The battle for translation versus original language and titles (or program notes) has long been thought to be settled--and translation pretty much lost. Other than very small opera companies and The English National Opera (or the Chandos Opera in English series of recordings), the pro-native language advocates have all but given up. Yet I still believe no amount of "help" with a language that you do not understand can ever compare to the direct involvement of one you do, essentially hearing with no "barriers". The main reason that things are let "as is" has more to do with singers being able to sing anywhere just to pay the bills than any real concern for authenticity. If you learn Cosi Fan Tutte in Italian, you can sing it anywhere in the world. And any singer from any part of the world can sing it anywhere. This makes a certain sense. But it's no real excuse. The Met does works in translation all the time: Don Carlos, for instance, a work written to a French text. There are plenty of performers who have learned both the Italian version and the French version and have gone back and forth successfully. Really, Verdi hated the Italian translation but realized he would get more performances if the Italian was available. Yet the Met does it in Italian, even though virtually anyone who knows both can enumerate for you the myriad ways the French text is preferable. But audiences have gotten used to ignoring words and concentrating their attention on the music (or more truthfully, the melody) because idiots have convinced them that the actual sounds of the various words are much more important than their communicative ability--that somehow Verdi would be denigrated to be heard in English. Factor in that a house the size of the Met makes it very difficult to understand any language being sung, so why not have it be Russian or German or Czech? No one can really understand it anyway. This is all old news. We, the advocates of understanding, have long since lost the battle.
But I continue to fight it. So over the years I have used translations for a great many classical pieces and audience response has always been positive. Surprisingly so. In fact, to continue to perform lesser-known works of a certain difficulty, I have had to create a few "singing" versions of pieces that have only prose translations or "literal" ones that were not meant to be sung. This is a difficult, (usually) long, tedious process--I am forced to rely on other people's translations, a person or two who speaks the language in question, and dictionaries--but I have always sung better in English and feel the work has been worth it. Part of the solution is to find works composed to English texts, which I do often. That is a whole 'nuther can of worms which I may open later.
So why am I talking about this now? Because of a piece performed at our last concert, where poems by children of Terezin's ghetto who were killed were set to music by a fine composer, Lori Laitman. They were in English and the audience was very moved by them. They could not distance themselves so they had to hear the poems as "intended." This led me to re-listen to a group of operas written by victims of the Holocaust which were recorded in the latter decade of the 20th Century by London Records. The series was called Entartete Musik (Degenerate Music) because that was the label the Nazis placed on any style of which they disapproved. Because the Nazis were an extremely conservative group, they only approved of extremely conservative music, and banned anything that did not fit rigid models from the (usually German) past. So many of the pieces that were recorded are of "difficult" music. The period of the early 20th Century until the Second World War was one of experimentation, mixed methods, extended harmonies, conversational melodies, complication and simplicity (sometimes in the same piece), popular music invading "serious" music, etc. Composers were looking for new ways to hear things--not necessarily to cater to the popular audience. Yet, listening to some of these--chiefly Erwin Schulhoff's Flammen (Flames), Hans Krasa's Verloben im Traum (Betrothal in a Dream), and Pavel Haas' Sarlatan (Charlatan), all composers murdered by the Nazis by the way--I have come to a sad conclusion: these are all worthy pieces, but their various styles do not make for easy listening (or performance) and the language barrier is the final nail in the coffin. Why would any group put so much money into a performance of a piece written in Czech by an all but unknown composer who writes in a somewhat difficult style, when they can spend that money on a premiere of a new work by a living composer with a libretto already in English, or a production of, say, Shostakovich's The Nose? They wouldn't. Not here, anyway. If they performed some of these Entartete operas in English, would more people come? Maybe, but the people who did come would, I believe, appreciate them more and be more willing to try to understand what the composer was after. My proof? A children's opera by Hans Krasa, Brundibar, which has been performed all over the English-speaking world in a marvelous translation by Tony Kushner. Granted, it's only an hour long and the music is much simpler than Krasa's full-length one, but the correlation is fairly apt. I would love to see any of these works, in any version, but I fear I am a very small minority. Even the London recordings are out-of-print. [Side note: another group, Music of Remembrance, has picked up the idea, but their budgets are smaller, and are comprised more of short pieces. They did, however, record Brundibar, which is delightful. And a few performers, like Anne-Sofie von Otter, have recorded some of the shorter vocal works. But how long will they stay in print? How many performers will learn these pieces? Good question. So buy these while you can!] Yes, they were saved from extinction of one kind only to be all but destroyed by another: too few people want to have to "work" to appreciate music. At least, not music that isn't "universally" accepted as "essential." (Lulu, for instance. Which I worship, so don't get me wrong.) Not in an English-speaking country, anyway. So they lie around in manuscript, unheard. Even Los Angeles Opera, in an honorable bid to keep some of this music "alive", did a work that was so conservative musically, Lehar could have written it: The Birds, by Walter Braunfels. They hedged their bets. I believe the whole idea of performing in a language the audience does not understand will forever keep the more difficult of these (and many like) works dead in the water. It's just one barrier too many. I fight it on a small scale, but: English translation is dead. Long live English translation.
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