TENOR.com - The Opera Blog

A thoughtful article about the genesis, highlights and lowlights of reading English while hearing something else.

Now, in the 25th anniversary year of supertitles, such systems have been embraced by companies and audiences. The benefits are obvious. Opera is a form of drama, and that basic element of the genre becomes immediately apparent, even to neophytes, when titling is used. In the early 1980s productions of Wagner’s complete “Ring” cycle were undertaken by relatively few companies. Now a “Ring” production has become a calling card for any house that wants to be taken seriously. Titles have made the difference.

With audiences able to follow Wagner’s librettos, this complex mythological tale of sacred treaties made and broken and the catastrophic mingling of gods and mortals, of curses, hatreds and impossible hopes passed down through generations, emerges as an engrossing, humane and tragic operatic epic.  …

Robert Jacobson, then the editor of Opera News, published by the Metropolitan Opera Guild, deplored supertitles as a “pathetic marketing grab for the fringe public,” adding that opera “is not a reading experience.” Then, speaking of the Met, there was James Levine. As supertitles were catching on everywhere, Anthony Bliss, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, said that even that august company was considering a tryout. But in a 1985 article for The New York Times Magazine the music critic Will Crutchfield quoted Levine as saying, “Over my dead body will they show those things at this house.”

He is still living down that statement. In 1995 the Met introduced Met Titles, a system of individual screens mounted on seatbacks. Levine has said that he dropped his objections when the Met devised a system that allowed patrons the option to turn the things off.

Yet the record reveals widespread support from the start, most critics included. Reviewing the City Opera’s “Cendrillon” production in The Times, Donal Henahan described supertitles as “a dangerous experiment in audience education that on the whole worked astonishingly well.”  …more

My advice:  Sit in the cheap seats if you don’t want to strain your neck reading them.

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