Grand Opera—Its Cause and Cure

The Opera in America Being What It Is, How Can We Turn It Into Something Else?

DEEMS TAYLOR

LAST month in these pages, discussing the average American's indifference to grand opera, 1 ventured to explain it on the grounds, first: that a wall of foreign languages bars him from a complete understanding of what opera is about; second: that whereas his theatre is thoroughly modern and expert, his operatic productions are old-fashioned and clumsy; third: that he is asked to swallow whole an operatic repertoire that makes no distinctions between masterpieces and rubbish.

Assuming that this diagnosis is correct, at least so far as it goes, what about it? If Americans are—and I firmly believe they are —a great potential operatic audience, how is their interest to be captured and held?

Obviously, the first thing to do is to give the American some operas in his own language —a thing that, 1 hasten to add, is neither simple nor easy. The singers will have to relearn their roles in English; and the better and more experienced the singers, the more completely will they have absorbed the roles in foreign tongues, and the louder will they complain if they are asked to change.

Even more difficult, probably, will be the actual task of translation; for if opera sung in English is to be anything but ridiculous, it must be sung in good English. Most of the existing translations will have to be scrapped, for reasons that require only their perusal to he apparent. The so-called "English" libretti that are hawked about the lobbies of our temples of song as containing "all the words of the opera" contain just that. The words are there, carefully translated into the poorest possible English equivalents, but the order in which they are arranged bears no relation to the language that we understand and speak. Consider this example, culled, punctuation and all, from the official "English" libretto of Giordano's Andrea Chenier:

She, with her lips my forehead smites Like the morning rays of dawn!

Her loving fond embraces New joy and peace affords.

Kind Death . . . here it comes . . .

HERE it comes indeed! Yet it is no isolated specimen. It is a good average example of what confronts the opera-in-English missionary when lie tries to make converts to his cause. One marvels, sometimes, at the extraordinary pains to which some opera translators must have gone, in order to achieve such triumphantly idiotic results. Take one instance out of millions: In the last scene of Act II of Tristan and Isolde, Wagner has Mark say, Die kein Himmel erlöst., warum mir diese Hölle? which may roughly be translated,

True, I have no hope of Heaven;

Yet why this Hell for me?

The famous Corder brothers, preparing the official British translation of this passage, render it, presumably after exhaustive study, thus:

Why in hell must I bide Without hope of a heaven? And why in hell the Corder brothers did not see that they were thereby handing the unsuspecting Mark a choice morsel of profanity, I do not know.

Operas can be translated into English— real English, that is—and occasionally have been. All that the task requires is a translator whose knowledge of foreign languages is accompanied by something more than a smattering of English. As an example of what an English translation can be, let me recommend the acting version of Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac that Brian Hooker made for Walter Hampden, a translation that for dramatic intensity and poetic beauty ranks little, if at all, below its French original.

BUT Mr. Hooker's Cyrano is not an opera libretto, and his task was not complicated by the necessity of fitting his English words to existing music. Perhaps a fairer example is Robert Simon's translation of Faust. It was made for the American Opera Company, and helped make their Faust production here last winter more or less of an operatic milestone. Here was an English version that fitted the notes of Gounod's score like a glove, that was easy to sing and easy to enunciate, and that managed moreover to steer a safe course between pomposity and excessive colloquialism.

The American Opera Company's Faust had more than a good English libretto to recommend it, however. It offered its audience the unusual spectacle of a grand opera staged like a play, with the mental as well as the physical resources of the modern theatre behind it. Vladimir Rosing, the young Russian who is directing the company's artistic fortunes, approaches opera, not as one about to put on a concert in costume, but as a stage director confronted with a new manuscript. His attitude is, briefly, "Here is a show. How can I put it over?"

Mr. Rosing's solution of this problem, as embodied in his Faust, is completely modern, notwithstanding its mediaeval settings and costumes. He conceives a Mephistopheles that is no longer the red devil of operatic tradition, but a cheerfully sinister person who may be anything the spectator pleases, from a debauched contemporary of Faust's to a personification of Faust's evil nature. He contrives the staging of the rather childish scenes of magic in such fashion that the skeptical onlooker may explain them on rational grounds if he chooses. He directs the singers on the assumption that they are actors in a play, the fact that the play is given in music being entirely incidental. The result is a dramatico-musical performance that turns its auditors into theatre-goers, and holds them as opera audiences are seldom held.

Curiously, a number of people, many veteran opera-subscribers among them, object to being held thus. They don't want opera to be dramatic, and they very violently don't want it to be understandable. Their objections are generally twofold: that opera loses its essential glamour and mystery when it is treated too dramatically, and that English "sounds silly" when it is sung. These objections may be sincere, but 1 should not call them the result of thought. A work of art that is impressive only so long as it is incomprehensible is hardly worth preserving; and a sentiment that sounds silly in a translation is probably silly in the original.

As a matter of fact, tin; average objector to translated and theatricized opera is motivated, 1 believe, not by aesthetic rectitude hut by fear—the tremors of one who hesitates to open a telegram lest it contain bad news. For the truth is, that many operas, once they are intelligibly conveyed and expertly acted, contain very bad news indeed. Faust, produced by the American Opera Company, emerges not only as an interesting dramatic entertainment, but as a very feeble musical one. One has only to hear Gounod's score with an English text to realize how immeasurably dramatic technique ill music has progressed beyond him. His tunes are charming, graceful, and well orchestrated; and they have about as much to do with Goethe's story as they have to do with Beeman & Smith's Plane Geometry. At all the dramatic crises of the action 1 found myself muttering, "Oh, Charles, for God's sake say something!"

CONVERSELY, a performance of The Marriage of Figaro in English, by the American Opera Company, brings home the painful fact that Mozart wasted quantities of enchanting music upon a libretto beside which the book and lyrics of Manhattan Mary loom like Hamlet. If Tosca could be heard in English, some irreverent souls might begin to wonder whether a young woman in the process of being chased around the room by a gentleman bent on atrocities really would suddenly pause to tell the audience that she had always lived for art. The Old Guard are quite right. If Americans could hear all operas in their native tongue, some old favorites might turn out to he too silly to be taken seriously; good staging applied to certain librettos might ruin them beyond repair; too clear understanding might reveal grotesque discrepancies between the dramatic contents of certain books and their accompanying music.

But what of it? The present-day American opera-goer suspects, even if he cannot prove, that the present-day operatic repertoire is of unequal merit. Some operas bore him. Because he cannot explain why they do, he decides that all operas are to blame for his boredom. Let him find out what he really likes, and give him a chance to stay away, without shams, from those that he doesn't like. A few old war-horses, beloved chiefly by singers, would undoubtedly perish. Those that survived would do so because they were interesting—which is the best excuse any work of art has for survival. And if Americans would discover what they liked in opera, American operatic composers could stop writing for their libraries and start writing for an audience.