But isn't that a bit the point? The language Ravel, Debussy, Gounod, Berlioz, Messiaen and Massenet wrote their operas in (some of them actually not that bad) is OK for Manchester but not good enough for the Met?

Ça sent le poisson...

But are those operas performed in French in Manchester?  Or in translation?  Interested readers would like to know   Opera North no longer tour to Manchester AFAIK.  (This is a mini-scandal in itself, since NorWest Holst sponsored a massive multimillion-£ revamp of the theatre, especially so that it could take shows from Opera North and ENO.  ENO welched on the deal, having taken NorWest Holst's money first to stage a series of one-off rarities - none of which ever got closer to Manchester than Bedfordbury).

In any case there's an error in the terminology... Mr Wainwright, if he is indeed a francophone, would speak Québécois.  Is that the language in which he has written (or claims to have written) this piece, I wonder? 

My own view is, I'm afraid, rather uncompromising - there is no reasonable excuse for performing any work of theatre in a language which is incomprehensible to the audience.  Anything else, I'm afraid, is mere narcissistic posturing in my book

Opera North now play Salford rather than Manchester, not least because of the way that the Opera House (and the Palace, which was also extensively modernised) now work as commercial theatres, and often house seasons of out-of-town runs of large-scale shows with massive sets which need two or three months to be financially viable (I've done ten-week stints in each of them). With the opera and ballet seasons mainly shifted elsewhere, these two theatres can get on with making money.

(IIRC, both have really awkward get-ins, too, which complicates opera and ballet weeks and fortnights with a repertoire of three or four works still further.)

I'd prefer to list you amongst the tiny number of polyglot exceptions who prove the rule

My somewhat iconoclastic stand on this isn't mere casuistry and obstinacy (well, ehem, not in this instance!) - it's founded on bedrock Stanislavskian practice, and the pre-eminence of the text as the starting-point for everything that's done on stage  I'm as much concerned with the work of the performers on the material, as comprehensibility for the audience.  As soon as work is done parrot-fashion in la-la-la-gibberish,  any hope of getting focussed, taught and relevant work evaporates, in my experience  When looking for motivation and building a character, you mine the text for everything...  "find the insult, find the snide remark, what's the trigger for this man's anger here, what sets him off?"...  it's all hopeless if it's in Norwegian.  One would never even contemplate doing Ibsen or Strindberg in the original - outside Norway or Sweden - it would get your name in the papers of course, but for all the wrong reasons.  Why should the case with opera be different?   Case in point...  Moscow Chamber Opera did MAGIC FLUTE in German, including the dialogue.  I was getting "Reiner, can you tell me what the **** this text is about?" phonecalls - it wasn't even my show, and my German is quite wayward.  Paragraph-by-paragraph synopsis might be alright for home listening with cds - performers find their motivation and spur to action in the individual words, and the nuances behind them.  The result was an exercise in appalling futility and frustration - the blind leading the blind.  The cast were utterly dejected and demotivated, sensing it was a disaster in the making - they were then torn to pieces by the critics   And all - for what?  So someone in the audience could crow about how he understood every word?  Highly doubtful with the pronunciation that was heard  


Ta for the input on that, Ron

I do see the other point of view, too - although I prefer not to work that way.  But there is a difference between listening and doing here.   For example, in HOUSE OF THE DEAD, when the Commendant is freeing Goryanchikov at the end, he makes this gesture of magnanimity and then suddenly feels out of his depth...  he rules by insult and threat...   so he asks Goryanchikov if he understands, can he understand that I, A COMMENDANT have freed you?  And then the kicker...  a ty - ty arestant!.

"Arestant" is so loaded with vicious loathing that to flash-up "and you - you are a prisoner!" on the subtitles means nothing.  He's sledging Goryanchikov, in the hope that he'll lash out at a Guard... giving a reason to stick him back inside again.  You'd really need the f-word in English to convey the triggering flashpoint word - and working with non-Czech speakers, the moment would go for nothing (as indeed it almost always does, viz the Chereau production, which is littered with moments where the text has been utterly ignored).

On the other hand, as you say, translations can sometimes introduce ideas which weren't there in the original.  Back to HotD...  in David Pountney's very wayward translation of the opera, right at the end of "Luka Kuzmich"'s narration about how he killed the warder in his previous prison,  Luka says  "Aljeja! Aljeja - niti!" - he's in the prison workshop.  He's calling for "thread" (niti).  But "thread" doesn't fit the music, so Pountney made this into "Aljeja! Aljeja - Scissors!".   But who the hell would gave scissors to a psychopathic headcase like Luka Kuzmich??    So a wrong idea has crept in, and it's doubly wrong...  because "scissors" rings alarm bells for the audience and now the production has a glaring inconsistency in it (because Pountney knew it didn't mean "scissors" and therefore didn't produce any).  This translation has now been printed, and the error compounded by repetition

Yes, yes, I know these are just small things.  But a whole raft of them make-up a picture of a scene which is entirely misleading, and untrue to the work being presented.


If there is, it's usually confined to "not looking silly in front of the critics", and abstruse discussions about the correct pronunciation of "-ch" in different regions of Germany & Austria.  Any hope of getting to the meaning of the text is inevitably sidelined to an overal explanation of what's going on.  Dialogue is, after all, doing a play in a language you don't speak - for an audience who don't understand it.  This is hovering close to artistic onanism in my book

I've mentioned this one before, but since opportunity arises...   I think the very first thing I ever saw at the ROH was their production of BORIS GODUNOV.   In those Cold War days, few native speakers were around to advise.  I think they found someone from Poland instead.  At the end of Act I we had a whole chorus of "Shlava! Shlava! Shlaaaaaaaa-va!" - in perfect Polish.  Quite ironic when you think who it is that the Pretender Grigory - against whom all hatred is directed - is alleged to be working for?     But I'm sure the chattering classes in the Crush Bar went home believing they'd heard the opera in Russian?  Ho-hum...

The idea of Pelléas in anything other than French, or anything of Schumann in anything other than German, is unthinkable to me. And I'm sure that if I knew the first thing about any Slavic languages (or numerous others), I would feel the same way about them. I can possibly accept the idea of various operas being text-driven, but more in the sense of being driven by the sonic properties of the text (which are all to do with the language) rather than the semantics (after all, an awful lot of opera dialogue and plots are rather naff, to say the least).

Yes, I agree that a non-French Pelléas would be strange indeed, but it's an exceptional piece, and its word-setting is intimately related to the language. But what of earlier opera, where the bond between words and music is less strong, and different verses of the same aria are set to the same notes? Where there's a considerable amount of recit. carrying the plot forward? Where there are involved plots (particularly comic ones)? A Mozart or Rossini comedy given in the vernacular will be a different experience to seeing it in the original, but for many (especially in a country where command of any foreign tongue is the exception) it may well be the richer. Plots that are 'naff' are likely to seem even dafter if the audience can follow them only on a superficial level.

Bearing in mind the wider public's preference for music which lies inside its comfort zone (which I would have thought would communicate itself as a recognisably different reception to the majority of musicians playing to them), then it shouldn't be so hard to understand that those performing and presenting opera being aware of non-specialised audiences' general preference for at least some opera in the vernacular. In countries where there's rather more opera (Germany for example) there's been a long tradition of anything other than international houses performing most of the repertoire in the home tongue. Yes, it's a compromise, but a workable one.