Opera Australia’s television experiment is a ratings hit, seen by almost double its annual stage audience.

Opera Australia’s TV experiment, the soap-opera inspired The Divorce, has proven to be a worthwhile gamble after recently released ABC television ratings showed the four episode serial reached 1.1 million viewers – just under double the number of attendees to Opera Australia’s onstage season over an entire year. Each episode of The Divorce, written by composer Elena Kats-Chernin and librettist Joanna Murray-Smith, reached an average of 484,000 television viewers, with 31,000 additional viewers via the ABC’s iView, per episode.

“We’re extremely happy,” Opera Australia Artistic Director Lyndon Terracini said of the superb ratings. “I’ve thought for a long time that contemporary opera would be best seen through a contemporary medium, like television. Presenting a present day opera in a 19th-century context, like the theatre, isn’t a good way of connecting with a contemporary audience. By putting an opera on television, using a format similar to the American style of soap-opera, we aimed to make the experience more familiar and accessible, and that’s paid off.”

Opera Australia Artistic Director Lyndon Terracini

The Divorce has performed far better than Opera Australia’s last mass-media venture, the televised performances of Brett Dean’s Bliss in 2010, which secured a television audience of less than 25,000. Terracini believes that by tailoring the production specifically for television, The Divorce has been able to engage with a broad audience more fluently. “Opera for the stage and what we’ve created for television are two very different beasts,” Terracini explains. “Both are of course music driven, but the way you connect with the characters is dependent on the medium, so we tailored a number of things – the sound mix, the camera angles, the locations – to make sure we got the most out of the television format.”

Some have criticised The Divorce for being musically insubstantial or too far removed from the grand operas of the traditional canon. However, embracing a new model for opera, as Mozart did with his Singspiel operas for example, should be a crucial responsibility of modern-day opera practitioners, Terracini says. “Many people have commented on how successful it’s been, and have suggested we do a sequel, but I don’t want to do that. For a start, sequels are always worse than the original, but also I want to keep trying new ideas.”

Terracini has now set his sights on the silver screen and hopes to develop a new opera written specifically for the cinema. “There’re a few ideas I’m thinking about at the moment, some that I’ve been thinking about for quite a few years, but really an opera movie would be about capturing the zeitgeist,” he says. “It’ll be about finding the right composer and the right “contemporary opera” singers – who may not necessarily sing with a 19th-century operatic technique – to connect with a cinema audience. By doing that, I think we can help the art form to progress.”

Opera Australia CEO, Craig Hassall, added his delight regarding the ratings success, saying, “The reaction from viewers and critics has been so positive that it suggests there is certainly an appetite for more projects like this and we will certainly be investigating opportunities.”

Get Limelight's free weekly round-up of music, arts and culture.