ABSTRACT
Taking the sounds that accompanied the showing of Carmen and other contemporary opera films as its focus, this essay plunges into this enormous variety, tempering the plenitude by focusing on a particular location, Dublin, Ireland in 1916. The Volta's small orchestra, consisting of five string musicians led by musical director Reginald Morgan, seems like it would have been well suited for such a task, but in the event, the Volta appears never to have offered opera films in the way described by this chapter. The programme survives in a collection of ephemera housed at the National Library of Ireland that belonged to Joseph Holloway, a Dublin architect and obsessive theatre-goer who also recorded his impressions of many of the entertainments he attended in his diary. Works such as Carmen offered the opportunity for exhibitors, musicians and audiences to test the possibilities of synchronization, albeit that the syncretic weld remained to be fully achieved for the feature film.
