Unintentional humour at the opera

[muckefuck]

I may or may not get around to writing a proper review of La fanciulla del West at Lyric last night, so let me say up front that it was an utter delight. Not that it was perfect by any means, but what flaws there were were inconsequential to a good evening's entertainment.

Now if you've ever watched anything with subtitles, you've noticed that they never translate all of the dialogue. I imagine the ratio is better for opera than it is for a lot of things because it simply takes longer to say the same words when they're set to music. (Unless, of course, a piece has a particularly high proportion of recitatives and/or patter songs.)

Unusually for an Italian work, Fanciulla has no recitatives at all. So I was all the more struck by how much was left untranslated. In Act II, for instance, there's an exchange of three or four short utterances none of which appear in the subtitles. Very odd, considering that every occurrence of "Hello!" in the text seemed to be translated for our benefit (to the amusement of many patrons).

My Italian is piss poor, so I didn't pick up much that wasn't translated. There was one pretty amusing exception, though. In Act I, a group of miners are playing faro (which at the time was more popular in the West than poker). One of them loses a hand a lets loose a mild blasphemy (one suitable for the sensitive ears of 19th century Italian operagoers): "Sacramento!"

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my first, last and only experience with the supertitles at the Lyric

[mollyc-q.livejournal.com]

The production was Tancredi, with Marilyn Horne in the lead. I marveled at the fact that the siege of the city lasts not much more than a minute or two, and Tancredi's aria while dying this, this took a while. She did a fine job with it, the problem was the super titles. I recall only a few years earlier James Levine railing against them as a distraction from the performance. That night I got an eyeful. The supertitles did not keep up with every word of the aria - it captured Tancredi's repeated variations on being miserable at the prospect of death and separation from his love. Near the end, at the point where the phrase, "Your grief, adds to my grief and so I die..." flashed up on the screen, there was I kid you not a ripple of laughter as the audience took in the translation, I was kind of mortified for the performers, the singers took it in stride and finished.