Newsgroup: it.arti.musica.classica
Titolo: Language issue in a work-in-progress new opera libretto

I am writing a libretto from Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus for my
friend and teacher Antonio Giacometti. I will write it in Italian, but
I am considering the possibility of keeping some parts in English. As
you may know, Titus is a very emotional play and I think it is much
suited to musical treatment: when the characters are ovewhelmed by
horror (and there is much horror here), they start to ritually heal
their wounds with poetry, i. e. music. So, I wanted also to change the
type of language, when passing from speech to lyrical expression: to
switch from Italian to Shakespeare's English, since most of the times
the meaning is self-evident and the important thing is the poetry. The
other reason would be that in the play there are several lines in
Latin, so the uses of different languages is already present in the
original play (and of course not all Elizabethan audiences could
understand Latin), since culture and literature are main issues in the
tragedies (characters quote from Ovidius, Horatius and Seneca). But
I'm afraid the passage from oe to antoher could be too hard. And there
is the subtitles problem: do we have to diplay subtitles? Not for the
Italian (it will be most probably produced in an Italian theatre) -
for the English lines. We could make a dramatic use of subtitles,
somehow (screen them in an elegant way and within the scene, for
example). But will they distract the audience from the main action on
the stage?
Or I can think about keeping the Italian but changing the style (prose
and verse, different kind of verse, different lexicon), instead. (My
models are 17th century italian tragedies and librettos, like Tesauro,
Della Valle, Dottori and most of all Busenello, the librettist of
L'Incoronazione di Poppea).
What do you think about multi-language operas? Would you appreciate
such a thing or would you rather have your opera all in one language
(one that you can possibly understand)? What do you think about
surtitles, especially in new operas?
Do you have any suggestion for a new opera libretto and for Titus in
particular?
Paolo


Wait a minute... "change the type of language"... surely that's the 
business of the composer? After all, it's the music that primarily 
carries the moods and emotions in opera, not the text. Switching 
languages for no (apparent) reason would only serve to confuse the audience.
In this particular case, Latin quotes in the text are not as much of a 
problem since the characters would have been speaking Latin in 'real 
life' -- although for me it does seem a bit like Asterix. But why would 
you want to intrude English into it? Italian is much closer to the 
'original' Latin anyway, even if you are working from a play written in 
English...
I may have a slightly distorted view of this, since here in Finland it 
used to be the case until the 1980s that all operas were performed in a 
Finnish translation, which led to very strange things with visiting 
soloists. I recall a performance of La bohème where Rodolfo sang in 
Italian and the rest of the cast in Finnish.
-- 
Regards,
Jaakko Mäntyjärvi
Helsinki, Finland
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