more on these programs, see Brian G. Rose, Television and the Performing Arts: A Handbook and Reference Guide to American Cultural Programming (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1986), 161−68. The Met has also published its own short article about the role of technology in saving the company during periods of financial difficulty. See Peter Clark, “Technology in Troubled Times,” Met Opera website, available at www.metopera.org/discover/articles/technology-in-troubled-times/, accessed June 15, 2020. 7 I borrow the term “media event” from Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz to mean “the high holidays of mass communication,” which serve as “an invitation—even a command—to stop [audiences’] daily routines.” For more on the media event, see Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). Although Dayan and Katz are most concerned with how external, historic events become “media events,” this concept may be extended to include events that are created through and by media. See, for example, Nick Couldry, Media Rituals: A Critical Approach (London: Routledge, 2003); and Julia Sonnevend, “Introduction to Media Events Today,” special issue of Media Culture and Society 40, no. 1 (2018): 110−13. 8 Even when the gala was re-released as an “encore,” it was again offered for a limited time period of a weekend, between 7:30 pm EDT on June 12, 2020 and 6:30 pm EDT on June 14, 2020. 9 As Benjamin Britten remarked while preparing his television opera Owen Wingrave (1971), “You have to persuade viewers to take the occasion seriously. On the other hand, you can’t really calculate for those who are bored, arrive late, or are interrupted by the telephone. You can’t keep repeating the plot, like a cricket score or something.” Benjamin Britten, “Benjamin Britten Talks to Alan Blyth,” Gramophone, June 1970. 10 For more on the intimacy of early television, see Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 11 Most reviewers praised Nézet-Séguin’s performance, while being silent or critical of Gelb, whom journalist Richard Bratby of the Spectator uncharitably described as “a man with the screen presence of Voldemort.” Bratby, “It Costs a Lot of Money to Look This Cheap,” Spectator, May 2, 2020. On the role of the conductor in early television, see James Deaville, “Toscanini, Ormandy, and the First Televised Orchestra Concert(s): The Networks and the Broadcasting of Musical Celebrity,” in Music and the Broadcast Experience: Performance, Production, and Audiences, ed. Christina Baade and James Deaville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 193–211. 12 For more on how Bernstein embodied music’s effects on Omnibus, see Danielle Ward-Griffin, “Up Close and Personal: Opera and Television Broadcasting in the 1950s,” Journal of the Society for American Music 31 (2019): 216−31; and Sharon Gelleny, “Leonard Bernstein on Television: Bridging the Gap Between Classical Music and Popular Culture,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 11, no. 1 (1999): 48−67. 13 As James Steichen has shown, this scripting is key to the “behind the scenes” features and interviews of the Live in HD broadcasts. See Steichen, “HD Opera: A Love/Hate Story,” Opera Quarterly 27, no. 4 (2011): 443−59. 14 Ibid. 15 Ashley, “Thrilling Singing.” 16 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 5−6. 17 Steichen, “A Love/Hate Story.” 18 For more on these features, see Steichen, “A Love/Hate Story.” 19 Rupert Christiansen, “A Galaxy of Opera Stars ‘Phone In’ for a Glitchy but Uplifting Concert,” Telegraph, April 26, 2020. 20 See, for instance, the Royal Opera House’s “our house to your house” series, the Paris Opéra’s “chez soi” series, and Teatro Colon’s “Cultura en Casa.” Other “domestic”-themed concerts have also been offered by orchestras and chamber groups, including the “Living Room” concerts by the Houston Symphony Orchestra, the “Quarantine Soirées” by the Budapest Festival Orchestra, and “Living Room Live,” a concert series for chamber players. A full list is beyond the scope of this article, but for more information, see Freya Parr, “How to watch concerts from home: The concerts and operas available to stream online during the coronavirus pandemic,” Classic FM, available at www.classical-music.com/features/articles/concertlivestreams/ (accessed June 30, 2020). 21 As some journalists reported, the orchestra and chorus have not been paid since the end of March, although their health benefits have continued. The singers donated their performances. Tommasini, “The Met Opera’s At-Home Gala”; Nice, “Classy Joy and Sorrow.” 22 This theme can also be seen in pop concerts, including the “One World: Together at Home” fundraiser for the WHO by Global Citizen on April 18, 2020. 23 Jorden,“The Met’s ‘At-Home Gala.’” 24 To be sure, any Met gala on stage would have also featured performers from different countries, but the ideal of the Met as a symbolic home for the opera world would not have come through with such force. 25 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 60. 26 This is different from other theatrical art forms. For instance, Philip Auslander has argued that television was a rival to and sought to replace spoken theater. See Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008). For a fuller explanation of my argument on the relationship between opera broadcasting and live performance, see Ward-Griffin, “As Seen on TV: Putting the NBC Opera on Stage,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 71, no. 3 (2018): 595−654. 27 Peter Gelb, “Would Mozart Have Performed for You on Zoom?”, New York Times, April 1, 2020. A similar argument was also made in this same newspaper about live spoken theater. See Laura Collins-Hughes, “Digital Theater Isn’t Theater: It’s a Way to Mourn Its Absence,” New York Times, July 8, 2020. 28 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). 29 Gelb, “Would Mozart Have Performed for You on Zoom?”. © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) TI - Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder:The Met “At Home” Gala JF - The Opera Quarterly DO - 10.1093/oq/kbaa010 DA - 2021-01-30 UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/absence-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder-the-met-at-home-gala-ieqiuTrr9T SP - 1 EP - 1 VL - Advance Article IS - DP - DeepDyve ER -