An English opera subtitled in...English
Henrietta Bredin 12:02pm
A very tightly wound Turn of the Screw indeed at English National Opera last night, brilliantly performed and spine-chillingly played under the leadership of conductor Charles Mackerras. But I emerged feeling apoplectic with rage because the opera, composed by Benjamin Britten to an English libretto by Myfanwy Piper which is so consummately well written and constructed that it should serve as a model to all would-be libretto writers, sung with perfect articulation so that every single word could be heard, was given nonetheless with an idiot board of surtitles running across the top of the proscenium arch. It is an appalling insult to performers and a pathetic sop to lazy audiences to provide the words for something which was actually written in English. The ultimate admission of failure by the company would be if they were to dare provide the words for a Gilbert and Sullivan show. For that they would deserve to be savaged in eternity by the ghost of William Schwenck Gilbert himself, and I’m sure Myfanwy Piper would be happy to join him.
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Tyndale
November 5th, 2009 3:22pm Report this commentApoplexy: what a very Spectatorish reaction! I went the other night too - and it's not true that that the words were always brilliantly articulated. They never are, as most people who go to see opera will recognize.
The opera was riveting as you say, and not at all ruined by the surtitles. Whether surtitling G&S is acceptable is another question, expecially as most of the dialogue there is spoken, not sung.
Fergus Pickering
November 5th, 2009 5:35pm Report this commentNot really on topic and shows the endless frivolity of my mind, but BB would surely have loved a production that contained a boy in transparent pyjamas.
Beer Moth
November 5th, 2009 5:40pm Report this commentPerhaps the producers had been got at by the PC brigade and felt they had to provide for 'those whose first language is not English'.
Why should opera be spared the idiocy that foists itself on all other spheres?
TFM
November 6th, 2009 11:03am Report this commentI don't know about this production, but when I went to see Lorin Maazel's '1984' in 2005 I was glad to have had the subtitles, because without them I would hardly have understood a word. It is certainly a peculiarity of modern performance practice that words are twisted out of all recognisability (how many times have you switched on the radio and struggled to determine what language was being sung, even when it was English?) since as a narrative medium an opera's libretto is almost as important as its music.
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