A Singer’s Life Pt19
Opera in Translation
I have decided to address the hoary old question of whether opera (and songs and oratorios) should be sung in the original language they were written in, or in a translation in the audience’s own language?
This argument has been running for as long as opera has existed as an art form. It is generally recognised that the first operas appeared at the beginning of the 17th Century. Before that time, there were mystery plays and ribald farces with music, but not something one could call ART. It is commonly accepted that the first opera was ‘Dafne’, by Jacopo Peri, premiered in Florence in 1597. In 1600, Peri and Caccini produced ‘Euridice’ as a joint effort, and this is the earliest surviving score we have. It was largely recitative with almost no melodic sections, but only 7 years later, Claudio Monteverdi wrote ‘Orfeo’ for the Court of Mantua, using songs, recitatives, and proper orchestration to tell the story of Orpheus. Opera had begun. In 1600, in Rome, Emilio da Cavalieri wrote a morality play with music, singing and dancing called ‘Rappresentatione di Anima e di Corpo’ (Portrayal of the Soul and the Body), which premiered in the Oratorio dei Filippini. Was this an opera or an oratorio? We don’t know, but certainly this decade from 1597 to 1607 was when the art form I have worked in all my adult life saw the light of day. In 1637, the world’s first commercially run opera house, the Teatro San Cassiano opened in Venice.
Obviously, the works were written in Italian for Italian audiences, and must have been absolutely astonishing to see and hear. Consequently, for centuries since then, the Italian language has been seen as the language of opera and even in our own time, Luciano Pavarotti singing ‘Nessun Dorma’ from Puccini’s “Turandot” has become fixed in the public’s mind as OPERA!
After the initial surge at the beginning of the 17th Century in Italy, opera took Europe by storm as the nobility of Paris, London, Vienna and Hamburg flocked to see this new entertainment, and to be seen enjoying it! The stars of the opera became celebrities with supporters and opponents screaming their delight or opprobrium. Outside Italy, it became de rigeur to be seen at the Opera, and rich families bought seats and boxes to show themselves off.
For a century or more, these operas were sung in Italian, usually by Italians, but, as the frenzy increased, singers from other countries vied to be the stars. Huge sums could be earned and lost as fashions changed and people came into and out of favour. What was clear from the start, outside Italy, was that most of the patrons had no idea what their favourites were singing about and couldn’t care. The more spectacle on stage, fire effects, ballets, choruses, sumptuous costumes, the more the public cheered. They each had a programme to read, either during the boring bits or afterwards, and they would learn the gist of the story from that. The music was everything, and diction and clarity of speech were totally unnecessary, let alone comprehensibility!
Over the years, operas began to be written in other languages, first in French and German, then later in Russian, Czech and English. With this proliferation of languages, soon people began to ask why they could not understand what was being sung, and here we find ourselves at the translation crossroad.
Is it best to perform in the original language, at the expense of comprehension, or is it better to sing in the language of the audience, thus necessitating a translation?
When I started off in 1981, this was a very moot point. In London, the Royal Opera House sang everything in the original, but English National Opera at the Coliseum sang everything in translation. The regional companies were more nuanced. Opera North, as an offshoot from ENO sang in English, while Scottish Opera, where I started off, sang comedies in English and tragic pieces in the original. In Germany, most operas were sung in German apart from the international houses, but in France, most were in the original.
The problem in Britain was twofold. Firstly, opera was still seen as somehow elitist and highbrow, and because there were very few companies, compared to our European cousins, it became something of a battle to work out what was the best solution, and it turned almost political. Secondly, translating Italian, German and French into singable and decent English is a great challenge, since, for example, virtually all Italian words end in a vowel and most German sentences involve the verb coming at the end. These problems are very difficult to solve, involving, in Italian, a lot of sentences filled with Oh and Ah in translation, and, in German, a lot of word juggling and sentence mangling. The sounds of the languages in speech are also completely different, and even simple expressions take on another dimension when sung in another language. When we start to think about translating Russian or Czech into English, we also come across the problem that the musical sound is often bound up in the sound of the words.
It became a serious dilemma for opera companies to judge what was the best solution. Direct comprehension versus the sound of the words in the original. Added to this, there is the age-old problem of singers’ diction in any language. We are trained to make the most beautiful sounds possible when we sing, and often the necessity to be clear with the words gives way to beauty of tone. Many of the older generation, particularly female singers, were less interested in clarity of diction and concentrated on the purity of sound. I was always taught that one sings on the vowels and adds the consonants to achieve understanding. This has never appeared problematic to me, but it is obvious that many singers were less bothered about those consonants! There is yet another complication that means that as female singers go high, the actual sound of the words become modified and certain vowels become impossible to sing. My favourite example occurs in Wagner’s ‘The Valkyrie’, in Act One, when the heroine Sieglinde discovers that she has found her long lost brother and wants to make love to him (don’t ask??), she screams (beautifully) at the top of her voice what sounds like ‘Seigmund’, because she can’t sing an ‘ee’ vowel up there. He, who hasn’t heard this name before, interprets for his and our benefit, and declares, correctly ’Siegmund!’ over and over. Problems everywhere!
I always felt that the system we had at Scottish Opera in the early 80s worked very well, although singing “The Bartered Bride” (Smetana) and “The Golden Cockerel”(Rimsky-Korsakov) in English, rather than the Slavic languages Czech and Russian, sounded terribly twee and British. Of course, the contrary problem facing our European neighbours is that some of the original libretti for operas by Donizetti, Bellini and Verdi were less than perfect, and repeating the same phrases over and over induces feelings of exhaustion on the listener.
Some operas just struggle to be translated. One of my bugbears for years has been Debussy’s opera ‘Pelleas et Melisande’ in English translation. The composer set, almost word for word, Maurice Maeterlinck’s play and used the speech rhythms of French to create, in my opinion, one of the great works of the 20th Century. There are no arias or set ‘singingy’ bits, just one superb all-through opera, and it defies English translation, because for me, it only sounds right in French. Attempts have been made, but it simply sounds wrong. On the other hand, Wagner famously wrote all the words and all the music for his operas, and it occurs to me that contemporary Germans might find his alliterative style out-dated now, and that a translation allows us here to find a better way of saying what he meant. In a previous article, I noted that in 1990, we, the cast and director of CBTO, changed the original translation of Wagner’s Ring to a certain extent, and that contemporary critics had loved our translation, but thinking that it was the original from 20 years before, praised the superb (old) version.
My good friend, and accompanist in an earlier life, Jeremy Sams, has made a great name for himself in the past 30 years as a translator of operas, and I think he has done a fine job, but it still remains a huge problem that a translation allows the audience to understand much more of what we sing, but are deprived of the beauty of the original language. I was privileged to sing for several years with English National Opera in London, and at that time, their raison d’etre (note the language switch!) was to perform everything in English translation. All the singers were English-speaking, even the Scots like me, and it was part of our training to learn how to sing clearly in our own language. Mark Elder, the musical director at the time, was brilliant at helping us understand what to stress and what not to stress, and at the start of every rehearsal period, we would work through the score emphasising clarity and good diction. Despite the soprano problem with high notes and acoustics mentioned earlier in this piece, we all worked together to be as clear as possible. Mark was very good at finding the important stresses in each word. I give an example: the word ‘angel’ has a stress on the first syllable, but the second syllable is quite neutral, almost a nothing sound apart from the ‘L’ at the end. Now listen to the wonderful Annie Lennox singing ‘There must be an angel’. At several points she has to sing the word ‘angel’ but for some unknown reason she pronounces it ‘Ain-GEL’. There are many other examples of wilful mispronunciation on recordings, and I don’t think most people have ever noticed (you will now; sorry Annie!), but Mark brought it to my attention, and I have never forgotten it. Sadly, now, ENO still sings everything in English, but frequently employs non-English speakers, thus negating, to a certain extent, their famous raison d’etre. Problems often crop up when non anglophone singers sing in English. They think they know how to pronounce something because they speak excellent English but haven’t bothered to learn these little discrepancies and nuances to which I have alluded. Listen to the fabulous Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau on the recording of Britten’s War Requiem. His ‘L’ sound is often terrible, a sort of strangled gulp, and don’t get me started on French people trying to sing ‘th’.
Diction is enormously important, and yet, the most critical development in opera over the last 20 years has been the introduction of surtitles. This allows the singers to sing in the original language while the audience is able to follow the words by using the screen on the proscenium arch. At a stroke, the problem, for me, has been solved, especially in the big theatres, but there is still an ongoing discussion, no, argument, about their use. People complain about twisting their necks to see the words, that they have to take their eyes off the stage to look at the text, that they find it all too confusing, Even in New York’s Metropolitan, where the screens with the words are in a choice of 3 languages, including the original, on the back of the seat in front of you, there are complaints. Now, I think many of these complaints come from people who, in the old pre-surtitle period, used to come up to me after a performance and say:” Oh Brian, that was lovely. So beautiful! I loved every minute. Couldn’t understand a word of course, but it didn’t really matter! I got the gist from the programme”. I often had to be physically restrained! I would almost have preferred if they had told me I was rubbish. (Actually, that’s not true!)
It has made a huge difference, although in smaller theatres where they either can’t afford surtitles or just would rather have direct contact between singers and audience, there is a place for translations. Similarly, when working with students and younger performers, asking them to sing and memorise words in a foreign language is sometimes too much of an ask, and here we still will need those excellent translations, like those of my friend, Jeremy Sams (other translators are of course available!).
