For EMI, Beecham recorded two complete operas in stereo, Die Entführung aus dem Serail and Carmen.
I put an opera on the stereo system.
— Michele M. Moody-Adams's father was a schoolteacher passionate about classical music, and Sunday afternoons at their home on the South Side of Chicago, he would put some opera on the stereo and quiz her.
He leads me through the evening streets, warm with early spring, and is seemingly carried by a kind of buoyancy: talking about the sea, poetry, his childhood in Aberystwyth, his flatshare in London, heading down quiet roads, around corners, doubling back, until we find the bar he has been hunting: a narrow corridor where the wine comes served in plastic cups and the stereo plays opera.
Sitting one recent morning in his spacious office at his Washington law firm, Feinberg Rozen, he sips San Pellegrino Limonata as an opera plays faintly from a stereo system near his desk.
The pair could often be found in the living room of Mr. Simowitz's apartment on the Lower East Side -- Wanda June on her futon, Mr. Simowitz in his favorite chair from Pottery Barn -- listening to opera on his high-end stereo system.
The stereo type of the opera star is bohemian, temperamental, unstable, jealous.
The first stereo recording of the opera was made in 1959, with Francesco Molinari-Pradelli conducting the Santa Cecilia orchestra and chorus with Renata Tebaldi as Tosca and Mario Del Monaco as Cavaradossi.
Knappertsbusch recorded the opera again for Philips in 1962 in stereo, and this release is often considered to be the classic Parsifal recording.
This immersive approach to recording performance has already proven viable with pop acts (Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber) and opera (the recently released Carmen 3D), but Wenders takes the use of stereo photography further to convey artists' movement through space.
