Opera, in Translation

The 25th anniversary of supertitles at the Metropolitan Opera is warm beer to me.

Supertitles are definitely a darned sight better than the old days when one sat through operas barely knowing what anyone was singing and just savoring the "passion."

In 1943, one man described what going to the opera was like when he was a kid. He said, "Listening to people sing words you didn't understand wasn't much fun." That was Oscar Hammerstein. Supertitles were beyond the technology of the day, and so he took another tack: translating an opera into the language he spoke.

It was a Black English version of "Carmen" called "Carmen Jones." The famous "Habanera" in the original: "L'amour est un oiseau rebelle, qui nul ne peut apprivoiser." Great tune, but what on earth is Carmen saying? Here's Hammerstein: "Love's a baby dat grows up wild, and he don't do what you want him to." It's exquisite: I recommend the soundtrack of the film version.

But now, of course, we have supertitles (imagine "Superman" music on the soundtrack here), projected on the back of the chair in front of you, or on some monitor a story above the performers.

This means that at the Met's "War and Peace," we spend one-eighth of the performance reading. Imagine spending an eighth of an evening at "My Fair Lady" reading.

In fact, Europeans have not had to suffer this kind of thing nearly as much. When the French first heard "The Marriage of Figaro" it was in French. The Germans heard "Così Fan Tutte" in German.

As they do "My Fair Lady" now. In America we get "Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?" In Germany they get "Kann keiner lehren unsere Kinder wie man spricht?"

Even here, there were television performances of grand operas translated into English in the 1950s, and New York's City Opera was presenting translated versions of operas into the 1960s.

But fashion changed. When Baz Luhrmann brought "La Bohème" to Broadway in 2002, he cast gorgeous young singers, and set it in the roiling red-on-chiaroscuro ambience that made his "Moulin Rouge" film so stunning, to make it accessible to young Americans. Yet the singers were still warbling away in Italian with supertitles, Mr. Luhrmann shrugging, "The language is inherent and fundamental to the music. It just doesn't sound right in English."

Or does it? Here are two lines from the beginning of "Così:" "La mia Dorabella capace non è / fedel quanto bella il cielo la fè." And here is how New York operagoers often heard it in the translation used in the Eisenhower and Camelot eras: "To doubt Dorabella is simply absurd / She'll always be faithful and true to her word." What sin has been committed?

Well, for many the issue is vowels. Opera, we are told, is all about beautiful vowels. True, Italian vowels are deliciously singable. But German's are decisively not, and yet we are expected to sit through five-hour performances of "Die Walküre" in German, under an assumption that taking it in in English would be like eating at the Olive Garden. This just doesn't make sense; the issue is merely blind tradition.

My first opera, when I was 10, was "Porgy and Bess," in ugly old English. Tears were rolling down my cheeks at the end, and it wasn't because of the vowels. I was moved because I understood what the characters were singing (32 years later, brava, Clamma Dale and bravo, Donnie Ray Albert).

Now: imagine a production of "Porgy and Bess" in English in Germany. Porgy launches into "Bess, You Is My Woman Now." Johann doesn't speak English. He hears, especially via opera diction, "Ba-a-a-a-zz, oo-weez-nay-oo-mah-na-a-ah ... "

But wait — he has supertitles (tah-ta-dahhh!). In cold digital print he gets: Bess, jetzt gehörst du mir. But that chilly projection is worlds apart from the plangent passion on stage. Johann is losing a lot, and unless he happens to be an opera nut, he leaves tired. The ordinary American operagoer foisted with supertitles is Johann — or, in America, John: i.e., me.

Of course, opera singing can be hard to understand even in English. I can't say I minded the supertitles during the Met's recent "Peter Grimes." However, they were a mere crutch — without them, I would have more than followed the action, just as I did at "Porgy and Bess" as a lad. Ideally, the Met would keep the supertitles, but still have all operas be performed in the language we speak.

I submit that all discomfort with that proposition falls away when one attends operas by a company like the Opera Theatre of St. Louis where all performances are in English. The sky does not fall in, and no one looks remotely ridiculous.

Vowels are nice, but they aren't everything, and for my money an evening of vowels and reading is not much of anything — especially for a hundred dollars and change.

Mr. McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Correction from July 11, 2008: 1995 is the year the Metropolitan Opera began using its system of individual screens mounted on seatbacks. The timing was misstated in a column by John McWhorter on page 7 of yesterday's New York Sun.