Edition: U.S. / Global

Sept. 24-30;Now You'll Know What the Fat Lady Sings

Published: October 1, 1995

WITH its opening night tomorrow the Metropolitan Opera joins most of the world's other major houses in giving the audience simultaneous translations of the words being sung on stage, little words appearing on little screens in front of each seat. Every member of the audience can turn the screens on or off at will.

That may mean the end of that intermission sight -- the opera patron hunched over the libretto like an anxious student cramming for an exam that starts when the lights go down. Is this the part where the King hands his son over to the Inquisition, or have they moved on to where he refuses to give them his friend?

Most operagoers who don't have a firm command of Italian and German and French and Russian and Czech and Hungarian welcome supertitles. It's not hard to see why. Opera was never intended to be incomprehensible. Until Wagner turned down the lights a century ago, patrons could see well enough to read a libretto, and for many years afterward operas were translated before they were presented to foreign audiences.

Think of subtitles as so many cheaters' penlights brought in to read the libretto, to illuminate the plot. Knowing precisely where in "Don Carlo" the terrible Inquisitor is trying to intimidate the King into handing over his friend will give you a keener appreciation of the moment his tune changes from a dark adamancy to higher-pitched wheedling phrases.

A vague notion of the plot line is no replacement for the actual words. To know that Figaro says he's the perfect man for the job in Rossini's "The Barber of Seville" conveys nothing of the flavor and immediacy of his actual line: "The cheese fell right on the macaroni!" And knowing that in "The Marriage of Figaro" Susanna sets up the Count with a false assignation is mildly amusing, but the comedy is in the dialogue between the Packwoodish boss and his nervous employee: "You'll come?" "Yes." "You won't fail me?" "No." "So you'll come?" "No." "NO!?" "I mean, yes." "You'll not fail me?" "No." "So you'll come?" "Yes." "You'll not fail me?" "Yes." "YES!?" "I mean, no."

On the other hand, supertitles have brought on their share of unintended laughter. There is a line early in Puccini's "Tosca" in which the jealous soprano tells her lover, a painter, to give the woman in his painting dark eyes, like hers, as proof that he has not fallen for his model. During one performance, the soprano was shocked to hear her line get a laugh -- until she learned that the supertitle said: "Give her black eyes!"

Ode to Daddy Dear

Well, at least the Met's patrons have the option of switching off the words. Sometimes, they may want to, even if the titles are perfectly accurate. A fact of operatic life is that there are times when knowing what's being sung doesn't contribute all that much to the opera experience.

Some might find the soaring choral ending of Wagner's "Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg" undermined by the creepy words of Teutonic self-love. ("What is German and true no one would know any more, if it did not live in the honor of the German masters"). And, as Clayelle Dalferesof WQXR radio once pointed out, the gorgeous aria "O mio babbino caro," from Puccini's "Gianni Schicchi" turns out to be several minutes of a young woman saying nothing more than, "Oh, daddy, please, may I? Please?"

Even Lorenzo da Ponte, the librettist of Mozart's greatest Italian operas, and a man of keen dramatic instincts, had his weak moments. Donna Anna's last aria in "Don Giovanni" is:

Do not tell me, my beautiful idol

That I am cruel to you;

You know well how much I love you,

You know my fidelity,

Calm your torment if you do not wish me to die of grief.

When W. H. Auden tried to translate this into English, he remarked, "the words are of an appalling banality." Then he threw the whole thing out and wrote verses of his own.

Many of the librettoes that date from before the last half of the last century, the era before composers could play auteur, are feeble from start to finish. In "I Masnadieri," a work from what Verdi called his "galley years," the chorus of highway robbers sings this:

Pillage, rape, arson, killing,

For us are pastimes, sheer amusements . . . . . .

The last gasps of murdered fathers,

The cries and wails of wives and mothers, are music to us,

Are entertainment for our harsh, stony hearts.

What can you say to that, except, Yeah, right!

The buoyant, serene and self-satisfied march of the Carthaginians in Berlioz's "Les Troyens" is accompanied by these padded lines:

Glory to Dido, our beloved Queen!

Queen by her beauty, grace and great spirit,

Queen by the favor of the gods,

Queen by the love of her happy subjects.

In all fairness though, opera is not alone in its absurdity. What about Michael Jackson's "Bad" video? There is a double standard here. People who find the chorus of murderers in Verdi's "Macbeth" a little silly don't blink an eye when the action-movie hero turns to the leading lady as they're pinned down by bad guys' machine-gun fire and asks, "Friends of yours?" If you can stand that, you can stand to know that sometimes a beautiful voice has nothing better to do than sing "I am a Borgia!" over and over again.

Photo: Figaro says he's the right guy for the job. (Martha SwopeAssociates/Susan Cook)