Operatic Dilemma: Is an Aria Worth 100 Words? : In the Old Days, People Went to the Opera to Look and Listen . . . Now They Go to Read

Opera has always been an irrational art. Ask old Chorley. Ask any singer, director, educator or administrator. If desperate, ask a critic.

Some people regard opera merely as a concert in which the singers--usually fat and immobile--happen to wear costumes. The words, they say, are just an exotic excuse for beautiful sounds. Dramatic meaning is virtually irrelevant.

Other people--more sensitive people--insist that opera is a sophisticated, potentially lofty, often poignant fusion of drama and music. The music, they say, enhances the words, and the words enhance the music.

In the bad old days--perhaps they actually were good old days--some people went to the opera primarily to listen. Others went primarily to look. A few actually went to listen and look.

Now, people go to the opera to read.

This strange development, we are told, represents progress. It heralds the dawning of a new age, the triumph of informed culture over ignorant pretension. It provides civilization with a means of bringing an irrational elitist art to the unwashed masses. This--fanfares, please--is the Age of the Supertitle.

The SUPERTITLE!

Awkward term, isn’t it? If you happen to have been out of the hemisphere for a few years, you may wonder what it means. To ordinary literate observers, the word suggests a name that is bigger than life. You know, if a superman is a man blessed with some greater-than-normal power, then a supertitle must be. . . .

Oh, never mind.

Maybe some of the official synonyms, all presumably copyrighted, are better. Anyone for a surtitle? Anyone for OpTrans?

Anyone for a performance of an opera in which the text--or an abbreviated, unreasonable facsimile thereof--is flashed on a screen high above the stage while the singers sing presumably related words (usually in a foreign language)? Anyone for instant operatic digestion and distraction in the guise of textual enlightenment?

Not me, thank you.

I know, I know. I am in the minority. Nearly everyone else in the world simply adores the newfangled invention.

I hear you. I am just another one of those critical churls, you say. I resist novelty simply because it is new. I automatically protect an outmoded status quo and pine for the slush of yesteryear.

Balderdash.

Met Holds Out

Supertitles are undisputed box-office hits. Nearly every opera company in America has succumbed to the infernal, simplistic explanatory signs, usually, we are assured, in response to vast popular demand. Only the stodgy Metropolitan, stubbornly guided by James Levine, is holding out for old-fashioned values and traditional virtues.

The current epidemic of titular spoon-feeding began in Toronto back in 1983. Lotfi Mansouri, incipient chief guru and guardian of public virtue at the San Francisco Opera, first employed the literary projections for a production of Richard Strauss’ “Elektra.” John Leberg was credited with perfecting the technology.

Soon the idea spread throughout America. It has been adopted and adapted with trendy alacrity in Australia and England. It even has invaded some opera houses in Italy, where everyone, we had thought, was supposed to be able to sing along with the dying tenor anyway.

The idea has moved from the subliminal to the ridiculous. It has created lazy singers and lazy audiences in the process. These days, minimalist messages are often utilized to spread the word of the libretto even when the language of the performance happens to English.

“I go, I go to him!” cries Stravinsky’s agitated heroine at cabaletta time in the first act of “The Rake’s Progress.”

“I GO, I GO TO HIM,” says the hyperredundant explanation atop the proscenium at the New York City Opera and at the San Francisco Opera.

It is as if the silly soprano had been trying to communicate with us in Swahili. It is as if the audience were feeble-minded. It gives one pause.

Never mind that the practice insults the singer. Trying to be expressive all by herself, it is implied, is a hopeless waste of effort.

Never mind that the practice indirectly discourages careful diction. Why bother making the words count, the singer must ask, if the audience is reading the lines anyway?.

Never mind that the translated words on the screen often distort the thoughts being sung. Never mind that they often appear too early or too late, and thus disrupt the flow, contradict the curve and compromise the impact of the vocal line.

Never mind that audiences at comic operas often laugh at a joke before the punch line has been sung. Never mind that audiences at serious operas often laugh at lines that aren’t supposed to be funny.

Never mind the basic tendency of the written word to overpower the music. Never mind the destruction of the delicate balance between text and score. Who cares about what the composer wanted, anyway?

Composer’s Desires

Wait. The composer did want the audience to understand the words. More important, he wanted us to grasp the meaning behind the words. No one denies that.

How does one make the audience understand? That is the question.

Throughout operatic history, most composer’s wanted their operas performed in the language of the audience. Verdi wrote “Don Carlos” to a French text for Paris. Puccini savored German versions of his operas in Vienna, even though the translations sometimes altered verbal stresses and vocal timbres.

Both composers wrote polemics about the crucial need for crisp pronunciation and clear expression. Wagner and Strauss did that too. So, for that matter, did Mozart.

All these musico-dramatic geniuses expected the audience to focus its attention on the stage. One wonders what they would have thought about an audience mesmerized by a little screen way above the stage.

One can infer from their writings that they would have been astonished and horrified. They would have lobbied instead for better translations, for singers who care enough to make the words count, and for conductors who do not smother voices in heavy orchestral blankets.

They also might have suggested that the audience do a little homework before attending an opera, or that the management try harder to make the plot accessible through legitimate means. They might even have argued that their music defines character and conveys the essential moods in a way that makes the possible loss of a specific verbal phrase unimportant.

The precursor of the operatic supertitle was, of course, the cinematic subtitle. The two are related. They are not the same.

In a foreign-language film or in a telecast, the translated text appears at the bottom of the frame. The practiced eye can take it in without looking away from the central image. Moreover, the translation does not have to play against any musical or melodic rhythm.

Supertitles are least problematic in the opera house if the proscenium happens to be relatively low and if the viewer happens to sit relatively high. If one can look down on the stage from a balcony, one sometimes can glance at the screen and at the singer almost simultaneously. If one sits in a “good” seat on the orchestra level, however, one’s gaze must constantly shift up and down. This causes more than a pain in the neck.

From some perspectives, supertitles can cause more problems than they solve. Take, for example, the oft told tale of “Tosca” in Houston. Puccini’s tempestuous heroine, you may recall, is unhappy because she thinks her lover, the artist Cavaradossi, has been inspired by the features of a fair-haired rival in his portrait of Mary Magdalen. Tosca wants the picture to look more like herself. “ Falle gli occhi neri! “ she begs, half maliciously. “Paint her eyes black.”

Unfortunately, the resident supertitle expert deep in the heart of Texas did not choose his words with sufficient care. “GIVE HER BLACK EYES!” he wrote.

The audience was amused. The diva wasn’t. Something had gotten lost in translation, and something had been added.

No Accident

Accidents can happen. Not all supertitle dilemmas, however, are accidental.

Gotz Friedrich recently staged a brilliant production of Janacek’s “Kat’a Kabanova” for the Music Center Opera. The celebrated German director doesn’t particularly like supertitles, but, since the performance was sung in the original Czech, he grudgingly accepted the house policy dictating their use. He also insisted that the titles be kept to a minimum, and discarded hundreds of carefully selected lines.

The result--on-again/off-again titles--gave the audience the worst of both worlds. The translations created the usual distraction when they appeared. At the same time, they set up specific audience expectations that were frustrated when, for long stretches, they disappeared.

Of course, the non-Czech cast, which had learned the opera phonetically, could have sung in English. But that would have been too sensible, too easy.

I know the counter argument: Opera sounds better in the original language. That may be so. Still, for some of us the loss in authenticity is usually offset by the gain in intelligibility, not to mention focus.

Can there be exceptions? There have to be exceptions.

One wouldn’t expect the Bolshoi to bring us “The Tsar’s Bride” in English. In the golden era, one wouldn’t necessarily have wanted Renata Tebaldi, Carlo Bergonzi and Tito Gobbi to sing “Tosca” in English. That might have been even more comical than black eyes.

Supertitles, carefully manipulated, can be useful educational devices at the outset. They may be justifiable under special, festive conditions, especially if the audience is unenlightened and the work unfamiliar. For most common purposes, however, less still seems like more.

Last season, the Music Center offered a titled version of Verdi’s “Macbeth.” Familiar lines from Shakespeare’s play had to be recycled from concentrated Italian into flash-card high-school English. It was a jolting experience.

This season the same company ventured Sir Peter Hall’s dramatically sensitive production of “Cosi fan Tutte.” For once, a stage director chose to play Mozart for pathos rather than easy laughs. The supertitles, unfortunately, fastidiously picked out all the laugh lines as if they were so many raisins in a rice pudding. What we read wasn’t what we saw, and it certainly wasn’t what we heard.

I know the counterargument here too. As head of the New York City Opera, Beverly Sills voices it all the time: “If you don’t like supertitles, don’t read them.”

That, alas, is easier said than done. Any person with an iota of intellectual curiosity cannot help but pay attention to important messages flashed overhead. One wonders, on the other hand, how Sills would have felt if she had been forced to contend with supertitles during her own illustrious career on the stage.

Would she have been happy to give her all in the Mad Scene of “Lucia di Lammermoor” if the audience had been concentrating not on her but on a text projected above her? Would her performance have been as subtly nuanced, as dramatically affecting? Would her own concentration have been compromised?

When San Francisco last attempted Wagner’s “Ring,” Rene Kollo, the Siegfried, didn’t want to compete with the supertitles, especially in passages that could produce the wrong audience reaction. When, for instance, he stripped the armor from the ample breast of the sleeping Brunnhilde, he wanted no instant translation for his innocent exclamation, “ Das ist kein Mann! “--”This is no man!”

Heldentenors are very rare birds, and thus very persuasive. Kollo actually got the management to turn the supertitles off for a few moments. No one complained. More important, no one laughed.

Ironically, the most effective use of the sign system that I have witnessed turned out to be the most obtrusive. Peter Sellars recently staged a revolutionary “Tannhauser” in Chicago, portraying the 12th-Century minnesinger as a Jimmy Swaggart-like televangelist torn between the lures of flesh and spirit. Sellars doesn’t like supertitles. Characteristically, he decided that if he couldn’t beat them he would go whole hog in the other direction and integrate them into the scenic action.

He used white titles to telegraph the familiar essentials of the text. He used red titles for an inventively raunchy subtext related to Venus, here interpreted as a senior hooker in a sleazy motel. He used blue titles for poetic quotations and romantic commentary, often illustrating orchestral passages. Most important, perhaps, he engaged a bona-fide literary expert, a sensitive professional linguist, to write the words.

One wouldn’t want this sort of experiment in all operas all the time. Still, Sellars proved that there are possibilities of illumination within the system. He staged this opera to accommodate the titles. He built his production around a special visual and philosophical concept. He actually made a virtue of distraction.

Most important, he never condescended to the audience, never patronized the music or trivialized the fundamental text. At least temporarily, his “Tannhauser” silenced those who object to supertitles in principle.

Conscientious Objector

It may be significant that the most articulate and most conscientious objector I know is an educator and singer, Phyllis Curtin. Now dean of the School for the Arts at Boston University, she recently volunteered some arresting, unpopular views in a letter to Opera News. She was disturbed that an article in the magazine had equated dislike for supertitles with mindless conservatism.

“I am appalled by supertitles,” she wrote, “and have been devoted to performing new music on the concert and opera stages since the beginning of my career in 1946. . . . I have lived a rich life as a singer--loving text with music, developing as an actress, making every effort to be a wholly communicative singer. I deplore the clear fact that an audience is reading (and not necessarily the correct text) while a singer has magically combined text, music, gesture, mood on the stage.

“American audiences, brought up to believe opera in this nation should be performed in languages they neither understand nor speak, have never thought to listen to text and have no experience in it. . . . I have my doubts about the value of popularization of opera. I understand the financial need but deplore the banalization of this profoundly rich art, the simplification and generalization that titles effect. And I know I would not want to perform under reading material.”

Then comes the grand climax:

“No artist performs, paints and sculpts generalizations.”

It is a climax that requires no translation.