Lost in translation
Henrietta Bredin on the prevalence and pitfalls of opera surtitles
They’re here to stay. There is no longer any point in discussing whether or not opera performances in languages other than English should have surtitles. Everyone’s doing it now.
So, if they’re here whether we like them or not (and it has to be admitted that most people do), are there ways in which they can be improved? The ideal arrangement is the one that most companies can’t afford: a small screen in the back of every seat. This means that you can choose whether or not to switch it on, and is infinitely less distracting than a line of text flashing in the darkness above the stage. It’s no good saying that if you don’t like surtitles you can choose not to look at them. If they’re there, it’s impossible to ignore them: they’re a moving light at the edge of your vision and we’re all trained nowadays to scan for peripheral images. People have tried putting them in different places. Baz Luhrmann, for example, with his production of La Bohème, had text projected from the sides of the stage on to the reverse side of bits of the set in different typefaces to indicate changes of mood, so that ‘lurve’ lyrics appeared in curlicued, slanting, romantic-fiction lettering.
The Royal Opera House, although it does have a few seat-back slots, and some that are recessed into the padded fronts of the boxes, opts for the more standard method of displaying the surtitles on a screen above the stage. Given that restriction, no greater care and attention could be paid to the subtleties of their transmission than are exercised by Jonathan Burton and his colleague Judi Palmer. Burton took me to the auditorium to show me the glassed-in room at the back of the balcony from where the titles are operated during performances. It offers an excellent view of the surtitles screen but has absolutely no sightlines to the stage. For that they have to rely on a small, fuzzy TV screen and on what they can remember of production details from having sat through stage rehearsals taking detailed notes. Another screen shows the conductor in the orchestra pit, which is essential for spotting when the action is about to start up again after a pause. The operator cues the titles from a marked-up score, adjusting their timing to the music and the action as necessary.
The preparation of surtitle texts is done in an office elsewhere in the building, using a computer programme which allows for the minutest of adjustments. Legibility is the prime consideration, so the level of brightness is crucial, as is the speed of fading in and out for each title, and the kerning, or individual letter-spacing. The projected letters are a foot high, so every detail shows. Only two short lines of text are displayed at a time, which is reckoned to be the most you can take in at a glance, and there are well-tried conventions for denoting when a new person is singing (a dash before their line), when someone is singing offstage (italic type), etc. Punctuation is distracting and kept to a minimum. But unless you see something done wrong or clumsily you wouldn’t notice any of this.
Making a translation for surtitles is a very different thing from making a singing translation. Burton offers excellent guidelines, emphasising the need for brevity and clarity, and to provide the audience with a guide to the sense of the text, not a literal word-for-word translation. He recommends that translators practise with a recording to establish pacing; how often the titles should change. In the case of fast music with a lot of words, a Rossini patter song, for example, this requires an acute sensibility and lightness of touch, indicating the meaning of what is being sung rather than reflecting the style. Above all, Burton stresses that the aim of the surtitler should be transparency, almost invisibility.
This is a laudable aim but not an easy one to achieve. And if surtitles are provided for operas which are being sung in English, the pitfalls become much more evident. The problems are particularly marked in comedy. People do not all read at the same pace and it’s rarely possible to time the appearance of a surtitle line precisely with the moment it’s sung, so there is a high risk that members of the audience will laugh just before, or just too long after, a comic line has been delivered. This makes complete dramatic nonsense and has a jarring effect on a performer’s natural rhythm. Of course, as the composer Jonathan Dove points out, the same applies to any sort of performance, it’s just that with laughter you have an audible measurement of the audience’s response.
Dove has had direct personal experience of these difficulties. His opera Flight, with a text by April de Angelis, has recently been performed in the same production in St Louis, without surtitles, and in Boston, with them. As he says, ‘The intention is good. We want audiences to understand better what is happening, but the result is the opposite. In Boston, people good-naturedly but inappropriately laughed at a list of things that were funny when read from a projected text. In fact, the words do have humour but the feeling behind them is highly emotional. That misunderstanding would never have happened if people were listening, not reading. It destroyed the atmosphere of the scene.’ Both he and the director Colin Graham noticed that audience reception for Flight in St Louis was warmer and more naturally responsive than that in Boston. At the time of writing, Glyndebourne has yet to make a final decision on whether to surtitle performances of the original production of Flight when it’s revived there this summer.
In the most literal way, surtitles upstage performers — there’s a conflicting performance that they can’t see going on over their heads. That dynamic could be improved if all surtitles could be in seat backs or the arms of seats; it’s definitely better to look down at text (or to ignore it) — in the same way that people would once have done with printed copies of the libretto — than to have the titles competing with the visual expression of the production. However, it’s undeniable that people don’t really listen any more because they know that the text will be provided so they don’t need to make the effort. Without the crutch of surtitles, they panic if they miss a few words, think they can’t hear anything and perpetuate the problem. People forget how much meaning is conveyed visually and expressively.
As Dove recognises, some composers are better at setting words than others, and ‘some people are better at interpreting sung words, either more practised at it or quite simply better able to take in the sounds’. In addition, singers’ ability to convey words clearly varies dramatically. Are some singers becoming lazier about diction because they know they can rely on surtitles instead of on their own ability to articulate?
Recent performances of Così fan tutte at Opera North — in English and without surtitles — were astonishingly fresh and vivid because the text was so clear and audible that the audience response was seamlessly attuned to its delivery. A bright line of communication and pleasure crackled between stage, orchestra pit and auditorium. What worries me is that this was, in recent years of opera-going, a rare and unusual experience.
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