When the aged, world-weary Faust, in Lyric Opera of Chicago’s new production of Gounod’s “Faust,” opening this weekend at the Civic Opera House, enters with the wordy French line, “En vain j’interroge, en mon ardent veille, la nature et le Createur,” audience members who cast their eyes to the little screen above the proscenium can read this pithy translation, in computer-generated lettering: “In vain have I sought the meaning of existence.”
Welcome to the wonderful world of opera titles.
By now, the use of projected English captions has become so standard for presentations at the Lyric–and with just about every other major opera company in the U.S. and in many theaters in Europe–that audience members would probably rush to the box office and demand refunds if the performance came without them.
Since 1983, when Lotfi Mansouri introduced them as director of the Canadian Opera Company (he now heads the San Francisco Opera), the idea has become the hottest marketing trend in opera since the invention of the subscription series.
Of the 120 professional opera companies here and in Canada, the vast majority have embraced some form of titles. The Santa Fe and St. Louis operas, both of which perform all or part of their repertory in English, are the only major holdouts.
Even the Metropolitan Opera–whose artistic director, James Levine, once vowed that the Met would caption its presentations “over my dead body”–has jumped aboard the titles bandwagon: In October the company proudly unveiled its $2.7-million computerized system of seat-back translations, called Met Titles. And, yes, even Levine likes them.
The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in London captions its opera performances, while the Bastille Opera in Paris runs simultaneous translations in both French and English.
Lyric Opera first used captions with its production of Puccini’s “La Rondine” in 1985; they have been an integral part of every production there since, including operas that are sung in English. General director Ardis Krainik says she is a titles maven because it’s good business. “I think titles do the audience a great service, and I’m in the business of serving my audience,” she declares. “I love them, too. I think they have increased the audience for opera and certainly have increased their comprehension and enjoyment.”
A 1991 survey of Lyric subscribers conducted by the University of Chicago found that fully 97 percent prefer captioned to non-captioned opera.
So what are the advantages of titles? What has the titles phenomenon brought to the operatic experience? What has it taken away?
The Tribune posed these questions to a variety of professionals who work in a variety of opera houses and experience opera on both sides of the footlights. Their answers suggested that, although most professionals welcome titles and believe opera has much to gain by making itself more accessible to more audience members, others–admittedly a minority–wonder if opera hasn’t given up something precious by being reduced, in a sense, to a sequence of words flashed across a screen.
Marc Scorca, the former Chicago Opera Theater official who is executive director of Opera America, which serves about 280 companies and affiliate members in North America, agrees titles have helped build a constituency for opera. “One of the reasons for the phenomenal growth of opera over the last 10 years–and no other performing art form has grown the way opera has grown–is clearly the accessibility of the art form brought about by projected titles,” he says.
Composer Dominick Argento, whose “The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe” was presented by Lyric–with titles–in 1990, admits he was initially opposed to them until he heard a titled performance of his “Casanova’s Homecoming”–an opera already written in English–at New York City Opera.
He found that virtually every projected line provoked an audience reaction that actually fueled the performance. The experience convinced him that titles can be a valid part of an operatic performance.
Besides, he says, “knowing how composers from Monteverdi to Britten have taken pains to give every single word its correct inflection, weight and stress, it seems to me we miss a great deal of an opera’s richness and detail when we settle for partial understanding. And without titles, that is precisely what we do.”
Most opera singers interviewed say they welcome the fact that audiences can really understand everything they are singing. And one of the primary benefits of projected titles, they say, is that they allow singers to perform everything in the original languages, as the composers intended.
Although most opera companies spend thousands of dollars on educating their public through lecture series, providing librettos and synopses of the operas, the fact is many operagoers still aren’t all that familiar with the text of even standard operas–so titles help. Says soprano Erie Mills: “If the audience came prepared, we wouldn’t need titles; but they don’t, so we do.”
Critics of titles argue that it’s virtually impossible to concentrate fully on what’s happening on stage, musically or dramatically, when one’s attention is constantly being drawn to the words on the screen.
One experienced operagoer who is ambivalent about captions is Matthew Epstein, vice president of Columbia Artists Management and artistic adviser to Lyric Opera. He concedes, on one hand, the value of titles as an audience-broadening tool and believes they can help to demystify certain arcane plots or unfamiliar works. More often than not, however, he finds them distracting. “I have found myself watching the text and realizing after a few moments that I had missed what was happening on stage,” he says.
Patrick J. Smith, editor of Opera News magazine, wonders whether their popularity has something to do with what he believes is a “general decline in aural acuity” among opera audiences. Only time will tell, he adds, whether titles have contributed to the lazy listening of an entire generation.
Perhaps the sharpest critic of titles is, ironically enough, a man who makes his living from them: Francis Rizzo, author of the “Faust” titles quoted above, and Lyric’s unofficial titlist-in-residence. The former artistic director of the Washington Opera, Rizzo has captioned more than 60 operas, most of them works the Lyric has presented. His captions have been seen in theaters all over the nation, including Los Angeles, Washington and San Francisco.
“From a purely artistic, idealistic point of view, I feel titles are an artificial thing grafted onto the art form,” he says. “The audience is made to think and feel by something that has nothing to do with the creators or performers of the work.” At their worst, he adds, titles can snap the vital connection between the audience and the music.
Many of the defects of titles are the same defects one finds in singing translations, according to Rizzo. But there is a crucial difference: Singing translations are encapsulated in the music. They are being sung by the singers. They can’t lead a life of their own, as titles unfortunately do.
Having said that, Rizzo argues passionately that the intrinsic quality of projected titles has not improved all that much over the last decade, and that many theaters aren’t very savvy in how they use them; they think it’s enough to translate word for word and leave it at that. At the risk of sounding self-serving, he says: “In major houses–I won’t name names–you can see shockingly bad titles very ineptly done. You ask yourself, `Have they no pride?’ The Lyric administration is among the few that take titles really seriously.”
A stickler for captioned perfection, Rizzo estimates that for every 500 title slides he prepared for Lyric’s 1987 production of Berg’s “Lulu,” he discarded another 500–and that’s just one example out of the 38 operas he has captioned here. “I’m a maniac in my demands, both on myself and others, because it’s a very serious business,” he says.
(Lyric pays Rizzo a fee to prepare titles for a given production of an opera. If Lyric rents that show–titles and all–to another company, Rizzo gets a royalty. Lyric also rents sets of titles from other independent titlists such as Sonya Friedman.)
It’s a demonstrable fact that poorly written or clumsily timed titles have provoked gales of audience laughter in the middle of tragic operas, or spoiled a singer’s carefully planned comic aria with a misplaced punchline.
But the situation is slowly improving, as titles become more user-friendly and more theaters learn to treat them as a subsidiary art form.
Then, too, even the harshest detractors of projected titles admit that opera directors have become a great deal more creative in how they incorporate titles into their productions. Many have heaped praise on Peter Sellars’ 1987 production of Wagner’s “Tannhauser” at Lyric for the ingenious manner in which various levels of text–literal translation of the libretto, historical-cultural footnotes, even Tannhauser’s feverish sexual imaginings–were made an integral part of the stage design, using varicolored titles across and down the sides of the proscenium arch.
As for the charge that titles are distracting, the Metropolitan Opera would seem to have circumvented the problem in its 4,000-seat theater with its sophisticated new Met Titles system. With that system, each seat back is equipped with its own, individually controlled, 8-by-2-inch computerized screen. The audience member switches it on or off by pressing a button. Special filters make it impossible to see adjacent screens; only the screens on seats directly in front of you are visible.
Met Titles already appear to be a big success with subscribers in New York. This writer can report from firsthand experience at a performance of Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades” that the system is discreet, easy to use and unintrusive.
So, while the long-term cultural impact of projected titles has yet to be determined, their potential to reach out to thousands who would not ordinarily be caught dead in an opera house has been amply demonstrated over the past decade. That alone is reason enough for their existence.
Titles, if judiciously used, can powerfully enhance the theatrical experience of opera. Without them, opera is an exotic entertainment for a privileged elite of vocal connoisseurs. With them, opera demystifies itself, opens its cathedral doors to a potentially much larger public who find, much to their delight, that because they understand what is being sung, they are immersed in the drama.
For all his reservations about projected captions, Rizzo concedes their advantages. In a tone somewhere between resignation and guarded optimism, he says: “Titles are not going away; they’re here to stay. That’s why we had better do them as well as we can.”
HOW PROJECTED TITLES WORK
Lyric Opera originally projected captions from slides arranged in a conventional slide carousel and flashed onto a screen, but in 1988 that cumbersome and time-consuming process was abandoned for a computer-generated system. (It is now the system of choice with most other large opera companies, including New York City, Washington, Seattle, Houston and Los Angeles; San Francisco and Toronto still use slide projections.)
Prime components of the Lyric system are an IBM computer and a Talaria video projector developed by NASA. Lyric technical director Drew Landmesser commissioned Lyric’s software, which creates an amazingly high-resolution image in the lettering. Titles are constantly revised during rehearsals, sometimes until minutes before–and even a few minutes after–the curtain rises.
Titles are fed into the computer, which allows them to fade in and out as needed. The computer is operated by an electrician, Fred Parise, Jr., who takes his cues from Peter Gronwold, an assistant stage manager sitting behind him in a box-level projection booth. Each has a monitor that allows him to follow the stage action, and cues are marked in Gronwold’s score.
As a rehearsal or performance progresses, Gronwold follows a score marked with “go” spots indicating where and when to project each title. At each spot, he says “Go!” into a headset. Parise hears the “Go!” and touches a single computer key to make the change to the next projected title.
Each opera requires between 600 and 800 projected title cues, although a long, talky opera like Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger” can take up to 1,000.
And here is the most amazing fact: an entire opera season’s projected titles can easily fit onto a single computer diskette.
