Opera’s Unsung Hero : David Headland Makes Meanings Clear With Supertitles

For many people, the key that has opened the riches of opera has been supertitles. But few of them know how much work goes into keeping those translations of the text of arias and dialogue flashing accurately and in timely fashion above the stage.

“Many people think this whole thing is automated,” said Opera Pacific supertitles coordinator David Headland, who is busy this week cluing in non-German-speakers to the action in the company’s presentations of Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman” at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

“Whenever I invite somebody to the opera house, I take them up there to the light booth and show them what we do. They’re always surprised.”

Some companies--L.A. Opera is one--use an electronic character generator, through which an operator keys in the translations. Others, including Opera Pacific, use titles that are put on slides. Both systems project the titles onto a screen, usually above the stage. The slide projector used here is operated by a projectionist directed by a supertitles coordinator like Headland.

The two men sit in the spotlight booth of the Orange County center’s second tier and communicate with each other through earphones and microphones. Headland listens to the sound coming through a stage mike. He watches the conductor and follows along with the score. At times, he has to count measures if the sound is too low or if the singers turn away from him.

“When I want a slide to appear,” Headland said, “I’ll say to the projectionist, ‘One, Go’ when I want him to push the button.”

Depending on the production, there can be anywhere from eight to 13 carousels, each full of 50 to 80 slides.

“There are all sorts of pitfalls,” said the 37-year-old Headland, who in his day job is an information systems coordinator in the radiation department of a hospital in Orange.

“A cue is called incorrectly by me, which happens sometimes, or I call a cue and it’s executed improperly. And that can mean that a slide might appear before the singer sings, which I hate, if you have a comedy, and it’s a very funny line, and the audience is laughing before the guy is delivering the line. That’s the worst.

“So you make aesthetic decisions all the time because you really want it to be a part of the experience, not just what they say. That’s what we shoot for. There’s an inevitable human element involved, and you can’t get rid of that.”

A singer and a pianist, who also trained as a composer at Cal State Fullerton, Headland began working as an independent contractor for Opera Pacific in 1993 on Gounod’s “Romeo et Juliette.” He begins work on supertitles at least a week before an opera opens, attending at a minimum two piano and two orchestra dress rehearsals. On performance nights, he works three to five hours or more.

With his hospital duties, some days Headland works 11 or more hours. But the moonlighting job has its perks. “I get to sit for two weeks and listen to Mozart. You can’t beat it.”

When it comes to supertitles, an opera company has three options: It can rent the whole production--including the slides--from another opera company; it can create its own production (and slides) from scratch, or it can rent slides from a company in Florida that specializes in that business. That company also will create a single slide that a director might need for a special moment and send it by overnight mail.

“The only thing that’s scary about that, of course, is if you’re in a hurry, you don’t want to load it in upside-down and backward,” Headland said. It has happened.

There is a rhythm to the process. “You don’t want to have slides constantly changing so the viewer is bobbing his head up and down,” he said. “Obviously, there’s a lot going on on stage that they want to see.

“So I have to decide what’s significant to project and what isn’t. It’s not easy. Sometimes you have to make decisions which aren’t really that great but are necessary. It’s not usually a big problem because as long as you get the salient plot points and the salient dialogue, the important stuff, you’re going to be OK.”

When singers keep repeating a line, Headland has another decision to make.

“What I’ll often do is have the initial slide up there and have it fade out maybe over eight seconds, even 16 seconds, if it’s really long,” he said. “That tells the audience, ‘OK, he’s still singing this, now look at the stage. The slide is not going to change.’ ”

Cuing spoken dialogue can be difficult because there is no rhythm, he said. Sometimes he adds his own touches.

“I’ll do fun things too,” he said. “I’ll try to have slides pop out on an orchestral punctuation of a line, just to make it rhythmic. You don’t even care about it. I just do it for me.”

Translations can be a problem if they aren’t in keeping with the music. “You can have a very accurate translation, but it stops everything cold. That’s the last thing in the world you want.”

Worse are the lines that draw unexpected--and inappropriate--laughs, as happened recently in “Madama Butterfly.” People laughed at a particularly tragic moment when Butterfly told Sharpless that the son she had borne to Lt. B.F. Pinkerton could not have a Japanese father because “had he ever seen a Japanese child with blue eyes and blond hair?”

“We had no clue at all that would happen,” Headland said. “We rephrased it after that happened at a dress rehearsal. But when it happened again even with the change, what could we do? We couldn’t cut it.

“Maybe audiences are conditioned to laugh by sitcoms. But that’s a definite problem in translations.”