Search - Louise (Charpentier) on DVD

Historically Interesting

Mark E. Herriott | North Bend, WA | 02/14/2007

(3 out of 5 stars)

"While this DVD of the film version of the opera Louise may be interesting from a historical perspective, opera singer Grace Moore in one of her signature roles, it is only a "better than nothing" alternative for those wanting to see the opera. Much of the score has been cut, replaced by spoken dialog. Subtitles would have been helpful, as the film version perodically differs from the storyline of the opera itself. The quality of the film is somewhat below average. Of course one can't expect a pristine print from a film made in 1938, but there are some bad edits and a few fuzzy frames. The sound quality is inconsistant. There are some portions where you can hear the phonograph recording, for those of you old enough to remember phonographs, of the singing starting up, going from a slow garbled sound to finally intelligible singing. I guess they weren't able to go back and digitally remaster the soundtrack and as a result, some of the music comes out muddied. Consequently, I rate this 3 stars as its the only DVD presentation of this opera available."