Don’t tsk-tsk the music video disc

Siegfried’s a big fat slob. How do I know it’s Siegfried? Easy. His name is plastered across his dirty white T-shirt.

Shoveling down his grub, he’s in the kitchen with an overwrought Mimi, the scheming dwarf who’s peeling potatoes at the table and piling on the guilt. After Siegfried stalks offstage in this riveting, if outrageous, production of the third opera in Wagner’s “Ring� tetralogy, Mimi is given a fright (and maybe a bit of a private thrill) by an intruder in a leather jacket (the Wanderer). Then, alone on a funky sofa, nervously awaiting Siegfried’s return, he lets his hand wander along with his mind, while Wagner supplies a startling soundtrack.

You won’t see this sordid “Siegfried,� taped in Germany at the Stuttgart Opera, at a theater near you. No company in America would dare touch it. But you can watch it at home. It’s on DVD, and it comes across on television as a perverse operatic version of “The Honeymooners.�

DVD has been slow to catch on with classical music lovers, but with the wealth (and breadth!) of opera showing up on the medium, that is starting to change.

Traditionally, classical record collectors have been the most faithful group of high-fidelity early adapters. Promise better sound and out come the checkbooks and credit cards. Classical music helped fuel the changeover from 78s to long-playing albums, from mono to stereo, from LP to CD. Sony and its cohorts are currently courting classical collectors with SACD (Super Audio CD).

Likewise, when new technology has gone the other direction, favoring convenience over improved fidelity, the classical crowd has shown little initial enthusiasm. Hence its cool reception to cassette tape in the ‘70s and to iPods and other MP3 players now.

With DVDs, the picture is, so to speak, fuzzy. DVDs can sound pretty good on their own. Used without video and on an appropriately equipped player, they can be souped up into surround-sound DVD Audio, but that format hasn’t caught on. SACD is better. You certainly need something more expensive -- hundreds of times more expensive -- than a $49 DVD player (on which the picture may be perfectly acceptable) for sound that approaches the quality of good CD players and never equals the best CD can offer. Still, I’ve come to enjoy watching on my computer using high-end headphones.

Classical concert videos are, of course, a wash. They always have been and, except perhaps for the pleasure of occasionally seeing what the fuss was all about over a truly charismatic conductor -- a Leonard Bernstein or Carlos Kleiber -- they probably always will be. Documentaries about musicians (and there are a lot from British television that are beginning to make their way over here on video) are nice, if a marginal segment of the market.

But opera makes sense on DVD, and most in the industry predict that it won’t be long before DVDs supersede CDs as the preferred medium for recording opera.

It can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to record opera in the studio, while most opera DVDs are taken from televised performances (opera broadcasts are quite common in Europe) and require merely paying some fees. For the consumer, operas are substantially cheaper on DVD. Most fit on a single disc, but they typically require two, three, even four CDs. For a longer opera, the DVD version can cost half the price of an audio-only CD, and you get to see the production. If the sound is less than ideal, it’s not so diminished as to cause consumer revolt. Most people consider this a great deal.

And it is.

Thanks to DVD, a whole world of opera is beginning to open up for the American opera-goer, long subjected to ultra-conservative opera companies and artistically apathetic television networks. Anyone wanting to know what’s going on in opera -- which means what’s going on in theater, since the most inventive theater these days is found in opera -- used to have to go to Europe. That has almost changed.

The DVD opera catalog, while growing each week, is thus far spotty. Many things once available on VHS tape or laserdisc have yet to be transferred to DVD, and much that is broadcast has never made its way to the home market. Some DVDs come out only in Europe, which means a multiregion player is a must, since the discs can be ordered over the Internet.

And the buyer must beware. There is an amazing amount of second-rate stuff. Obscure companies in small cities can easily digitize their productions and put those out themselves in reputable-looking packages. Check your sources carefully.

Nevertheless, the choices are exploding. The Italian repertory suffers some, but many excellent versions of Mozart and Wagner operas compete for your time and dollars. One of the best performances of Dvorak’s opera “Rusalka� is the DVD of an arresting production by the Canadian director Robert Carson, starring Renee Fleming and conducted by James Conlon. The Stuttgart “Ring� -- each opera has a different director, every one trying to outdo the others -- will drive traditionalists up the wall, but what great theater this makes. Moreover, traditionalists need not get worked up: They can turn to the Metropolitan Opera’s old-fashioned “Ring,� brilliantly led by James Levine.

I’m particularly impressed by how many operas once rare on CD are readily available on DVD. There are, for instance, several excellent performances of Berlioz’s “The Trojans� and Monteverdi’s “The Return of Ulysses to the Fatherland.� A fabulous “Les Boreades,� courtesy of the Paris Opera, is maybe the most enticing Rameau found in any recorded medium.

Keeping up with Eurotrash is yet another DVD reward. A lot of the really nasty stuff one reads about has yet to make it to the small screen, but the exceedingly vulgar Hans Neuenfels “Die Fledermaus� that managed to offend just about everyone at the 2001 Salzburg Festival has been released. Such significant directors as Peter Sellars, Robert Wilson and Achim Freyer are not yet well represented, but a scattering of their work is out on DVD.

For all that DVD offers, it does have its drawbacks. Much can be said for the physical excitement of a stage performance over a studio one; but that means there will be stage noise, and it can grow annoying on repetition. In studio recordings, mistakes can be corrected and casting kept more flexible, be it the inclusion of fat singers who don’t meet the dramatic needs of a work in the flesh or simply the accommodating of a busy schedule.

Last summer, Placido Domingo recorded Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde� at Abbey Road in London. It’s a role he has never sung onstage and at this point in his career would not be able to sustain live. The release (set for summer) is much anticipated and may wind up being the last such costly project record companies will finance. If that proves true, it will be a shame.

But it’s a new world out there, DVD-wise, and in opera, often a brave one.