Lost in translation

Which language should students at a music college perform an opera in for the public? I’d have thought that, though it’s no doubt very good for them to learn to sing in various non-native languages, it’s at least as important that they practise singing as communicatively as possible. Which does not mean that they should stand squarely at the front of the stage and sing to the audience. The three operas I saw this week, two at the Royal Academy and one at the Guildhall School, were sung in their original languages, two in Italian and one in Russian. The standard of pronunciation was high, especially for Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta, and there were surtitles, of which I am an ardent supporter. And I’m not at all sure that the enemies of surtitles are right in claiming that they make singers lazy. It is not only a question of clear enunciation, it’s also a matter of projecting, in which the words are only an element, though the most important, with bodily and facial expression counting for a lot. There are singers who sound as if they are giving an elocution lesson but communicate very little, and others who are not always ideally verbally clear (often because of the vocal line they have to sing) but convey an extraordinary amount: look at one of the films of Callas singing ‘Vissi d’arte’ and the point is made.

The Royal Academy’s production of Iolanta was comprehensively perverse, so the language barrier was only one factor in the overall lack of effectiveness. The action was updated to more or less the present, which meant, as with Gianni Schicchi, the other half of the programme, and for that matter Figaro at the Guildhall School, that the surtitles had to be pretty indeterminate or intermittent not to render what we could see inconsistent with what was being said/sung.