Lost in Translation?: Designing Opera Titles

By Stephanie Murg on November 20, 2009 10:22 PM

When The Diving Bell and the Butterfly began its rounds in American theaters, one of the final directorial details attended to by Julian Schnabel was selecting—and then fine-tuning—the typeface and hue of the English subtitles (the film is in French). Hearing Schnabel thoughtfully discuss the merits of pale yellow text versus the usual white left us wishing that more visual artists and designers were at the helm of feature films. It also made us acutely aware of subtitles wherever they appeared. In this month’s issue of Opera News, writer Matthew Gurewitsch takes on opera captions, which usually appear as supertitles projected on a screen above the performance or (as at New York’s Metropolitan Opera) on tiny LED consoles embedded into the back of each patron’s seat.

Despite their drawbacks (drawing the eye away from the stage, undermining the illusion that the actors are real people acting on their own impulses, in real time), titles “have become as integral to an opera production as sets and costumes, wigs and makeup,” writes Gurewitsch. “Yet most designers and directors give them scant attention, taking the titling systems of the houses they work in pretty much as they find them.” [Translation: graphic design opportunity alert!] He goes on to offer examples of creative titling, including performances that have experimented with non-standard typefaces and excerpted longer stretches of text at a time, allowing the viewer to refer back to previous lines. Then there are the times when titles go beyond translation:

…Titles have been known to mutate into commentary, marginalia, or even hypertext, as in a rare revival of André Grétry‘s Zémire et Azor at Houston Grand Opera in the early 1990s. In particular, I remember an aria di bravura in which the heroine had a great many more runs and roulades to toss of than thoughts to pin them on. “Neat, hunh?” one title read, when the steeplechase was at its dizziest.