OPERA IN THE VERNACULAR

More than 40 years after their first, controversial introduction, supertitles have become ubiquitous, and opera performed in its original language has become the norm. But contrary to popular belief, this practice does not necessarily represent “the composer’s intent.”  For composers like Verdi and Puccini, having their work translated and performed in other languages was a mark of success, and until very recently, major European opera houses privileged the language of the audience over the language of the composer. In this piece, librettist and translator Kelley Rourke reviews the shifting linguistic practices of American opera companies.

Sounds of the Homeland

In America, opera was a cultural artifact brought over by immigrant communities. In the 1820s, British touring companies presented English works and English adaptations of Italian operas throughout the northeast. Manuel Garcia's Italian Opera Company arrived in New York on November 6, 1825 and opened three days later with Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia, a work already well-known (albeit in English) to much of the audience; Garcia went on to give New York its first Italian performances of nine popular works. Although American audiences embraced the performances, they were put off by the unfamiliar language. A critic from the New York Mirror grumbled that "the Italian opera threatens to exclude the English from the stage."

In early nineteenth-century New Orleans, opera in the vernacular meant French opera. The first Théâtre d'Orléans, which opened in October 1815, presented popular works by Boieldieu, Spontini, Auber and other French composers. The newest territory of the United States was determined to hold on to its culture and language, even in the face of Yankee occupation, and opera became a rallying-point for intensified Gallic self-awareness. Under impresario John Davis, New Orleans saw more than 700 performances of about 150 operas. His mission was showing off French opera, "the pride and hope of the generation raised on the ruins of the old French regime." This mission took him all over the country, playing to enthusiastic French emigres in Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, and Boston.

By the mid-nineteenth century, opera was becoming an established part of the cultural scene in most major American cities. The type of presentation was often a reflection of the city's political, social, artistic, and intellectual values. Philadelphia was originally colonized by touring companies presenting English farces, but European immigrants "supplied the theaters with admirable orchestras and modified the manners of the town.” By the 1830s, operas were performed in French, German, and English. The choice of language was mainly dependent on the singers available.

A National Institution / An International Repertory

In 1880, fifty-two of New York's leading citizens subscribed $100,000 each to what was to become the Metropolitan Opera. The new theater opened on October 22, 1883, with Gounod's Faust, sung in Italian. The choice of Italian for even a French work demonstrates that Italy had become established in the mind of New York’s elite as the official source of opera. Impresario Henry Abbey programmed mostly Italian pieces but also included works such as Carmen, Mignon, and Lohengrin in Italian translation.

In 1884, the Met's new manager, Leopold Damrosch, adopted a new language policy designed to appeal to a large, intellectual segment of the population: For the next seven years, the repertory consisted mainly of works by Wagner and other Germans, but Damrosch followed Abbey's policy of translating other pieces (including Rigoletto, Aida, and Norma) into the prevailing "house" language — now German. One could argue that this policy was actually part of America's vernacular opera tradition: at that time, New York may have had more German-speaking inhabitants than any city after Vienna and Berlin.

After the German period, records show that opera at the Met was usually produced in its original language. The exceptions were unfamiliar works, such as Liszt's St. Elizabeth (1918), Mussorsky's Khovanshchina(1950), and Berg's Wozzeck (1959), which were given in English for their first performances. As a major international venue for opera, the Met largely justified its original-language policies on practical grounds: many of the singers presented at the Met were not native English-speakers.

For the first 100+ years of its history, the Met was a major provider of opera across the U.S., touring from Maine to San Francisco. For Americans outside the touring circuit, Saturday broadcasts, which began in 1931 and continue today, provided a steady “opera fix” — albeit one that required some advance study to follow the story, since the Met performed in the original language. For many opera fans, the need for additional engagement were part of the allure.

Opera Theater in America

As the American appetite for opera grew, so did the number of opera companies across the country. Some sought to imitate the Met’s practices, with lavish period productions and original languages, but others clamored for opera in English. Herbert Graf, who led opera houses in Philadelphia and New York, wrote, "It still seems very strange to me that anyone who believes in the basic function of the theater...can deny in principle its need and its right to be understood." Although he recognized that a work was changed in many ways by translation, he argued that, "Opera is written and performed to be understood by an audience, and no composer ever preferred subtleties of prosody to full comprehension by the audience." The movement for opera in the vernacular became tied to the development of a renewed vision of opera: opera as theater, with intimate venues, imaginative staging, and high dramatic/theatrical values.

Director and translator Boris Goldovsy described two resident opera traditions: "We have an international style and what I call an opera theater style. We want to hear the great singers... And since we want to hear them, we want to hear them in the way that they produce the best kind of sound, usually in the original language which they have learned. And since we have many American singers who sing with them, we teach the Americans to sing [foreign languages]. But we teach them so they can participate in the international style. That makes perfectly good sense, but we have the other style, the opera theater style...Then you have the advantage of audiences that can understand the words, and you can accomplish better theater because the audience becomes acutely aware of bad acting." Many American opera festivals — including Chautauqua Opera, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Des Moines Metro Opera, and Glimmerglass — originally had opera in English as part of their mission statements.

Supertitles Arrive

In fall of 1983, Opera News tersely reported an experiment taking place at New York City Opera. Beverly Sills, NYCO's singer-turned-director, had seen projected translations in a Canadian Opera Company production of Strauss' Elektra in January of the same year and planned to introduce projected titles for NYCO's fall 1983 Cendrillon. For Sills and other "popularizers," titles were the long-awaited answer to the language question. "I think we should eliminate as many barriers as possible to opera. With subtitles, you can have opera in the language the composer wrote and relax, instead of straining to understand."

The NYCO audience responded enthusiastically to projected titles, and Sills attributed a substantially increased subscription base, in part, to the new technology. In 1996, an independent survey of opera neophytes confirmed audience enthusiasm for titles. Participants expressed relief at being able to follow the plot and understand the jokes. For at least one patron, titles motivated attendance: "As soon as I knew there were surtitles, I went [to the opera] the very next month."

But not everyone welcomed this new addition to the operatic experience. The most famous declaration against titles came from James Levine, artistic director of the Metropolitan Opera, in 1985. "Over my dead body will they show these things at this house. I cannot imagine not wanting the audience riveted on the performers at every moment." Others echoed his sentiments: "Well-intentioned though they are, Supertitles give a false sense that enjoying a live opera performance means simply getting the words straight...Supertitles wrest the audience away from the action toward a disembodied shelf of words floating above the stage."

An Option Need Not Be an Obligation

Today, it is hard to imagine opera without supertitles. They are a standard feature in nearly every American opera company, even those producing opera in English. At Milan’s La Scala (which was still performing Wagner in Italian in 2000), titles were added in 2004. With the widespread utilization of supertitles, combined with relative ease of air travel, a near universal practice of performing in the original language makes practical sense, especially for companies presenting only a handful of performances.

Interestingly, many now see move away from the vernacular not just as a practical solution, but as an aesthetic imperative, one in keeping with “the composer’s intent.”  While many enjoy the sonic qualities of certain foreign languages, the marriage of melody and the sounds of its original language were not sacrosanct for the composers who now make up much of the canon. To give but one example — in Verdi’s lifetime, Aida was performed in English, French, German, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, Czech, Rumanian, Swedish, Croatian, Lettish and Danish. Today’s preference for the original language over the vernacular is not historically accurate performance practice; it is a distinctly modern fetish.

Time marches on. There is no going back to the days before supertitles, and it’s a good thing; without their popularizing quality, opera audiences in America would be far less robust. For a variety of reasons, performance in the original language, with supertitles, remains the best choice for many productions. But — particularly for comedies — there is something lost when audiences cannot connect directly to the words as the characters utter them.

In 1992, Glimmerglass leadership concluded that it could better serve its audiences — and the art form — by adopting supertitles and performing (mostly) in the original language. But unlike our previous practice of performing in English, this was not written into the mission statement. Supertitles give us options, and occasionally we’ve exercised our option to perform in English translation, especially for comedies (King for a Day, Ariadne in Naxos) and works that include long spoken dialogue scenes (The Magic Flute, Bluebeard). For the 2026 production of Così — a comedy set in an American college — a new script in the vernacular of the audience (and performers) offered the best option.

"I remember the first time I heard Mozart recitative in English,” said Artistic & General Director Robert Ainsley. “It was revelatory – it almost felt like the singers weren’t singing at all, and yet every word made it to the back of the hall without effort, with Mozart’s naturally perfect pacing and intent preserved. After spending so long working on my Italian and trying so hard to make the beautiful stream of sounds seem idiomatic to my teachers, suddenly I understood what they were trying to achieve – but for whose benefit?  It would have been a particularly odd choice to update Così to a modern American college setting in celebration of America’s 250th anniversary and to then have it sung in Italian. Opera being sung in anything other than the native language of its intended audience is in itself an anachronism – Mozart would have been shocked at the idea.”