Composers Datebook™ is a daily two-minute program designed to inform, engage, and entertain listeners with timely information about composers of the past and present. Each program notes significant or intriguing musical events involving composers of the past and present, with appropriate and accessible music related to each.
Bizet and Menotti on TV in the 1950s
On this day in 1952, thirty-one theaters nationwide offered the first pay-per view Met opera telecast. This was a regularly-scheduled performance of Bizet's "Carmen" broadcast live from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, featuring Risë Stevens in the title role and Fritz Reiner conducting. The performance was relayed to the theaters by means of a closed TV circuit.* Beginning in 1948, the Metropolitan Opera had experimented with live telecasts of their opening night performances, but relatively few people in the U.S. owned TV sets at the time. By 1952, most American households had TVs, but the Met's manager, Rudolf Bing, was dead-set against any further FREE telecasts. The 1952 pay-per-view experiment was not successful, and it wasn't until 1976—after Bing had resigned—that live telecasts of Metropolitan Opera performances resumed on public television. The most successful of all commercial telecasts of a live opera performance occurred in 1951, when, on Christmas Eve that year, NBC-TV broadcast "Amahl and the Night Visitors" by Gian-Carlo Menotti on Christmas. NBC's black and white kinescope recording of that premiere performance was broadcast annually for a number of years—until it was accidentally erased by a network employee.** Although "Amahl" is no longer an annual visitor to television, it is still staged this time of year by amateur and professional opera companies around the world.