Lotfi Mansouri

Opera director and pioneer of surtitles; Born: June 15, 1929; Died: August 30, 2013 LOTFI Mansouri, who has died aged 84, was the controversial originator of the art of operatic surtitles, which rapidly spread worldwide after he pioneered it for a Canadian Opera Company production of Richard Strauss’s Elektra in Toronto in 1983. He was also general director of the San Francisco Opera where he appointed the young Scottish conductor Donald Runnicles as music director in 1992.

Surtitles were a simple but revolutionary development whereby an English translation of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s intricate German libretto was projected above the stage so that audiences could read exactly what was being sung at every moment of the performance.

Yet for all its usefulness it provoked a torrent of abuse from purists and opera critics who deemed it no more than an irritating distraction, even although cinemas had been successfully employing a similar system of synchronised subtitles (translations printed along the bottom edge of the screen) for decades.

The Iranian-born director, who was enrolled to study medicine at Edinburgh University before moving to California, said he hit on the idea when his wife saw a television performance of the Ring cycle using subtitles and told him she had understood the fine detail of Wagner’s operas for the first time. Could the same sort of thing, she asked him, not be done in the opera house?

Instead of pouring scorn on her suggestion, he took her advice and started staging productions by the Canadian Opera – of which he had been director general since 1976 – in that way.

The system took time to perfect, and initially its critics believed they had been proved right in their complaints. Mishaps of synchronisation resulted in verbal witticisms being laughed at by the public before they had actually been delivered on

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