L’opera e la nascita della televisione in Italia

Between 1954 and 1957, in the first three seasons of regular broadcasting, RAI aired almost one opera a month, live from Milan television studios. Then these studio productions became progressively rarer, almost disappearing after 1960. Despite a partial revival of interest between the mid-seventies and early eighties, opera never regained the leading position that it had enjoyed in the early days of the Italian television. The studio productions of the fifties, therefore, represent the high point of opera on television in Italy, and as such have received some attention from television historians and critics, while musicologists have almost completely ignored them. In this article I consider these broadcasts from the point of view of the opera historian, investigating the impact of the encounter between opera and television on opera itself, and focusing especially on the relationship between music and image.