About time too, I reckon.
Sean Doran explains why.
"Surtitles are," said David Pountney, "a celluloid condom inserted between the audience and the immediate gratification of understanding."Sir Peter Jonas, now head of the Bavarian State Opera, said: "If ENO are doing what the audience wants, they should have public executions on the stage of the Coliseum. After all, the public wants capital punishment."
Dennis Marks, who succeeded Sir Peter at ENO, said: "It's yet another undermining of the principles on which ENO was founded."
So, Pountney is saying that people have no right to understand - that to do so is instant gratification and thus to be deprecated; Jonas is saying, that an organisation, largely funded by people who buy tickets and by tax payers, has no business being responsive to public demands and needs. By his logic there should be inadequate female toilet facilities at the Colisseum. And Marks is contradicting him perfectly, because ENO was founded, long before anyone imagined surtitles, supertitles, subtitles, or whatever, precisely to make opera accessible to, erm, the paying public.
The BBC is clearly blissfully ignorant that English operas at Covent Garden, for example, are performed with surtitles.
Séan Doran explained the reasons cogently on Today whilst the Editor of one or other opera magazine was snootily dismissive.
I haven't encountered any opera goers who wouldn't welcome surtitles at ENO. There are criticisms of singers' diction, some quite rightly, but, on the other hand, if, for example, you have four different vocal lines, with different words, often creating beautiful harmonies, the words are simply not distinguishable. I find that if I choose not to look at surtitles I don't notice them - for example, in Ballo at Covent Garden, which I know pretty well anyway, and the Italian diction was sufficiently clear (for me, anyway) to render them entirely surplus at times
I suspect that the criticisms may come from those that sit in the expensive seats downstairs, because, I think, they may have to crane their necks a little to see titles above the proscenium. From the cheap and middle-pricing seats upstairs, it does not require contortions.
I rather thought that the magazine editor is rather opposed to people attending an opera who don't know the libretto (as written AND as translated), as well as the score, backwards. Well, sod him. If he were to bother to ask, he would probably find that the majority of people who attend operas, or concerts, or plays, or art exhibitions, are not academic or professional experts in those fields but are looking for an enjoyable and thought provoking evening out without worrying about their purist credentials. They work for a living, and pay - not get paid - to attend these events, unlike critics and administrators. Sod him. Yay for surtitles. Power to the people!
I'm not saying that ENO, or other similar organisation should necessarily bow to every whim and demand, but I always view 'thin edge of the wedge' arguments as the last refuge of people who resist change for the sake of resisting change, lack the intellect to argue their point on its own (by inferrence, dubious) merits and lack the understanding of people - or perhaps disdain them - to understand that one change does not lead inexhorably to another. I think that the 'public want public executions' argument should automatically lead to the disregarding of any point by that user.
