Giving Opera a Whole New Meaning

I’m all for supertitles--those translations projected on a screen above the stage during an opera. Just about everybody benefits. Companies do better at the box office because now everyone can follow the dialogue. They can understand the plot as it’s happening.

If it’s a comedy, they can laugh.

If it’s a tragedy, they can weep.

If they’re bothered by supertitles--and some people are--they don’t have to look at them.

Even the Metropolitan Opera in New York uses them, despite music director James Levine’s claim that they would be introduced only “over my dead body.”

Well, they’re there and so is he.

(The Met system is discreet, however. It’s almost personal. Translations are projected in tiny red letters on a little railing that sits on top of the seat ahead of you. You turn them on or off.)

Let’s face it: Opera plots can be bizarre, and all help is appreciated. Gilbert and Sullivan made a lot of hay parodying them. But some operas parody themselves.

Still, the plots almost always make more sense as they unfold in the theater than when they’re read on the page. So it makes sense to be able to understand them line by line.

They’re like Shakespeare’s plays in this regard. People reading Shakespeare for the first time often are bewildered. Who can keep straight all those Dukes of York and Lancaster, for instance? Which side is which? Who are the good guys? Who are the bad?

But seeing actors play these roles almost always makes the characters’ motivations immediately clear.

And how many of Shakespeare’s jokes seem incredibly obscure when you read them but make you laugh outright when delivered onstage?

Opera and supertitles are like that too.

Admittedly, at one time, the translations were sometimes clumsy or ill-timed, prompting premature or inappropriate laughter. One of the most famous gaffes of this sort was a translation of Tosca’s instruction to her painter-lover Cavaradossi to change the blue eyes of a woman in a portrait to black, like her own.

Tosca sings, “Ma falle gli occhi neri!” (But make her eyes black). The translation used suggested he give the woman a black eye, by slugging her. People laughed. But it wasn’t a funny line. It was simply meant to indicate Tosca’s extreme jealously of an imagined rival.

But though things have gotten better, there are still plenty of opportunities for misunderstanding. In fact, supertitles may lull people into thinking they understand what’s going on when they don’t.

At Opera Pacific’s recent presentation of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” a few such misunderstandings occurred. Some were minor. Some were just awful.

When the American consul Sharpless asks Butterfly right before her wedding to Lieutenant B.F. Pinkerton if she has any sisters, for instance, he’s merely politely inquiring about her family.

But people in the audience laughed at the line--”E ci avete sorelle?” (And have you no sisters?)--as if Sharpless were asking if there was anyone else in the family that he might date or marry.

The keen listener would have realized Sharpless just turned down Goro, the marriage broker, who offered him one of his other geishas. Marriage is the last thing on his mind.

More serious mistakes occurred later. Remember that by Act 2, Butterfly has been abandoned by Pinkerton. She is on the verge of poverty. Realizing her situation, she brings Sharpless the son she’s born to Pinkerton but which he’s never seen.

When Sharpless asks her if the boy is indeed Pinkerton’s, Butterfly replies, “Chi vide mai a bimbo del Giappon occhi azzurini . . . E i ricciolini d’oro schietto?” (“What Japanese baby was ever born with azure eyes . . . and such a head of golden ringlets?”).

For some reason, this line brought down the house. What a bizarre reaction.

But even worse, when Sharpless--stunned by her revelation--promises to tell Pinkerton about the child and asks his name, Butterfly instructs him to respond:

“Oggi il mio nome e Dolore . . . che il giorno del suo ritorno Gioia mi chiamero.”

This is almost always mistranslated as follows: “My name now is Trouble. . . . But the day my father returns, my name will be Joy.”

The Italian “dolore” actually means sorrow, not trouble.

So people are being misled. Let’s assume that’s why the audience laughed at the word “Trouble,” as if Butterfly were telling Sharpless her toddler was a real handful.

In one carefully chosen word, Puccini and his librettists have summed up Butterfly and her son’s desperate situation--and a mistranslation causes a terribly inappropriate joke.

So what’s the moral of this piece?

Pay close attention to what’s going on in the opera. Even with supertitles, you may be missing the story.