Music, Text and Translation

Helen Julia Minors

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781472576545
• eBook ISBN: 9781441189271
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Translating & Interpreting
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Expanding the notion of translation, this book specifically focuses on the transferences between music and text. The concept of 'translation' is often limited solely to language transfer. It is, however, a process occurring within and around most forms of artistic expression. Music, considered a language in its own right, often refers to text discourse and other art forms. In translation, this referential relationship must be translated too. How is music affected by text translation? How does music influence the translation of the text it sets? How is the sense of both the text and the music transferred in the translation process? Combining theory with practice, the book questions the process and role translation has to play in a musical context. It provides a range of case studies across interdisciplinary fields. It is the first collection on music in translation that is not restricted to one discipline, including explorations of opera libretti, surtitling, art song, musicals, poetry, painting, sculpture and biography, alongside looking at issues of accessibility.

Part One

Translating Text to Music

Opera

1

Tales of the Unexpected: Opera as a New Art of Glocalization

Lucile Desblache

Opera audiences and funding

In spite of colossal efforts by the world’s most renowned opera houses to justify the cost of their productions and make them accessible to a wider audience, opera is still largely perceived with suspicion and at times with resentment by a large section of the general public, who mostly regard it as a costly art form primarily enjoyed by the wealthy, yet publicly funded. The old adage that ‘the only thing more expensive than opera is war’ rings true in times of recession when the arts compete for dwindling state subsidies.¹ Going to the opera is certainly equated with affluence, but other attributes are also associated with what is still seen as an elitist club: a taste for and knowledge of high culture, and the time to attend performances which can last up to five hours. In spite of tangible signs that the opera public is changing, with a higher proportion of first-time goers, younger participants belonging to a wider social range, and of new productions and contemporary creations,² opera activities are still seen as unreasonably expensive to fund and largely elitist. In Europe, where drastic cuts in government subsidies are affecting the arts in the second decade of the second millennium, the consequences of a large decrease in public funding are starting to take effect.³ But even in countries where recent economic difficulties have been less marked, such as Australia, many criticize the art form as too expensive to fund.⁴

Nevertheless, audiences have been growing in the last two decades. In countries such as the US, where opera has always been largely privately funded and currently only receives around 7 per cent of public subsidies, the growth has been substantial (Bomback, 2010; Oestreich, 1997). Research compiled for the report Opera for Now ‘shows that the audiences for opera ha[ve] increased by a quarter between 1986 and 2000’ (BBC, 2001). This success is undoubtedly due to the vigorous attempts made by opera houses and art funding bodies to lure a broader public and ensure the future of opera. While very visible corporate advertising presence in the late twentieth century made those attending opera feel part of a privileged club, everything is done to diffuse images of elitism in the twenty-first century. The standard of performers on the operatic stage, a highly competitive space, is astounding and their musical excellence, combined with their now expected good looks and communication skills, with websites that often resemble more those of models than opera singers (see for instance Anna Netrebko) undoubtedly contribute to an increased interest in opera.

Opera houses are presently trying hard to attract audiences, and although this seems to have been the case since opera began, their efforts to ensure the survival of the genre have in recent years been unsurpassed. This involves using the canonical reference framework of the form and its polymorphous discourses (music, libretto, sets and staging) to explore contemporary resonances of the past for new target audiences. It also entails exploring this collectively, from composer to director, set designer to surtitler, as each opera is reinvented by a team of creators. In this respect, opera is, in essence, work in translation. It interprets established texts across times and cultures, and brings constantly new and ‘deferred’ meanings to life, to borrow Derrida’s phrase (Derrida, 1967/1978). David Levin noted in his analysis of opera as an unsettled and unsettling form, that the operatic form relies on traffic between discourses, traffic which ‘is not restricted to commerce between texts, but bears the marks of difference within texts’ (Levin, 2007: 72). Levin argues that operatic mediation primarily takes place through performance and staging interpretations, but there are several agents of translation in such a multifaceted and shape-shifting form as opera. I would like to show here that the transient, adaptive and hybrid qualities present in opera turn it into a tool of ‘glocalization’, as opera relies more than ever on global production and dissemination while also giving a voice to a wide range of local cultures and languages, and endeavours to be attractive to audiences from all ages and social backgrounds.

Opera accessibility

For opera houses, widening access is the current key phrase. This means offering shows which make storytelling palatable and opera relevant to contemporary times, with fresh, imaginative productions from the established repertoire, as well as new works. Contemporary opera thus uses its symbolic power to offer ‘remakes’ of known repertoire but also flexible pieces focusing on socially inclusive themes. For example, the recent Songs for Silenced Voices, originally performed in an empty shop in 2010 in Liverpool and staging a homeless ex-soldier, thus aimed simultaneously to introduce new audiences to the operatic genre and to change public perceptions of homelessness.⁵ Similarly, the English scheme ‘Streetwise Opera’ aims to involve performers who have experienced homelessness. This group is being funded as part of a trend where ‘large-scale opera shoulders a significant cut, but we [the Arts Council of England] commit to the long term health of opera’ (Arts Council, 2011).⁶

Extra-musical aspects are also vital to successful communication with audiences. Although using different guises from its ancestors, twenty-first century opera is at least as multimodal as its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century counterpart, where complex machinery and stage effects were highly appreciated by the audience. Patrice Chéreau, Luc Bondy, Jonathan Miller and Terry Gilliam, for instance, have drawn audiences to the opera for their direction as much as have famous singers in the last three decades as have opera divas for their fame.⁷ At times when nearly all operatic productions are collaborative ventures between different theatres from different countries, transnational co-productions aim to create a universal language decipherable by all and take audiences of different cultures and backgrounds beyond their own familiar zones. In the wake of the twentieth century, opera directors were often criticized for being too overpowering, but exciting productions can be and are being used to introduce a wider public to new or unknown operas. These are not only transnational, but also transdisciplinary. At a time when most types of music are associated with visual output and performance, we expect the operatic genre to make the most of its assets. Controversial figures new to opera, such as the experimental film maker Mike Figgis, are requested to direct productions in order to hybridize and broaden the form, grafting non-operatic devices to the conventions of opera. An instance of these transcultural developments is the spectacular production of Alexander Raskatov’s A Dog’s Heart, based on Mikhail Bulgakov’s eponymous novella, premiered in Amsterdam in June 2010. A co-production between De Nederlandse Opera and the English National Opera with the collaboration of the Complicité theatre company, it mixed opera stage direction with puppet animation introduced by Complicité. The haunting presence of Bulgakov’s literary and Raskatov’s musical dog-man is brought to life with virtuoso puppeteering that echoes the unstable music and the transience of the hybrid character. The unexpected introduction of fast flying puppets across the stage shifts the attention away from traditional operatic features into theatrical devices which are mobile, unfinished, uncapturable and unpredictable. Simon McBurney, the artistic director of Complicité, who had previously ‘refused [to direct opera] because [he] didn’t feel particularly close to the form’,⁸ seizes this opportunity to import rebellion into opera, to dissolve formulaic views of the genre, to dismantle its conventions.

Opera accessibility also entails making mainstream shows available which is undertaken by most opera houses in an increasing number of transfer modes. The best opera houses are racing competitively to offer the latest and most exciting forms: HD performances simulcast in cinemas (initiated by the New York Metropolitan Opera in December 2006, and now offered in 45 countries), live outdoor screenings, including podcasts, 3D live coverage and films (see Appleyard, 2010; Brown, 2011), DVD productions,⁹ dedicated terrestrial, satellite and internet television channels, as well as live shows in-house. The opera repertoire may be largely dominated by the past but it is delivered to twenty-first-century opera audiences with all the latest instruments in technology. In addition, a range of developments, including outreach events and educational programmes, information provided on the Web, surtitling, audio-description and, in some cases, performances signed for the deaf, is provided.

Opera and language

By far the most crucial and contentious aspect of opera accessibility today concerns the language in which the opera is sung. At times when national cultures are considered to have less impact on their populations, as many consume global cultures which put less emphasis on national differences, opera, a hybrid genre, with its blend of forms (dance, theatre, orchestral music, choral music, arias), its insistence on using a wide range of languages, and its frequently changing translations and adaptations, offers a type of entertainment that defies homogenization. Large contemporary operatic endeavours are transnational art forms, marketed globally for economic reasons and collectively produced out of artistic invention (and also, economy), but they promote multilingual, multicultural, and multimodal values and products. One of the most successful opera composers of the first decade of this century is Kaija Saariaho, a Finnish composer who has worked with the French-speaking Lebanese novelist and librettist Amin Maalouf on the three operas she has composed. In all three pieces, the theme of women’s marginalization is strongly present and the collaboration stresses multilingual and multicultural output. In L’Amour de loin (the French title is used also in the English version by Richard Stokes, first performed in July 2009), some of the original poetry of the mediaeval troubadour Jaufré Rudel is left in the Occitan language for instance, emphasizing the multilingual essence of the piece, and its timelessness. This also emphasizes the controversial point, particularly relevant to opera, that meaning is not exclusively articulated semantically: significantly sound can play both a signified and signifier role. Many examples of such contemporary transcultural operas – although not so many by women composers – could be given, from Philip Glass (Satyagraha, 1980; Akhnaten, 1983; Galileo Galilei, 2002) to Bruno Mantovani (Akhmatova, 2010).

Although opera was born in seventeenth-century Tuscany and patronized by the powerful to establish their linguistic, cultural and political authority, as a genre it is now keen to speak the musical and theatrical language of the marginalized. China’s desire to establish a national Chinese opera in China and abroad as a beacon of the country’s cultural power can certainly be read as a way of expanding its influence on the West, appropriating what is regarded as one of the most accomplished Western artistic forms of high culture (Melvin, 2010). In this respect, a parallel can be drawn with the ambitions of the Italian nobility to exert cultural and political influence on known human societies in the early modern period. Yet in spite of these global aspirations, opera is also introducing world audiences to a wide range of languages and cultures. The Chinese composer Tan Dun (b. 1957) thus predicts that ‘opera will no longer be a Western form, as it is no longer an Italian form’ (Lipsyte and Morris, 2005). He considers that its global appeal can be translated locally and states that for today’s artists, globalization offers opportunities ‘not to standardize, or neutralize, but by giving people a chance to be seen’ (Buruma, 2008). It represents an opportunity to be heard: if opera is to thrive as a global art form available locally, it needs to be understood by local audiences.¹⁰

Opera in England

I have discussed elsewhere the wide array of linguistic solutions provided across different eras and areas on the operatic stage, from the use of Italian (or Tuscan, as it was initially called) as a musical lingua franca in the early seventeenth century, to eighteenth-century bilingual productions which introduced recitatives in the language of the country in which the opera was performed while arias were sung in the original Italian or French, to multilingual performances where different roles could be sung in different languages, or to entirely translated texts (Desblache, 2007). It is beyond the scope of this chapter to consider the various attitudes to foreign languages throughout music history, but I would like to make specific reference to the situation in England, taken as a particular case study, since English has been an established lingua franca for decades, even though relatively few pieces of the operatic repertoire were composed in English until the second half of the twentieth century. While monolingualism is a well-known cultural trait of the English, opera was an enclave which forced some foreign language awareness into the cultural arena, where it was, curiously, accepted.

Opera has long been viewed as a foreign import in England. Although masques, which comprise most components of opera (music, dancing, singing, acting, stage design and production) were developed in the early seventeenth century as a form of court entertainment, the establishment of the Commonwealth of England and of the Rump reforms, which closed down theatres in the mid-seventeenth century, halted what might have been the early development of an English operatic genre different from Italian opera. The Restoration period reinstated masques, which evolved into operas in English (such as John Blow’s Venus and Adonis, around 1685, and Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas in 1689), but after Purcell’s death in 1695, Italian opera gradually grew in popularity, although it was generally perceived, as Samuel Johnson famously described in his Dictionary of the English Language, as an ‘exotick and irrational entertainment’ (Johnson, 1775).

From the start of opera in England, there seems to have been confusion as to the question of how language transfer should occur/does occur. The first Italian opera to be performed in England (without any spoken dialogues as the English custom required) was Arsinoe: attributed to Thomas Clayton based on a libretto by Tommaso Stanzani, it was performed in 1705 in the English translation of Pierre Antoine Motteux, a French playwright in political exile in London. As Edward Dent – who did much to promote and revitalized opera translation after the Victorian era – states, several Italian operas followed, first in English translations but at times partially sung in English and Italian, such as Alessandro Scarlatti’s Pirro e Demetrio in 1708. By the time Handel came to England and produced his Rinaldo in 1711, Italian singers were dominating the operatic stage, and Italian was established as the language of opera, a genre then primarily aimed at an aristocratic audience. What is now known as the Royal Opera House was called the Royal Italian Opera bet...

Table of contents

• FC
• Bloomsbury Advances in Translation
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Examples and Tables
• List of Figures and Note on the Text
• Introduction: Translation in Music Discourse Helen Julia Minors
• Part 1 Translating Text to Music
• Part 2 Cultural and Intersemiotic Translation
• Bibliography
• Index