Yesterday's The Times contained a long piece by Rory Bremner on the subject of his forthcoming translation of Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld. I'm a great admirer of Rory: he's extremely funny as well as being right on the nail in his observation of politics and all sorts of other things (US readers: he's a brilliant impressionist, stand-up comedian and political satirist who's had his own TV shows here for years). But his approach to translating nineteenth century opera gave me pause for thought:
"And herein lies the problem for translators: here are two worlds, Greek mythology and the French Second Empire, which have little modern relevance, and what to Parisians of 1858 would have seemed a witty, even scandalous, satire now looks like, well, silly people doing silly things... I soon realised, along with the director Oliver Mears, that we needed to revive and refresh the piece and add some twists of our own."
Over the last year, I've seen several examples of directors who think the opera they're directing is no longer relevant. To name just three: in ENO's Don Giovanni, Jeremy Sans's translation altered out of recognition the words of famous arias. In the Merry Opera Company's Troy Boy, billed as an adaptation rather than a translation of Offenbach's La Belle Hélène, Kit Hesketh-Harvey translated the musical numbers reasonably straight, but played fast and loose with the spoken dialogue. In Komische Oper Berlin's Die Entführung auf dem Serail, Calixto Bieito didn't have a translation to work with, so original words were left incongruously juxtaposed with incompatible events on stage.