Quarantine left opera houses without earnings, but they try not to lose the attention of the audience, so they moved their activity to the Internet.

Initially, online broadcasts of live performances and concerts with empty rooms were planned, and some even started to do this, however, the tightening of restrictive measures forced these intentions to abandon.

Almost all theaters in Europe and America are closed. Even in Sweden, one of the few countries where quarantine measures related to the pandemic were not introduced, and restrictions are very mild, the Royal Opera House of Stockholm, and other theaters, do not function. Perhaps, only the Bolshoi Opera and Ballet Theater of Belarus has continued to work from European theaters, and even then it has noticeably reduced its poster.

Under these conditions, the only option left for opera houses was the display of stock records: the theaters of Russia, America and Europe spread their most significant performances for general open use.

The vast majority of large and small theaters on both sides of the Atlantic switched to online broadcasting, more precisely, to showing recordings of their performances – made relatively recently, very fresh or already historical.

Not many people share the latter for various reasons – either not so many really good recordings of legendary performances have been preserved (this mainly applies to theaters of not the first echelon), or few of them that the public has not seen before (this is more true for brand theaters ) – as a rule, historical performances were periodically shown earlier, in pre-quarantine time, many of them were posted on the Internet on an ongoing basis.

The shows of some legendary performances of the 1950s and 70s during the quarantine period were offered, first of all, by German theaters.

Most prefer to demonstrate the achievements of the most recent years. Of particular interest are the very recent performances, whose premieres were held in the past or even this season, and which could be seen only by those spectators who attended the premieres live, since new works, as a rule, were not laid out by theaters on the Internet.

Thanks to the quarantine and, as a result, the stream of recordings that hit them, the locked music lovers suddenly got the opportunity to almost 24 hours a day watch the latest news from many theaters in the world – both leading and simply good.

Vienna Opera opens a free broadcast of the best performances in the days of quarantine. Also, the Metropolitan Opera in New York announced the broadcast of the performances.

You can see the opera and ballet performances of Wiener Staatsopera on the site after registration. Broadcasts will be held daily at 19:00 Vienna time and will remain available for 24 hours.

March 16 – broadcast of the opera Falstaff by Giuseppe Verdi (director David McVicar), March 17 – The Three Sisters by Peter Etvös (director Yuval Sharon), March 18 – The Valkyrie by Richard Wagner (conductor Simon Rattle). A detailed schedule can also be found on the website.

The Vienna Opera canceled all performances until April 2 due to coronavirus. Since March 10, indoor events with the participation of more than 100 people have been banned in Austria.

The Metropolitan Opera also begins on March 16 to broadcast recordings of performances in HD format on the theater website and in the mobile application.

“So we want to console opera lovers in these very difficult times for all of us,” says Peter Gelb, theater general director. “Every evening we will be offering to watch a new opera – a gem from our collection of online performances recorded in HD over the past 14 years.”

On March 16, the audience will be presented the opera Carmen by Georges Bizet (directed by Yannick Neze Segen), March 17 to Bohemia by Giacomo Puccini, March 18, La Traviata by Giuseppe Verdi with Anna Netrebko and Dmitry Hvorostovsky, recorded in 2015. March 21, they plan to broadcast the opera Lucia di Lammermur by Gaetano Donizetti, the lead role is performed by Anna Netrebko, and on March 22 they will show Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin (conductor Valery Gergiev) with Rene Fleming and Dmitry Hvorostovsky.

The Metropolitan Opera canceled all performances until March 31. Since March 13, the work of theaters and museums in New York has been suspended. All Broadway theaters are closed until April 12th.

Recall that the closure of theaters and the restriction of public events were announced by almost all the leading countries of Europe and the world. The theaters of Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, Moldova, Poland, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland and Australia are already closed. Theaters of Greece, Spain and the Japanese theater “Kabuki” also suspended their work.