Music: Catch an Opera at Home

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As always in the music business, star power is what drives the most successful DVDs, especially if the star, like Bernstein, happens to be dead. DVDs of such departed figures as singer Maria Callas and conductor Herbert von Karajan are top draws, not only because of their charisma but also because their performances have taken on a historic importance. Callas' farewell appearance on the opera stage, in Tosca,at London's Covent Garden in 1965, is the centerpiece of Maria Callas: Living and Dying for Art and Love,which is selling briskly at $24.99 after its release on the TDK label last month.

With more elusive personalities like cellist Jacqueline du Pré, whose career was cut short by multiple sclerosis in 1973, when she was 28, and Carlos Kleiber, the notoriously reclusive conductor who died last year, the interviews and documentaries that usually make up the bonus material on DVDs are scarce if not nonexistent. The producers are reduced to offering such extras as "photo galleries." No matter; the releases sell anyway. The performers' names and mystique are enough. Almost two decades after Du Pré's death in 1987, a DVD titled Jacqueline du Pré in Portraitis one of the best-selling offerings from BBC/Opus Arte ($29.99).

Among living performers, the Three Tenors, singer Andrea Bocelli, Levine with his many Metropolitan Opera productions and the vivacious soprano Cecilia Bartoli are just a few of the leading DVD sellers. Cases in point: Levine's two-disc version of Tristan and Isoldewith the Met, featuring tenor Ben Heppner and soprano Jane Eaglen, on Deutsche Grammophon ($39.98), and Cecilia Bartoli Sings Mozart and Haydn, a two-disc set with the Concentus Musicus Wien conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt, on BBC/Opus Arte ($39.99).

Bartoli thinks she knows one of the secrets behind the rise of DVDS. "This is a language young people understand," she says. "It's the language of technology, of being in front of a screen." For this reason among many others, she says, "I think it's the future." Increasingly, it's also the present. --Reported by Lina Lofaro