Met Opera's "Live in HD" Series Outside of New York "La Traviata," with Hei-Kyung Hong as Violetta, is one of the Metropolitan Opera productions that has been part of the "Live in HD" series. IF you visit the Web site of Piedmont Opera in Winston-Salem, N.C., and hover your cursor over the heading "On Stage," a menu drops down. "MetHD," a link to information about the local transmission of the Metropolitan Opera's "Live in HD" movie theater broadcasts, leads the list of the company's offerings, including two live Winston-Salem productions: Mozart's "Don Giovanni" and Robert Ward's "Crucible." With just a mouse click the site illustrates the reality of American opera today, which I observed as I traveled through the country over the last six months, watching the 11 broadcasts in this season's "Live in HD" series. Through the HD broadcasts the Met has attained dominance of the field: not as a standard to which regional companies can aspire, as in the past, but as a permanent and sometimes intrusive presence in their communities. In last week's Arts & Leisure section I wrote about how watching opera in cinematic close-up, with Dolby surround sound, changes the performance in ways large and small. But the most distorted and distorting part of the HD experience comes at the times when a live audience repays a brave performance with enthusiastic applause. Without fail, some watching the broadcasts shout "bravo" with gusto. But most of the audience doesn't quite know what to do, caught between the intensity opera elicits and the sobering realization that, well, they are in a movie theater, perhaps thousands of miles from what they want to cheer and even farther from the relationship live performance engenders. For all the praise HD deserves, and it deserves a great deal, this disconnect is damning. What the audience in a movie theater experiences is not just the opposite of opera. It is the undoing of opera, an art form in which a present, active audience is fundamental. "Operas in general," the critic Marcel Prawy wrote, "can only be properly enjoyed when audience, orchestra and stage form a compact community." Its history is a history of being there: of applause and booing and rapt silence, the symbiosis between performers and audience. An image, in high definition, 3-D or any other permutation, creates only the illusion of intimacy. It is a cooler, more detached art form. Because the broadcasts so closely mimic the experience of live opera - you join a group of people, some of whom have dressed for the occasion, in a darkened theater at an appointed time - the "Live in HD" series subtly retrains opera audiences in passive consumption rather than active participation. This retraining affects live performances as well, at least at the Met, where politely warm, trailing-off applause is now the norm. At the opening night of the Met's season in September the soprano Anna Netrebko sang the fiendishly difficult title role in Donizetti's "Anna Bolena." As she completed the first part of the final scene, the ravishing aria "Al dolce guidami," she slowly diminished the last note to nothing. After an instant of silence, the audience erupted in cheers that went on far longer than is usual at the Met these days. Ms. Netrebko, who had ended the aria gazing upward, suddenly gave a wide smile, driving the audience to even greater applause. It was a moment of engagement - of human relationship - between artist and audience that was once common but is now noteworthy for its rarity. So rare that many reviews mentioned it, some of them critical of Ms. Netrebko for her supposed lack of dramatic commitment. It's true that actors in movies don't break character like that, and we are increasingly going to the opera as though it were a movie. The HDs are working, at least in terms of the Met's larger strategy. In 2007 a writer for The Guardian told the company's general manger, Peter Gelb, that he found the experience of seeing "The Barber of Seville" in the movie theater better than being at the Met. "Oh, no, that's bad," Mr. Gelb groaned. We must be doing too good a job. The writer added, "Then he allowed himself a smile of well-deserved gratification." When it comes to HD, Mr. Gelb has reason to feel gratified. The broadcasts have been a material success - well attended and profitable - and the Met is quick to argue that they promote a tenuously surviving art form in a way that helps everyone, a rising tide that lifts all boats.