I recently had the privilege to receive an honorary degree. The diploma is in Latin. I like that. My Latin is approximate, but even when I can’t read the words, the fact that diplomas are written in a different and antique language gives them an air of distinction, distance, gravitas.
Pondering that effect reminded me that some people feel the same way about how we encounter opera. I couldn’t agree less.
The debate over translation in opera is lively and ongoing, but it’s more relevant than ever today, when opera companies struggle to attract new audiences and digital distractions lure away even some devoted fans. Like the qwerty keyboard, sitting through a three-or-more-hour performance in a language we don’t understand is a peculiar cultural phenomenon we accept only because it’s often the only option we’re given. It’s happenstance. And it’s a big part of what keeps opera from reaching more people.
In the 1800s and well into the 1900s, it was routine in many countries to present operas in the language of the audience. The music critic Anthony Tommasini wrote, “Verdi would have found it absurd for a French audience to hear ‘Il Trovatore’ in Italian. Even in Salzburg and Vienna, Mozart’s operas were typically performed in German until World War II.” Wagner expected his works to be translated into French when they were performed in France.
I wish I regularly had the chance to experience them in my native language. In Act II of “Die Walküre” (“The Valkyrie”) the god Wotan solemnly recounts the “Ring” story and reflects on his fate for what can be 20 minutes of rumination. It is a pitiless challenge to theatrical momentum that wears me to a nubbin. (I once watched it sitting next to a very famous singer I will refrain from naming, who was so underwhelmed that he spent the whole section canoodling with the woman he had brought.) If the performance had been in English, at least the audience members would have been able to comprehend what they were struggling through.
America used to cherish opera in translation. An English version of Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” was a big hit in New York for season after season between 1819 and 1824 and played in French in New Orleans in 1823. But in the Gilded Age, opera caught on with the wealthy as a symbol of European sophistication, conditioning an idea that to really count, it had to be performed in the original language.
In 1961 the classical music critic Harold Schonberg sniffed, “The fact that the Paris Opera does Verdi in French, or the Berlin Staatsoper does Puccini in German, does not necessarily mean the procedure is right.” The arguments for these translations have “immoral aspects,” he wrote. “Instead of wanting to bring people up to the level of music, they are demanding that music be brought down to the level of the people. Their idea is to get people into the opera houses by offering inducements and bribery.”
Nevertheless, in the mid-20th century, European opera in English experienced a certain fashion on these shores. Especially cherished were the fresh and singable lyrics of Ruth and Thomas Martin. In their version of Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte,” instead of the early passage that begins with “La mia Dorabella capace non è,” we got “To doubt Dorabella is simply absurd. Completely absurd. She’ll always be faithful and true to her word.’” That may not be identical to what its Italian librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, wrote, but it’s exquisite.
To the extent that opera in translation acquired real traction here, the advent of supertitles, the simultaneous translations projected above the stage or on the backs of seats, wiped it out in the 1980s. They did spare singers from having to learn the same opera in more than one language. But with supertitles, you’re always peeking away from the action, reading when you’re supposed to be hearing and never — at least in my experience — feeling truly satisfied. Puccini didn’t write “Madama Butterfly” to be read.
Many opera fans object to translation on the grounds that composers set the music to the words carefully, according to the accent patterns and vowel colors of the language in question, in a way that translation can’t hope to reproduce. Others note, in particular, how ideally suited Italian, with its open vowels and buttery consonant clusters, happens to be for singing.
But the composers of yore had their works translated, despite both of these concerns, because they wanted audiences to understand what they were hearing.
I’m with them. It’s hard to imagine any English translation of “La Bohème” that would allow Mimi to introduce herself — on the seven opening notes of “Sì, mi chiamano Mimi” — as perfectly as she does in the Italian original. Yet to know what Mimi is saying line by line (and she says a good deal; she is deep) is a richer experience than hearing her singing mere syllables, no matter how pretty. As the conductor Mark Wigglesworth wrote in response to this question, “Few artistic experiences are more complete than understanding singers’ words at exactly the moment they are sung.”
Of course, operatic diction can make it difficult to understand even in your native language — but not harder than it is to understand a language you don’t speak. Plus I find that Anglophone singers can be quite good at getting English across in an operatic voice. My first opera was the Houston Grand Opera’s production of “Porgy and Bess” when it came to Philadelphia when I was 10. I’m sure I missed the occasional word or sentence, but the singers did their job with the diction, and I had no trouble overall. (I will never forget Clamma Dale’s fierce and eternal Bess and Wilma Shakesnider’s Serena, who made me realize in one song that life is complicated.)
Singing in a language that you speak as a native and that the audience understands also makes for better acting. In Vienna in the 1950s, performances of Mozart’s operas shifted from German to the original Italian, largely because of the influence of the maestro Herbert von Karajan. The famed soprano Phyllis Curtin recounted the effect on two seasoned German-speaking actors: “After we switched to Italian, all of a sudden, because the Viennese audience didn’t understand them in the same way, these two consummate artists started acting like the Marx Brothers.”
As they used to say, I’m hip. A quarter-century ago, I flirted with becoming an opera singer, and in a summer program I played Antonio the gardener in “The Marriage of Figaro.” A friend who had seen me doing my yeomanly thing in some local productions of musicals and plays said that as Antonio, I hadn’t really connected. I said, “Yeah, he speaks Italian.” Around the same time, I used “O Isis und Osiris” from “The Magic Flute” as an audition and performance song, alternating between the English (by Andrew Porter) and the German. The German version was in no way superior.
After a while, I let go of singing opera. The main reason was that despite my exposure to foreign languages, I never could truly understand why we were singing in Italian, French and German. It seemed like something we wouldn’t do if we could roll the tape back and start again.
The lyricist and librettist Oscar Hammerstein II said he wrote a Black English version of Georges Bizet’s “Carmen,” “Carmen Jones,” because “listening to people sing words you didn’t understand wasn’t much fun.” I highly recommend “Carmen Jones” as a starter. Try the film and then the EMI recording with Wilhelmenia Fernandez for a more complete version of the score.
The Metropolitan Opera is seriously ailing financially, and its attempts to shift to more contemporary programming do not seem to be solving the problem. A suggestion: It should try having all foreign-language operas performed in English and advertising the change. This season “Aida,” “Fidelio,” “Tosca,” “La Bohème,” “The Barber of Seville,” “Tales of Hoffmann,” “Rigoletto” and “Salome” all should have been in the language that the greatest portion of the audience in New York speaks and understands.
The Opera Theater of St. Louis and the English National Opera are among the companies that saw the light on this long ago. If the Met gets on board, it will surely encounter Schonberg-type naysayers. But a little controversy would only stir up curiosity — and ticket sales. Tradition is fine but should never be an end in its own right. And even the greatest composers agreed: Opera is better when you can understand it.
John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of “Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever” and, most recently, “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.” @JohnHMcWhorter
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