Cendrillon Becomes Cinderella

By Patricia Blake

Subtitling a fairy tale at the New York City Opera

In May 1982, Beverly Sills was the honored guest at the Peking Opera. She found the music entrancing, the setting beguiling--and the opera incomprehensible. So did many Chinese in the audience. Therein lay the seeds of a revolution: the libretto was flashed on a screen at the side of the stage for the benefit of those in the audience who might not grasp every nuance of archaic Mandarin. Sills resolved to take a cue from what she witnessed. The idea was reinforced when the Canadian Opera in Toronto pioneered the use of English captions in its productions of Richard Strauss's Elektra and Claudio Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppea.

Last month the New York City Opera became the first major company in the U.S. to subtitle a live opera performance. For the experiment, General Director Sills chose Jules Massenet's Cendrillon, a rarely performed, exquisitely frothy turn-of-the-century version of the Cinderella tale. The English subtitles, selectively translated from the French libretto, were projected on a dark, 6-ft. by 47-ft. screen unobtrusively suspended below the theater's proscenium arch. Members of the audience could either ignore the running titles or read along as the action unfolded onstage.

The opera management, the performers and much of the audience regarded the experiment as a triumph. "It's one of the most revolutionary innovations to come into the opera house," exulted Sills, who has long strived to make opera less of an elitist entertainment. "I think we should eliminate as many barriers as possible to opera. With subtitles, you can have opera in the language the composer wrote it in and relax, instead of straining to understand the words."

Cendrillon's star, Soprano Faith Esham, found that captions made the audience more responsive to her singing. "Listeners get both the jokes and the sentiment," she observed. "For example, in the first act, when Cinderella's father, stepmother and stepsisters leave her to go to the ball, the audience understands with the translation that Cinderella is not just feeling sorry for herself: it is a poignant and reflective moment for her." Esham is not afraid the subtitles will draw attention away from her artistry: "I just sing louder."

Members of the audience who answered a New York City Opera questionnaire were overwhelmingly in favor of the subtitles. A sampling of operagoers interviewed by TIME during the first two weeks of Cendrillon performances had scarcely any complaints. Opera Buff Milicent Auerbach conceded that continually looking up at the titles and down at the stage could give someone seated in the orchestra a pain in the neck. "The words being sung and the subtitles didn't always coincide," noted Brooklyn College Professor Carolyn Richmond. "But the captions were very helpful. Even though I understand French, I wouldn't have grasped a lot of what was being sung without them." Cyril Harris, who designed the acoustics for New York City's Avery Fisher Hall, was also impressed. Harris, a stickler for concert-hall perfection, said, "I thought the captions would be distracting, but they weren't."

The fact that subtitling of live opera is being tried out in New York City came as no surprise to Daniel Toscan du Plantier, Europe's top producer of opera on film. Said he: "Since opera in America is among the world's stuffiest and most resistant to change, it's clear that something radical has to be done to reach new audiences. People are now demanding to follow the story more closely. The success of an opera is linked to the story as much as it is to the music." Still, many fans prefer to hear opera sung in English translation. Andrew Porter, who has rendered 27 operas into English, including all of Mozart's and the entire Ring cycle of Wagner, said, "On the whole, it often makes better sense for an American cast to sing to an American audience in the language they have in common." Nonetheless, Porter found the New York City Opera captions helpful. "American audiences shouldn't have English all the time; what you gain in being intelligible you often lose in musical sounds." Porter cited his translation of Tristan and Isolde. "Because of the heavy orchestration of the work, it was hard to understand the opera in English," he recalled. "In fact, I wondered why I had translated it at all."

The success of New York City Opera's bilingual Cendrillon has encouraged Sills to subtitle all of the company's foreign-language operas next season, including The Barber of Seville, Rigoletto, Madame Butterfly, La Boheme and Turandot. Last week the San Francisco Opera began using titles on an experimental basis. Next season the Houston Grand Opera plans to adopt the new system.

But are the older, tradition-bound opera houses ready for subtitles? In France, Germany, Austria, Italy and Britain, the answer was resoundingly negative. When asked about providing captions at Rome's Opera House, its former superintendent, Roman Vlad, declared, "I have never heard of such a thing." But in New York City the management of one of the world's most traditional opera houses, the Metropolitan, was eyeing the larger, younger audience captioning is likely to attract. "I'm asking a lot of people to go see the subtitles at the New York City Opera," said Metropolitan General Manager Anthony Bliss, impressed by the Canadian Opera's captioned productions. "I have observed infinitely more understanding of opera with subtitling; even the most dyed-in-the-wool opera fan will admit he learned something."

--By Patricia Blake.

Reported by Georgia Harbison/New York

With reporting by Georgia Harbison This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.