Opera in English

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 391, 20 December 1946, Page 11

Opera in English

NDER this title a series of Joan Hammond recordings came recently from 3YL. Translated opera has been fairly common on the Christchurch air recently; there was the relayed local Carmen, and=there is a scarred veteran, whose title I can never remember, invelving Dennis Noble and Webster Booth in a passage from La Boheme, But, taken by and large, opera in English is not as a rule successful. For one thing, the translation almost always bears the stigma of the pre-modern idea of Literary English, with its archaisms and unnatural idiom. Operatic Italian is, in all conscience, a sufficiently melodramatic and unnatural business-since all the human and dramatic side is for the opera-lover nothing but a pretext for the music-but-there is something about | the English words "Ah! ’Tis Gone" or "Thou May’st Learn to Hate Me" which somehow will not do; one feels like a student of Greek tragedy confronted with the less fortunate works of Gilbert Murray. Again, the Italian tradition in opera, from which all these translated works come, is much at variance with the English outlook, so that a translation has always something'of the "deary deary dear, this is none of I" look about it. Last of all, when the words are intelligible I, for one, am more than ever aware of opera’s too common disdain for everything within its own body which is not music. Benjamin Britten, I see, in composing Peter Grimes, got someone to write the libretto for him in modern English irregular verse, Perhaps this will solve the difficulty, and taise the words and actions of the characters to something like the same level of dignity as the music.