Where Sitcoms And Opera Meet

This hasn’t happened since Frasier was on the air, but there was an opera-sitcom convergence last night. I don’t know who was the singer in the opera recording played on The Office (Jim played it so Dwight couldn’t hear him), but the aria was from Martha by Friederich Von Flotow, a once-popular comic opera whose big tenor aria used to be very big with tenors, both in the original German ("Ach, so fromm") and, in the recording heard last night, in Italian ("M’ Apparì Tutto Amor").

Here’s an audio/visual recording (a short film made in the early days of sound movies) by the star Italian tenor Tito Schipa.