Read them and weep
Meet the team behind the titling for SFO’s productions
ITlooks simple enough. There’s a little screen in front of each seat at the Santa Fe Opera and some pre-show messages appear on it, followed by a choice of three options — an English version of the opera’s text, a Spanish version, or nothing at all. Somebody, perhaps the stage manager, probably pushes a button from time to time to make the titles appear in the Electronic Libretto System (ELS).
They’re extremely helpful when hearing an opera in an unfamiliar language, perhaps such as the Italian text for The Barber of Seville, opening Saturday, July 2.
Like so many aspects of opera production, what looks simple in performance is surprisingly complex to create. That’s true no matter what the opera is, but a fast-moving comedy like Gioachino Rossini’s 1816 masterpiece adds several additional challenges to both creating the titles and to running them during performances.
It takes an on-site, five-person crew for it all to happen every summer, starting with Christopher Bergen. Fluent in Italian, German, French, and Russian, he translates the operas into English and determines what text will appear when on the titles. “I work my way through each score, listening to it and marking it to show where I think each piece of text should appear,” he said. “Then I go back and start translating.”
Bergen’s goal is for the text to flow and sound logical, avoiding headscratching moments when the audience thinks, “Hey, what was that?” He also doesn’t try to capture poetic effects, even though many opera texts are rhymed, for the same reason.
Texts that include verbal wit, such as The Barber of Seville, get special treatment. Bergen tries to find English-language equivalents for the jokes, and they must be immaculately timed to the stage action. If they appear too soon and the audience starts laughing before the performer sings the text in question, his or her frustration is almost always apparent. Better a bit late with the punchline than too soon, they say, is the rule for this circumstance.
Complex ensembles like the opera’s Act I finale, with different characters singing different texts simultaneously, also present unique challenges. Even if there were room to display it all, “We don’t want the audience to
be reading the whole time,” said Bergen. His solution is to choose the texts that are most important and, sometimes, to add a word or two that explains who is singing it, so that “I’m so distraught” might become “I’m so distraught about my mother.”
There’s no perfect solution to another issue common to 18th- and early 19th-century operas: texts that are repeated, often several times, during an aria. An excellent example is Count Almaviva’s show-stopping solo near the end of the opera. During the final section, he sings the phrase “My happiness” (“Mia felicità”) no fewer than 16 times.
In such a circumstance, Bergen’s task is deciding when the screens should NOT display a translation. “It seems a bit silly to keep showing the same text over and over again, especially when the music is repeating along with the words. Some audience members get frustrated if all the repeats are shown, but others think the system isn’t working if they don’t appear and start poking the screen to make it start again instead of paying attention to the stage.” A middle-ground approach is usually called for in such instances.
When Bergen is finished translating, Fernando Mayans creates a Spanish translation of his English text. Both versions are entered into a database and then Adelaide Zhang, the team’s technical expert, takes over. “I convert what Chris and Fernando give me into the format the software requires,” she said. “It’s been streamlined pretty well, so it’s usually a hands-off import process.”
Zhang then meets with Ronald Grinage or Jennifer Rhodes, who cue the titles to appear during performances. Their first session is just before the daytime onstage run-through that happens about 10 days in advance of each opening night to make sure the titles are in the proper order and the text displays correctly.
“The run-through is when we learn the most about what needs to be fixed,” Bergen says. It always involves adding or subtracting titles, and the texts are often tweaked to ensure they correspond with what is actually being seen onstage.
Each opera then has three dress rehearsals after the run-through, one with piano accompaniment and two with the orchestra, and Bergen feels the texts usually aren’t ready for the stage director to review until after the piano dress rehearsal.
“I’ve found that the best directors are really interested in the titles,” he said, “because they know how important they are for the audience.”
Grinage added, “Peter Sellars, who did Doctor Atomic [at the SFO] in 2018, is the most committed to the process. He’s the only one who always comes up to our booth to introduce himself to everyone and talks about issues related to the titles.”
Sellars’ interest in the possibilities that titling systems create includes its most unique experiment to date: a controversial 1988 Tannhäuser in Chicago that portrayed the title character as a contemporary televangelist. The titles were displayed in three different colors, corresponding to different levels of meaning, one color for the translation itself and the other two offering decidedly non-Wagnerian subtext and commentary.
To date, nothing like that has been tried in Santa Fe, although the new system has capabilities that haven’t been utilized yet, such as displaying still imagery or video as well as text.
“Audience members who are interested in the titles system have lots of strange impressions about how it works,” Bergen says. “One of the most frequent questions I get is, ‘How do you type so fast and so accurately while the opera is going on?’ Of course, that’s not the way it works.”
Another misapprehension is that the system operates on autopilot after opening night. Not so, for several reasons. One is that every performance is different in terms of timing, with conducting tempos changing over the course of the season. Technical challenges can crop up too, which is why there are two team members in the titles booth for every performance: Zhang or one of her audio-visual department colleagues and either Grinage or Rhodes.
Another issue, again much more common in comedy, is that lines change or get dropped, especially in recitative and dialogue. When that happens, the
operator has to jump forward in the cues to the right place extremely quickly. They’re helped in the process by the way the titles display on their monitors, with three upcoming cues, as well as the one currently being seen.
Asked about their most-challenging assignments, Bergen, Grinage, Rhodes, and Zhang answered almost in unison: a fast-moving comedy that’s performed in English, such as last year’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream or 2018’s Candide, with the latter including the ultimate test, rapid-fire dialogue. “There’s just not enough room on the screen to fit every word,” says Bergen, “and boy, do people notice it and tell us about it.”
Rhodes equated running the Candide cues with participating in a sports event. “I got a big adrenalin rush at every performance because of the challenges, like singers dropping a line of dialogue or improvising something, but it was also the most fun for the same reasons.”
For the fight scene involving the four young lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Grinage created an at-home version of the cues so he could rehearse them with a recording in between performances. “I think I got it totally right twice,” he says, “and there were five or six performances of the opera.”
Another unique challenge is the champagne-fueled opening-night audience, which sometimes doesn’t mix well with a tragic opera, such as Eugene Onegin in 2001. Bergen remembers that the performance got boffo laughs in lots of unexpected places. “We kept deleting cues and deleting cues, but they just kept laughing.”
Bergen started doing titles in 1985 with the San Francisco Opera and is now on his 22nd summer here. He has only the highest praise for his Santa Fe colleagues. “This is the best team I’ve ever worked with,” he says. “It’s almost like we don’t have to speak at all. Everyone just knows exactly what to do when. And it’s incredibly complex since some productions will have as many as a thousand or more cues in them for the title operators.”
Whether shown above the stage or on individual screens at each seat, viewable texts have been a standard aspect of opera going for decades. Even companies that perform all operas in English, such as Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, now use them at every performance.
It wasn’t always so, of course, and it’s hard to remember how controversial titles were when first being introduced. The Canadian Opera Company premiered them, in a 1983 staging of Richard Strauss’ Elektra. Lotfi Mansouri, the company’s then-general director, later told National Public Radio, “I got blasted. They called it the ‘plague from Canada.’ I had vulgarized opera, but I didn’t give a damn because all of a sudden, the audience was involved.”
Beverly Sills, New York City Opera’s general manager, immediately brought them to her company, starting with Jules Massenet’s Cendrillon and likewise got brickbats, with Opera News denouncing them as “a pathetic marketing grab for the fringe public” and The New York Post calling her “a philistine.” In 1985, The Metropolitan Opera’s music director James Levine, offered the most withering comment, telling The New York Times, “Over my dead body will they show those things at [the Met].”
Ten years later, with Levine still very much alive and in charge, the first system with individual screens debuted at his opera house. Part of the credit goes to Maria’s restaurant in Santa Fe, where the idea for them was sketched out in 1992 on drink napkins by Patrick Markle, at the time SFO’s production director, and two Metropolitan Opera technical employees. In 1999 the same system was installed at the Santa Fe Opera. The company’s new system, which debuted in 2019, was developed entirely by in-house personnel, including Zhang, who wrote much of the computer code for it.