![]() ![]() WRGB was the first of these, and conditions for its Hansel and Gretel production would have been similar to the Met’s telecast. Although New York had just 2,000 television sets able to receive NBC’s ten hours of weekly programming at that period, the die was cast – the Met telecast had proved that opera on television was possible imitators were bound to follow. Thirty-two musicians from the NBC Orchestra and ten singers from the Met crammed into a television studio in Radio City, performing excerpts from Carmen, La Gioconda, Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Rigoletto and Pagliacci. The seed for WRGB’s Hansel and Gretel broadcast was almost certainly sown three years earlier, when on 10 March 1940 its parent company NBC hosted the first ever telecast by New York’s Metropolitan Opera. How was a small company able to put an opera on television in 1943, at a period when the broadcast industry was suffering the privations of wartime America? Why would they even bother, when so few Americans could afford a television set? ![]() None of the footage has survived, and some of the detail surrounding the event is murky.
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