Abstract
The paper deals with Television Opera as a specifically televisual genre produced by the Czechoslovak television between 1960 and 1989, which included several works of distinctly experimental leanings. The discussion revolves around Iša Krejčí’s opera Antigone, produced for the screen in 1964 by director Pavel Hobl, whose approach is characterized by the use of contemporary, politically charged imagery.
The opera is interpreted not only as a particularly engaging attempt to lay ground for a new audio-visual genre on the intersection of opera, film and television but also as a witness to the complex renegotiations, under the aegis of modernism, of the precarious relationship between aesthetics and politics in the 1960s (post Socialist-Realist) Czech music theatre.