by Heather O’Donovan

Even if you’ve never been to the opera, if you’ve spent a Saturday binging cartoons or an evening snuggled up with a bucket of popcorn watching a movie, you’ve probably heard at least a few of the genre’s greatest tunes. You’ve probably also realized that they — especially the ones referenced in pop culture — aren’t often in English.

Operas come in many languages, but the majority are in French, Italian, or German. And while it’s easy to imagine an audience full of pretentious fuddy-duddies who all speak six languages sitting in the theater understanding every word, that’s far from the case. Over the past several decades, companies have realized that by making the linguistic element more accessible, they are able to address a stigma that has long kept newcomers away from.

Cue: opera in translation, which takes two forms: supertitles (translated text projected on a screen above the stage) and singable translations (a new version of the text meticulously set to the original music). Let’s take a deep dive into the work that goes into their creation!

Supertitles

Supertitles, also referred to as surtitles, are a lot TV or film subtitles, except that instead of being displayed at the bottom of the screen, supertitles are typically projected on a small screen above the stage (i.e. super, or “above,” as opposed to sub, or “below”). They’re are used in foreign-language works to provide a real-time translation, but can also be projected during English-language productions to ensure intelligibility.

Supertitles — which I firmly believe, are super — have strong historical precedent. Beginning in the 17th century, it was common for opera goers to carry a booklet containing the libretto — often dual-language — into the venue. Back then, theaters weren’t as dark as they are today, so the audience would be able to read along by candlelight. And, for a long time, going to the opera was far from the “sacred” experience many envision it today — people would talk, eat, and even gamble, so reading along seems downright comparatively proper.

Modern supertitles are organized as a series of slides that are cued (switched) by an operator in a booth often located in the back of the theater. Slides alternate between those with text and without (blank, or black slides), and a typical opera can have hundreds to thousands of them. As the action unfolds, the supertitle operator follows a marked score, and when a character sings a new line of text, the corresponding slide is cued.When text repeats (which happens fairly often in arias and ensembles), the projection typically switches to black so the audience can focus its attention on the stage.

Translators have limited space on each slide, so they must be efficient, at times cutting extraneous details in order to fit. This also ensures the audience is able to read the entirety of one slide before the next appears. Conventional punctuation can also be utilized to indicate dramatic shifts — dashes can indicate a character has been cut off, or parentheses mark an aside.

There are several tricks to successfully presenting supertitles, but most revolve around timing. They should be as much a part of the ensemble as any instrument, and their appearance and disappearance should be undeniably musical. One of the primary rules is that the audience should never see a slide before onset of the singer’s voice, otherwise, it seems like they’ve missed their line. And then, of course, there are jokes (of which opera has plenty) and passionate exclamations indicating crucial plot twists (That man you killed was your brother!). These slides must be crafted and presented so the eye sees the most important word in the phrase at the exact moment it lands in the ear.

When executed properly, supertitles enhance the experience of the work on stage and play a crucial role in the modern opera house.

Singable Translations

Creating supertitles is challenging, but crafting singable translations is something of a Herculean task, and those skilled enough to accomplish the feat are few and far between. The work that goes into them is a bit like a juggling act — one hand holds the words, the other has the music. You begin tossing them in the air and all goes well until, suddenly, Mozart shows up and starts throwing in additional elements. First, a rhyme scheme, then a joke with a punchline that lands precisely on the last note of the phrase, and finally a reference to an obscure German food that sounds to American ears like an 18th-century disease. Mozart laughs and skips away, leaving you trying to keep five pins in the air, sweating profusely. You have to do something, so you compromise and let one drop so that you can successfully manage the other four.

Peter Low has described this juggling act as the “pentathlon principle,” in which the translator balances five criteria: rhythm, sense, naturalness, singability, and rhyme.

Rhythm

Music has structure. In opera, there are a specific number of notes assigned to a specific number of syllables. Rhythm is what makes these ambiguous syllables into intelligible words and phrases. Let’s say a composer sets “You bore me so” to music. If they know what they’re doing, the rhythmic value of each syllable will be set short-long-short-long, giving us the natural stress pattern of “You booooore me soooo.” However, if they’re new to the game or not as familiar with English, they might set the text to a scheme more like short-short-long-short, giving us “You bore meeeee so.” The misplaced stress not only makes this less intelligible, but also potentially results in a comical misinterpretation of the character: Are they giving birth to a fermented soybean paste (“You bore miso”)?

If they’re lucky, when they translate a sentence, the number of syllables and stress patterns will match up perfectly to the original. But, that’s rarely the case, which brings us to our next criteria …

Sense

When a literal translation doesn’t match the rhythm on the page, it’s time to get creative. The most important part of a translator’s job is the preservation of the “sense,” or meaning, of the original phrase.

Let’s imagine that our “You bore me so / You bore miso” example was originally a line from a Mozart opera in German. The original rhythm followed the short-short-long-short pattern, and the dramatic situation is a character expressing her boredom with her tiresome, aging husband who is reading her a particularly snooze-worthy book.

Mozart would probably laugh at the ridiculousness of the English “You bore meeeee so,” (after finding out what miso is, of course), so we have to find a better alternative. A potential solution might be “Oh how boooooring!”, In this version we lose the pointedness of the “you,” but gain a great deal through lengthened syllable in “boring,” as the rhythm allows the character’s frustration come to life: “Oh how boooooring!” Is it a literal translation? No. Does it capture the essence of the original? Absolutely. What’s even more exciting is that it sounds so very natural as well …

Naturalness

The goal of creating a singable English translation is almost always going to be performance, so it is imperative that it can stand alone as a work of theater. Intended to be accessible, they are frequently used in educational outreach settings and family-friendly performances. If it is clunky or otherwise unnatural, the audience can tell, so it must abide by the standard conventions of grammar and maintain a consistent registral voice. Similarly, if the decision is made to translate an opera into a standard modern register using the term “you” instead of the more antiquated terms “thee” or “thou,” then placing a sudden “thee” into a character’s text would be jarring to the audience’s ear.

Returning to our previous example, an alternate, but equally natural short-short-long-short option for our heroine to sing could even be something as simple as “How you boooore me!” This follows the natural stress patterns of the English language, obeys the rules of grammar, and sounds realistically like something a woman bored with her dull husband might exclaim.

Singability

The notion of “singability” encompasses many of the ideas we’ve already touched upon, but also refers in large part to the idea that a performer should be able to pronounce the text without ever compromising vocal health or beauty. Certain vowels are easier for a soprano to sing on a high note than others — skilled composer will almost always set sounds like “ah” and “oh” to that register, rather than the more uncomfortable “ee” and “eh.”

The Italian word for “heart,” cuore, offers sopranos a beautiful vowel to sing on a high note. Ideally, the translation will use  the word “heart” here, since it contains a similarly open vowel — “chest” or “breast” wouldn’t work as well. Furthermore, if a minor word, such as “the” or “this,” is set on the highest note in the phrase, the text will fail to have its full effect on the listener. Like longer rhythmic values, the highest and lowest notes of a phrase typically indicate that the word being sung at that moment is important. Our ears know this instinctively, and so it is up to the translator to preserve these moments, in turn crafting a highly intelligible and performable translation.

Rhyme

Rhyme schemes are one of the biggest challenges. They’re a big part of libretti and something the translator strives to capture.

Let’s return once more to our example. Imagine that Mozart’s original music called for two consecutive phrases — short-short-long-short / short-short-long-short — with the final two syllables of each line forming a rhyme. Ideally, that trick would be preserved, so a little creativity is necessary. Luckily, there is no new information introduced in the second line of the original version — our heroine merely laments her fate in slightly different words. So there’s room to play …

One version could be How you booooore me / I abhoooor thee, but it’s not perfect, since we’ve suddenly taken our modern woman back a few centuries with the word “thee.”

A second, slightly more appealing option could utilize our alternate version of the first line: Oh how boooooring / I am snooooring. With this one, we’ve clearly taken some liberties with the translation of that second line. However, it matches up rhythmically, exhibits a nice rhyme scheme, and has perfectly singable vowels. Most importantly, after a careful character analysis of our listless heroine, we can confidently conclude that “I am snoring” indeed might be something that she would cry out in exasperation.

One juggling act later and we’ve found the perfect pair of lines to set to our fictional composer’s music. Only two hundred more pages of music to go!

Next time you go to the opera, give some thought to what went into the creation of the translations you’re seeing or hearing. And tell your friends —  they may just be the key they need to get a few more operatic newbies in the door!

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