My first Summer School at Oxford was on Verdi and Shakespeare.  Verdi had written operas for Macbeth Othello.  His last opera was Falstaff.  The tutor, who was excellent, explained why in his view Italian was the best language for opera – which is theatre set to music.  It all sounded very logical, and we discussed the differences with English and French – and giggled when we spoke of German – just a little bit of Jingoism at Oxford.

But I recalled a previous visit to England when I saw a great performance of Billy Budd at Covent Garden.  This was in the 90’s when the AO was blazing.  I had asked Moffat Oxenbould, the Artistic Director of the AO, whether I should see Billy Budd or La Bohème.  One reason he gave in favour of the former is that it would be good for me to hear an opera in my own language.  This was very good advice, because at that time I found the music of Britten to be challenging.  Billy Budd is now my favourite opera – beside Falstaff.  (I would add Die Walküre, with the proviso that I must skip the second act – and watch the closing duet at the bar.)

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Simone Young will conduct Wagner’s Ring Cycle at La Scala.  (She was the first female conductor of it at Bayreuth, just as she had been the first female conductor with the Vienna State Opera and the Vienna Philharmonic.) 

She will share the function with a younger conductor who has learned under her.  (The person first appointed pulled out at short notice.) 

Simone had come to Wagner via Barenboim, who in turn came to Wagner via Furtwangler.  She and Barenboim had started their roles in Wagner on the piano.  Since Furtwangler is my favourite conductor, this is some pedigree. 

You can get an idea of what is involved by watching a video of Young talking in fluent Italian about preparing for Das Rheingold.  (She had previously held a long appointment at Hamburg.)  It is a great comfort to see learning being passed down from one generation to another in this high art form.

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Young told The New York Times that it was essential for the conductor to concentrate on the words in the libretto, as well as the music – then she knew how to place the accents of the orchestra – if I may be permitted the phrase. 

That makes sense.  The composer of the music wrote it to be played with the libretto written for just that purpose.  And it was written to be played with the score in the language in which the libretto was written.  Nessun dorma can’t come out like ‘None shall sleep.’

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Now, when we who speak English see Shakespeare, we follow it in our own tongue – and miss some of the archaisms of plays written more than four hundred years ago.  We get the meaning and the poetry at the same time.  And while we may cut the text, and take other liberties, no one has suggested that we may in some way flirt with the text itself.  That would be the civil equivalent of blasphemy.  Like fiddling with the text Dante or Goethe.  Or the opening chords of Don Giovanni.  Or the background to the Mona Lisa.

Poetry, like music, is a mix of imagination, form, and rhythm – and, for the want of a better word, alchemy.  (When Wordsworth referred to a ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ he was expressing a view good for Keats, but not so good for Wordsworth.)  And if you fiddle with either the music or the poetry, you might just wreck it.  Hamlet in French is a very different beast compared to Hamlet as it was written.

But most Australians who go to see the big operas of Mozart, Verdi, Wagner or Puccini do not speak the language in which the opera was written.  And with the possible exception of late Puccini, they are not the same as the audiences for which the operas were originally created.  Recording only started in the twentieth century.

This will not trouble those who go along to hear the big numbers and just bide their time otherwise.  (The Italians were notorious for gossiping until a set piece came on – when they exploded with applause – or derision.  Rather like a soccer match – or a bull fight.  Simone Young said that some thought that you had flopped in Germany with Wagner unless you got both raspberries and applause.  On the other hand, on one of my visits to Glyndebourne, the loudest applause came from the toff behind me who snored the loudest.)

But for the rest of us, at least two issues arise.  We are not getting the opera in the manner that its creators intended, and we cannot match the music to the language of the script.  We therefore have to put our trust in the translator, and in those directing the opera. 

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These misgivings – and that is what they are – show the wisdom of the advice I got from Moffat Oxenbould about listening to operas written in English.  This has led me to something like an addiction to Britten. 

Curiously, I have also become attached to Janacek, who was a fanatic about linking the music exactly to the text.  He used to patrol the streets listening to people and watching them speak, so that he could mould his compositions accordingly. 

My absorption with Janacek and Britten came at a time of extended leave from the great Italian composers.  I got to the stage that I had got to with Swan Lake and Giselle many years ago – if I heard La Bohème or La Traviata yet again, I might just give it all away.

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I doubt whether this gap for most of us between the text and the music in opera is grasped by many in the audience at the opera house or at home.

We are familiar with the problem with, say, French poetry.  On a good day, I can stagger through Verlaine and some of Victor Hugo.  (I subscribe to Paris Match, but I may say that is mostly for the photos – which is the precise opposite of what we schoolboys said when we smuggled in a Playboy.)  With Latin, I am on much firmer ground, and I have the luxury of not being called on to speak it. 

But take a well-known part of the Aeneid by Vergil.

Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

We can have a sporting chance of translating that.  ‘Even things have tears, and our mortality touches our minds’.  That may get the meaning of the words, but it sounds ugly, and however we translate it, we know it does and cannot have the poetic effect of the original text.  Latin has a very different structure and ring to it compared to English.

Or take an example plucked from Gutenberg:

In the midway of this our mortal life,
I found me in a gloomy wood, astray
Gone from the path direct: and e’en to tell
It were no easy task, how savage wild
That forest, how robust and rough its growth,
Which to remember only, my dismay
Renews, in bitterness not far from death.

That is among other things ugly and apparently wrought.  This is how Dante began the Divine Comedy.

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,

ché la diritta via era smarrita.

Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura

esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte

che nel pensier rinova la paura!

Tant è amara che poco è più morte;

ma per trattar del ben chi vi trovai,

dirò de laltre cose chi vho scorte.

You do not have to speak a word of Italian to know that the translation into English now sounds like an act of strangulated butchery.

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In course of the opera named after him, the third in the Ring Cycle, Siegfried kills his foster father before the latter kills him; he slays the dragon; he talks to the birds; he walks through a fire to free Brunnhilde from the spell put on her by her father; and then he takes off with her to the tune of what Simone Young says is one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written.  The final two lines of the text are:

Leuchtender Liebe,

Lachender Tod!

Even allowing that Siegfried is the dull child who refuses to grow up, those lines could surely not be as banal as their translation:

Radiant love,

Laughing death!

(And there is certainly nothing to laugh about in the death of either in Götterdämmerung.) 

The splendid Penguin version of the text and translation gives this comment of Nietzsche, who knew something about this.

Wagner’s poetry is all about revelling in the German language, the warmth and candour in his communion with it, something that as such cannot be felt in any other German writer except Goethe.

That is close to saying the text in this context is barely translatable. 

The score of the Ring was formally dedicated ‘with faith in the German spirit’.  You would not want it get into the wrong hands, especially one who like Wagner wanted to plant frenzy in the German audiences; a leader who, like the master, could wield magnetic power over the German psyche; a German whose favourite opera was Götterdämmerung, but who failed to see that it prophesied the fall of his regime, and of the whole German volk.

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There is another way of looking at what happens when the demands of the audience or reader require tampering with the work of a genius.  Goethe and Pushkin are celebrated in their own country to about the same extent as Shakespeare is in England, but neither travels well.  (Ibsen and Chekhov do not have the same problems.  Homer is seen as untouchable, in part because of intellectual snobbery, and the myth of Oxbridge that ancient Greece was civilized.) 

It is hardly surprising that mutilation carries huge risks.  Rare people of nerve and imagination and the soul of a director can occasionally succeed.  Nearly forty years ago, I took my young daughters to see Goethe’s Faust put on at the little Russel Street theatre, blessed of memory.  I warned them that it might be long and tedious.  I think a young Barrie Kosky directed it.  At the start, the lights went right out.  Gorillas were just seen running up and down each side aisle.  Then, two spotlights shone down the middle aisle.  A gorilla emerged at the front of center stage.  From out of it emerged the smiling face of Barry Otto.  There may have been the sound of machine-gun fire.  And our close attention was held for the duration.  I still recall it.

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Which brings me back to the suggestion that Italian is the ‘best’ language for opera.  Well, opera was born in Italy, and a majority of its superstar composers were also born there, but, putting to one side what experts in linguistics and phonetics might say, you may want to be careful in expressing that view in Amsterdam, Bayreuth, Berlin, London, Madrid, New York, Salzburg, Stockholm, Vienna and other cities that know something of music and theatre.  Or Commedia dell’ Arte.

And the discovery of the meaning of what you have heard so often may have its own entertainment value.  Nessun dorma is the best-known aria.  Who knows the real circumstances of ‘None shall sleep’?  Who knows just how plain silly Siegfried, the great hero of the Ring, is?  (Even the Master thought he was stupid.  The Rheinmaidens knew he was mad.  And by the time he finally gets to depart, we do not go into mourning.)  Heaven knows how many times I had heard Jussi Bjoerling sing Mama chel vino es generoso, before I saw Cavalleria Rusticana, and I started to giggle.  ‘Well might you need a stiff drink from your Mum, Comrade, because you are about to greet the guy with whose wife you have been playing tootsies, and in your part of the world, there can only be one result.’

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We should be careful about talking about meaning in this context.  We have trouble with the meaning of some passages in Hamlet because our language has changed – it is always evolving.  We have even more trouble with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, but with some tuition and encouragement – like I got at another Oxford Summer School – you can get by.  Then Beowulf is beyond all but those taught at tertiary level.

It is obviously silly to ask the meaning of the Pietà or the Moonlight Sonata – or Rigoletto or Don Giovanni.  Or Ode to a Nightingale. 

Macaulay said that ‘perhaps no person can be a poet without a certain unsoundness of mind…. Truth indeed is essential to poetry; but it is the truth of madness.’  That may sound over the top, but Ibsen admired Michelangelo because he had ‘the courage to commit a madness now and then.’  A psychiatrist asked – ‘Why cannot more light enter a mind that is cracked than one that is whole?’  Einstein and Keynes would have had a view on that (as would Barrie Kosky).  Keynes said that Newton was ‘the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians…. the last wonder-child to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.’  And, of course, Newton was up to his neck in alchemy.

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When we speak of a libretto in a foreign tongue, we are in some kind of hinterland when it comes to meaning.  Logical analysis is on very shaky ground.  We face three filters.  First, we depend on the conductor and director to present their version of this musical drama called opera.  Secondly, we depend on the translators to tell us their view of the meaning of the script in English.  And, finally, we get a very different account of the carefully managed marriage between the music and the text. 

You would not want to be on an ascent of Everest or undergoing heart surgery on such a wobbly footing.

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Opera translated into English does not have a good name – for good reason.  (One exception is the Mackerass Makropoulos Case.)  There is therefore a lot in favour of operas created in our own language.  We could never have survived Faust in German with voice over or subtitles.  Like the time some well intentioned internationalist got us at a Melbourne festival to see a Romanian theatre group do Titus Andronicus – in Romanian!  And our Romanian friends just hung their heads in horror. 

This was I think the ultimate risk in fiddling with the work of a giant, but at least to some extent, we take on some of that risk whenever we go to see most of the operas that are put on, especially in the straitened times since Covid.

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And the great success of Simone Young in Bayreuth, Berlin, Hamburg and Vienna is a sad reflection of the decline of the AO since its glory days of the nineties. 

I had been to a talk given by Simone on Tristan, which she opened with a thundering chord on the piano, and I saw her conduct that opera and a Wagner gala.  On each occasion, I was transfixed.  A chairman of the AO told me that Simone had allowed him to stand at the back of the pit during a performance.  He said his hair stood on end as she entered the pit, and she stayed back later to talk to the orchestra.  She may be our best export since Melba or Sutherland – but she is just not seen by those up the back as having that éclat.

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Well, at least my girls got to see our team at its best.  But it is sobering for an eighty-year-old lawyer who has been listening to or going to the opera for more than sixty years to reflect that not only can he not read the score – he cannot even read the script. 

That is just one of the reasons why I wonder if I am not much better off watching the live theatre of a test match – cricket or rugby – or a Grand Prix or Grand Final.  Or the Melbourne Cup.  Then I know just what is going on, but I have no idea how it all may end.  There is a lot to be said for that – it is called drama.

Then there is the shortest poem of Chris Wallace-Crabbe.  ‘Whatever Christ meant, it wasn’t this.’