Mark Wigglesworth is a former Music Director of English National Opera and a passionate advocate of ENO's policy of staging opera only in the English language. That policy was called into question in a recent interview on Bachtrack: we think it's an important debate and are therefore delighted that Wigglesworth has contributed this opposing view.
The rumours whispering through the cracks of the London Coliseum are alarming for those who believe English National Opera has a vital role to play in making opera accessible to all. If the language policy that forms such a pillar of its identity is abandoned, it would be a betrayal of the company’s most valuable mission to perform opera in a way that can be understood by the largest number of people.
The company cares about accessibility. But many forms of entertainment, from rock concerts to football matches, prove that within reason, accessibility is not really about the price of a ticket. For accessibility to be meaningful and long lasting it has to come from the work itself. No amount of pricing structures, auditorium lighting effects, or casual dress codes, are going to succeed if the performances themselves don’t reward people’s decision to come. When Mozart wanted to write for ‘the people’ he did so in their native German. He trusted that if more people understood the piece, more would enjoy it.
The initial impulse behind the creation of an opera is almost always a dramatic one. Most composers choose to write for the stage because they want to express drama through music - not the other way round. They may have the odd melody in mind, but they don’t write the music and then ask for the text. The words come first.
Just as the words lead the music in the composer’s creative process, so should they lead the experience for the audience. And if opera is drama first and foremost, why is the question of the language it’s sung in so hotly debated? Shouldn’t the same rules as drama apply? I don’t hear complaints about Ibsen or Chekhov being compromised by translations. There’s an acknowledgement in the theatre that drama has to express itself as directly and immediately as possible.
The most valid counter-argument is that the sound of the language is an inherent part of the expression - that the colour of the original words is connected to the colour of the notes. But beauty is not as powerful a medium as meaning. That’s not a radical opinion. It was almost 500 years ago that the Council of Trent decreed people should sing ‘so that the words are more intelligible than the modulations of the music.’
For some people, words in opera don’t matter that much at all. They don’t want to know the details of what the characters are saying, believing the music tells them all they need to feel. But composers don’t want their operas to sound like staged concerts. They want them to be theatrical.
A more unspoken view is one that thinks singing in a foreign language ‘keeps the riff-raff away’. An accusation of vanity is unfair to the majority of original language devotees but I do believe a certain pleasure in cultural elitism exists, even if only by a few.
It’s well documented how much opera composers have cared about audiences being able to understand the words. Both Verdi and Wagner were energetically supportive of translations. If we could ask them about surtitles, I suspect they wouldn’t understand the question. It would have been inconceivable to them that the words wouldn’t have been understood in the first place. Librettos were readily available to those with more time and curiosity than we allow ourselves today, but I cannot believe that opera would have captured the fascination of so many if the public hadn’t been able to hear most of the text in real time.