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LA Opera Podcasts: Behind the Curtain
Confronting Opera History: The Magic Flute with Dr. Lily Kass
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Have you ever thought about what the supertitles …
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Welcome to behind the Curtain, LA Opera's official podcast. Each week we dive deep into the creative process with the artists, creatives and scholars who bring opera to life. Get ready to decode the drama, dissect the music and hear the heart behind the high notes. From backstage laughs to history making moments, every opera starts with a story. Have you ever thought about what the supertitles at the opera do and do not reveal? In this episode, which was recorded as part of LA Opera Connect's Exploring Opera series, Dr. Lily Kass shares her research into translations, how they mediate across time and culture beyond simply translating a libretto. In the case of Barry Koski's production of the Magic Flute, supertitles are used to combat racism, updating and mitigating a problematic text for modern audiences. Dive into the history, confront the past and learn the relevance of this fascinating field. And we hope you'll join us for the incredible and storied Magic Flute. Tickets are on sale now@laopera.org thank you.
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Thanks so much for having me. Inviting me to speak with you today. As we heard in the first presentation of today by Dr. Tiffany Kuo, the Magic Flute is well known as a fairy tale opera, an opera fit for children and opera novices. Today we'll dig into the opera to show you some things that lurk below the surface, partially because they involve a more minor character in the opera, the character of Monostatos, and partially because productions sometimes actively hide these elements elements from audiences through methods such as translation practices. So first I will introduce how and why opera translations can be used as productive objects of study. Next, I will transition into the content of the Magic Flutes libretto that deals directly with issues of race and racism. I'll show you a little bit of data that I'm actively collecting using supertitles from various productions of the opera. I think my study has 17 different productions so far, but we're hoping to add to that before jumping into to how race is represented in the Barry Koski production of the Magic Flute, which is what you will see presented at LA Opera. I was introduced to that production when it had its run in Philadelphia in 2017. So a lot of the business of opera today in America and beyond deals in issues of adaptation and translation. Every new mounting of an opera, even if it is a clearly canonic opera like the Magic Flute, which has been performed without pause since its premiere in 1791, which is really impressive and almost the only opera you can say that about, there was never a break in performances about the Magic Flute, but even performances of an opera like The Magic Flute involve casting singers in the roles, applying directorial concepts of some sort, adding or subtracting from the opera's text or libretto, most often subtracting in the case of long operas like the Magic Flute, and also translations into the vernacular language of the audience that help bridge any linguistic gaps that may exist, as well as technological mediations, lighting, scenic effects, and the animations that are integral to the Berry Koski production you will be seeing today. I will be focusing on translation for the most part, but all of these elements are interrelated, so I'll touch on all of them. Translating Opera dates back to the 17th century, very early in operatic history. Some genres of opera place a special emphasis on performance in the vernacular language of the audience, the language the audience speaks, and the German singspiel, the tradition in which the Magic Flute takes part, is one of them. The Magic Flute was written in German for German speaking audiences, unlike Mozart's Italian language operas that were written around the same time that Clemenza di Tito he wrote the same year as he wrote the Magic Flute, 1791, which presented language barriers for German speakers. Language barriers to understanding opera have also been talked about and discussed and critiqued since very early in opera's history. And I'll show you one of my favorite quotations about this. In 1711 in London, critic Joseph Addison wrote, I cannot forbear thinking how naturally an historian who writes two or three hundred years hence and does not know the taste of his wise forefathers will make the following reflection. In the Beginning of the 18th century, the Italian tongue was so well understood in England that operas were acted on the public stage in that language. So Joseph Addison here is being very sarcastic. He's saying, historians like me will be tricked, looking at how much Italian opera was performed in London in the 18th century, into thinking that everyone in London spoke Italian. But that was not the case. Most of the audience didn't understand the words being sung on stage. And that's the case with a lot of opera throughout opera history. And that's why translation is so important. Audiences in Joseph Addison's London would have had libretti so little books printed with the text and the translation so that they could actually understand it through written means, even if they couldn't understand it hearing the words from the stage. So there's a lot to be said about the history of opera translation. But I just wanted to give you that little taste because I think it's kind of tempting. With the advent of super titles as one of the main forms of opera translation today, to think about translation as necessarily technologically mediated in that way and therefore a new practice, but it's actually quite old. We, of course also have singable English translations that have been produced again since very early on in opera history and continue to be produced today. The English National Opera is one of the most famous opera companies that performs only in English. Opera Theatre of St. Louis is another one. English National Opera says we sing in English. We believe that singing in English enhances the emotional connection to between performers and audiences. And of course it's not that it's sung in English per se, but it's sung in English in England. So the language of the audience, opera in translation is often seen as lowering barriers to entry. For opera, which is a performance genre, is often seen as elitist. So opera translation often is seen as pushing to combat the stereotype of elitism. We don't care what we're, we're hearing on stage, we don't understand the words. We're just going there to get dressed up, get fancy. And we don't even know how many people are dead so far in this opera because that's how much we can't understand it. Opera translation is often situated as being in the interest of making opera more popular, inclusive and accessible. So now we turn to the Magic Flute. And speaking of accessibility, as I mentioned before, the Magic Flute is often touted as a great opera for opera novices, including children, as a gateway drug, if you will, to a lifetime's enjoyment of opera as an art form. So we have this little quotation from 2016 from the Evening Standard. Mozart's Magic Flute is enchanting and more than a little madcap, complete with Sorcerer and Queen of the Night. It's all at once serious and comic, profound and yet it contains the essence of Selinas. It has the air of a fairy tale and the music is a little bit fierce, folky, especially saying how good this opera is for children. WQXR's list of five operas you can bring the kids to and even enjoy yourself from 2019, says a Zalper Oper or magic opera. It's the perfect piece for the kids and great for mom and dad too. From the overture's exhilarating music to the heart wrenching vocal lines of Pamina's aria, to the comic pitter patter of Papageno and Papagena, Mozart offers endless treasures for the listeners ear. So I'm going to burst that bubble a little bit. I'm not denying that these statements are all true, but I'm Also going to show you that there are other aspects of this opera that aren't necessarily inherently kid friendly or inherently light and eerie and fun. And the way that we'll talk about this is through translation. Because I think a lot of the the reasons why people can say things like this about the Magic Flute is because of the history of translation of the Magic Flute kind of pushing these less light elements of the opera down. Translation is the primary means for transferring linguistic information from the German language to, in this case at LA Opera, a mostly Anglophone audience, an English speaking audience. And oftentimes that translation is perfectly presented through super titles or seatback titles depending on your theater. And this is important for thinking about the Magic Flute because much of the content about race and racism, skin color in particular, is in the libretto, is in the words of the opera. I think it's also important to study translation because it's often vastly understudied and ignored. A lot of people just assume that what they're seeing in the supertitles is exactly what the singers are singing. And I will tell you that is most often not the case. And part of the reason for this is that translators often aim to make their translations so unobtrusive that no one knows the text has been touched at all. So Norman Shapiro, a translator has written. I see translation as the attempt to produce a text so transparent that it does not seem to be translated. A good translation is like a pane of glass. You only notice that it's there when there are any little imperfections, scratches, bubbles. Ideally there shouldn't be any. It should never call attention to itself. So I'm going to challenge this and say I think we should pay attention to translations, right? I think we should question translations and therefore question how they're presenting such important issues as race in the Magic Flute. The transparency of translation, I think is a double edged sword. It also has the potential to hide the large amounts of work that translators do behind the scenes. Because translators do a lot more than change the linguistic content from one language to another. They often mediate across cultures and across time and can fundamentally modify audience members reception of a work. In the case of translations of the Magic Flute in English subtitles and also in single translations, but I won't talk about that. Today I found evidence that the lines in the libretto referring to the character's skin color have been overwhelmingly modified across again dozens of productions. And the modifications lessen the impact of these lines for English speaking audiences, allowing us to be ignorant of of the racist content in the Magic Flutes. Libretto. So today I'll be talking about subtitled or supertitled productions of the Magic Flute. So they're sung in German on stage and text in the target language, in this case English, is projected on a screen super title. Started in 1983, Canadian opera companies Elektra was the first production that used it. And there were many, many early criticisms of supertitles about them, allowing audiences to do less work, to be lazy, to provide immediate gratification. It insults our audiences by assuming they can't be bothered to read the splendid background material. It meets audiences passive and castrated. There's a lot of sexual language around these supertitles, which is interesting that I won't get into here. Lately, subtitles and supertitles have gotten more creative in some instances. For example, the Rigoletto at the Metropolitan Opera in 2013, directed by Michael Mayers, had some translations that fit with the Rat Pack Las Vegas milieu that the production was taking place in. Like my sights are set on a swinging girl so come on baby, let's, let's take a whirl Was one of the subtitles for one of the Duke's arias in Rigoletto. Of course, audiences can realize the Duke in Rigo Latto as written. You know, a libretto written in the late 19th century would not have included that kind of language. And so it becomes obvious to the audience, right, this is not a transparent translation. This is a moment where we're like, oh, someone did something here. Someone's adapting this for us. Similarly, heartbeat operas Fidelio in 2022 had creative translations. A review said the spoken text is in English throughout, while the arias remain in their original German, a testament to the timelessness of Beethoven. Though the production surtitles take some liberties with the translation. For example, as an excuse for briefly letting the prisoners out into the sun, Rock sings that it's the King name day, but the titles say it's Martin Luther King Jr. Day. So Martin Luther King Jr. Day did not exist in Beethoven's time, but these subtitles are calling attention to them being tools for audience understanding. But that is most often not the case. Most often, supertitles are going to try to be transparent or pretend to be transparent. That's what we'll be talking about here. Before I jump into the content on race and racism in the Magic Flute, I just want to signal that I will be analyzing a scene that involves racism. I want to make sure that everyone in the audience knows that and can take care of themselves as best they can. There are three main moments in the Magic Flute where skin color is directly referred to in the libretto. I'll first turn to the racist content in the spoken dialogue. This is all surrounding the character of Monostatos. Monostatos is an enslaved person. He's called a Moor in the libretto. He's black, so he's a black enslaved character. But he is often seen as a kind of comic relief as we will see as we continue to explore his character. Monostatos, if you separate out the name, means stands alone. So we can see just from his name that he's an isolated character and he is very much othered in the opera. So let's look at some of this dialogue. So this is from the spoken dialogue. It says when Papageno first meets Pamina, the princess Pamina who is white, and Monostatos, who is black. He says, beautiful maiden, young and pure, whiter than chalk. And then when he meets Monostatos, he says there are black birds in the world, why not black people too? And this is part of a larger theme that we'll see about the character of Monostatos being related to animals. Papageno is very interested in birds. So this is kind of part of Papageno's character as well while he's comparing Monostatos to birds. But I just want to kind of flag that we'll see a lot of animalistic language. We also have this bit of Dialogue In Act 2, Scene 3, Monostatos has a conversation with Zoroastro and Pamina after he overhears the Queen of the Night tell Pamina to kill Zoroastron. And he says, why are you trembling? Because of my black color or because of the murder you are planning? And later he says, no. And why? Because I am the color of a black ghost. And then Zoroastro says, know that your soul is as black as your face. And this line said by what some scholars and audience members and directors think of as the most enlightened character in the opera, Zoroastro the high priest. Your soul is as black as your face. Equates black as a race with evil intentions. So I would say this is an anti black racist line. Here we also have Monostatosis aria. And this is where we get references to blackness and also whiteness in the sung text that Mozart set to music. So we have the line, and I should avoid love because a black person is ugly. This is all said by Monostratos himself. And also, dear good moon, forgive me, a white woman has captured me. White is beautiful, I must kiss her. Then we'll talk a little bit about how the music contributes to Monostatosa's characterization. So we can hear in this clip that this is an example of Mozart's quasi Turkish music, kind of fake Turkish music. He also wrote another zing spiel called the Abduction from the Seraglio, which is full. It takes place in Turkey and is full of all of this kind of imagined Turkish music. The instruments he uses to create this effect are high woodwinds and also percussion. It's played at a frenetic tempo like the one we just heard. And it's supposed to evoke Turkish military marches or Janissary music with the types of instruments that would be heard in Turkish military marches. So we have content of race or nationality or exoticism basically, right? Not Europe coming from the music as well as from the text. And as we saw in the text, this is not really funny to me, right. Monostato seems full of self loathing and kind of focusing on his blackness versus Pamina's whiteness and how he feels like he can't ever be worthy of her, but he wants her anyway. So I looked at a lot of productions from over the years in my data collection to talk about kind of the visual elements and how they play into these musical elements that we saw and the textual elements that we saw. Oftentimes in earlier productions, especially Menostatos, was played in blackface. And this is most likely how he would have been played in the 18th century as well in the opera's premiere, in other words, a white performer painting their face with black makeup to make themselves look black or like a stereotype of being black. The concept of blackface has an especially fraught history in the United States with traditions of minstrelsy. And it's a very harmful practice is how most people consider it today. I would highly recommend, if anyone's interested in this topic further, to look at Ayanna Thompson's book, theater scholar Ayanna Thompson's book called Blackface. It's very, very readable and short, but very powerful and explains this issue. So blackface used to be kind of how Monostatos was portrayed on stage. Lately we are seeing more of the white skin of white performers. Black singers very rarely sing this role, in part because black singers were not cast in operas very often in earlier decades. And now black singers often do not want to be associated with this character because of its history of being stereotyped and racialized. So we still mostly have white singers playing this role. And we can see the singer's white skin in a majority of the more recent productions. That I've looked at. But at the same time, we often have this kind of Orientalist idea. So in terms of costumes or other elements, we have something about monostatos. Outward appearance looks other, different, not white, European. Oftentimes he is made to look animal like. Like we saw the Julie Taymor production. He looks kind of like a. A bumblebee to me in certain variations of his costume. But we also have other productions where he looks kind of ape like as well. Oftentimes he's made to look monstrous in various ways and, you know, long fingers and fingernails shriveled up, otherwise, you know, made to look repulsive, sometimes made to look cartoonish as well. And as you can see, all of these different elements can be combined in the same production. I would say Dooley Taymor's production, he looks cartoonish, showing that he's meant to be a comedic character. And then there are some really interesting productions where it is clearly a white singer singing, but the skin is blackened, not through practice of black face per se, but because, for example, in the Barb and Doucet production, the character is a. I forget what you call it, but he stokes the fires of a hotel and therefore his face is blackened by soot. In another production, the Carson production, I think it is, he is a grave digger and he's dirty from the dirt digging graves. And in another production, he's covered with black tattoos. So those are all reasons that his skin can be black without him being black racially. So let's see what happens with the subtitles before getting into the Barry Koski production that you'll be seeing. But just to see the general trends, I looked at whether productions subtitles showed literal translations of the content dealing with white race. So it says black and German, the subtitle says black, it says white and German, the subtitle says white. What I call minimization of content dealing with race. So, like dark instead of black or fair instead of white, which is synonyms, kind of. But not using language that directly references racial categories. I would say some erase the content dealing with race and just don't mention race at all. And sometimes the German text being sung on stage is actually modified, and then the subtitles translate that new German text, which often minimizes issues of race as well. So for the line because a black person is ugly, you can see lots of different colors on this slide, but most of them are not green. So there are very few literal translations that I found in this data set of this line, because a black person is ugly, we Just have two here. Most common is because of my ugly black face. So that's saying my face is ugly. And also my face is black, but not as clearly. I am black and therefore I am ugly. My race makes me ugly. We have erasure because I'm not considered beautiful, because no one likes my face, because they find me ugly. No mention of blackness. And then we have the words being changed in the German from a black person to a servant, from a black person to monster, from a black person to slave, from a black person to villain. Those are the examples there. In contrast, the stuff about the text about Pamina's whiteness is most often not changed. And I think there are many reasons for this. The first one being it's considered fine to say that whiteness is beautiful. And so that most often is kept. Sometimes the German is changed to instead of the white person, a pretty one, a lovely woman. She is beautiful. She has charmed me. Things like that. One minimization is Forgive me for desiring this woman. She is so lovely. So that that's sung in German. A white woman has captured me. White is beautiful. And the subtitle has no trace of whiteness. We can also think of this in terms of issues of casting. All of the productions I examined had white singers playing the role of monostatos. Two of the productions I examined had women of color playing the role of Pamina. And so that would be a reason to change the words. So we have the tamer production here with Golda Schulz as Pamina and Kathleen Battle as Pamina here. And those are the ones in which this line white is beautiful, were changed to erase the content that says that the character is white. Okay, so let's jump into Barry Koski's production. As some of my colleagues have said, the Barry Koski production of the Magic Flute is based in silent film. And you can see it's kind of black and white silent film. There are titles interspersed like you would see title cards in silent film. A lot of the people look like old fashioned silent film actors. And there are these animations that add movement to the scenes. Monostatos in this is based on the silent film character of Nosferatu, a kind of vampire like character. Let's see how he looks. It's a white singer singing in basically white face. So even whiter than the actor's actual skin with dark makeup outlining his facial features. And he's dressed all in black is meant to be kind of creepy or monstrous. I think we also saw him holding dogs on a On a leash. And we'll come back to that in a moment. In terms of text changes, what we just heard in this clip from Minnesota Opera, but he sang the word black person because the black person is ugly. Schwarze. When the production came to Opera Philadelphia, Schwarz was changed to sklava. So black person person was changed to slave. Vaisa was changed to a white person, to beautiful person. And all the dialogue is cut. So all of those other lines about blackness and whiteness that I showed you that are not in this particular aria are nowhere to be found in the production at all because there is no spoken dialogue. So in terms of how it's translated in the Caskey, if we are doing the change of text, we have slave and beautiful woman. And we have the supertitles that we used at Opera Philadelphia, at least they may change for LA Opera. Are all know the pleasure of kissing and caressing. Yet I should deny myself love because a slave is ugly. So not only do we have the black person change to slave in the. In the German, in the Upper Philadelphia mounting, but we also take out these animalistic references of billing and cooing to just kissing and caressing. Here we have a pretty literal translation. Here the animalistic language is taken out again, the beautiful woman substituting for white woman. And she is beautiful substituting for white is beautiful. So again, I would call this minimizing language. So to conclude, I think translation should be an integral part of a production concept and should be considered while creating the production. I also think that how operas are translated is an issue of ethics, which I think is brought up very clearly in this Magic Flute. I once gave a variation of this presentation as a webinar which was moderated by a colleague who is black. She is a singer. She had sung the role of, I think, the third lady in the Magic Flute, one of the ladies in the Magic Flute many times. And she had no idea that there was racist content in the Magic Flute and was totally shocked to hear that from me. And she was like, I should have been more responsible. I should have. I should have known better. And I said to her, you know, no, like, it's not on you. This is. Lots of opera companies are purposefully hiding this content from their audiences. So much so that the performers aren't even aware. But I would argue that traces of the original still remain. The costuming that I call a blackening. There's soot on this monostatos, although he is white under the soot and he is singing, but he's wiping the blackness from his arm. So this is an example of what would have been purple on my table. The text is changed from A black person is ugly to A slave is ugly both in the German and in the supertitle. But on the word slave, which originally was where the word black person was, whether it's conscious or not, in terms of the practice of this particular singer, he is wiping the blackness from his skin while not saying because a black person is ugly, saying a slave is ugly. So I think we still have traces. Even when we're taking out the exact language, we can still feel that it's there. I will end there. Thank you very much.
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We hope you'll join us for the incredible and storied magic flu. Tickets are on sale now at la opera.org don't forget to like, comment and subscribe to behind the Curtain wherever you listen to podcasts and share this episode with your friends on your favorite social media. Did you know that as a nonprofit, LA Opera relies on charitable donations from arts lovers just like you? Learn more about how your support brings our stage to life@laopera.org donate we can't wait to see you at the opera,
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Sam.