Can an opera singer who does not speak Italian, French, or German, yet has perfect diction in all three, still have a successful career in the world’s major opera houses? My colleagues at the Met have varying opinions about this. A diction coach, who shall remain anonymous, tells me that all famous opera singers nowadays should be, and probably are, fluent in the languages of opera—except for Russian and Czech, which non-natives learn phonetically by rote. Conversely, a prompter (who also begged not to be quoted) argues that many opera singers know the plot of the libretto, the meaning of redundant words like amore, morte, fuggir, coraggio, lieb, tod, etc., but would be lost in Paris, Rome, or Berlin, without a phrase book in their pocket. Another anonymous pundit, an assistant conductor, when asked how a monolingual American singer would fare at recording sessions or opera rehearsals in a foreign country, where a maestro may not speak English, replied, “The language of music is universal.” (I will dispute this later!)
The best way for anyone to learn a country’s language is, of course, to live in that country for a year or two. Yet for an aspiring American opera singer, who has enough problems making ends meet in Podunk or New York City, with voice lessons, diction coaches, and flying here and there for auditions, this is not always feasible. So, short of taking an expensive course in a foreign language institute or private lessons with a language tutor, I have some alternative suggestions, which I list at the conclusion of this article. Meanwhile, let’s explore some of the pros and cons of learning French, German, and Italian.
The worst way to learn the major tongues of opera is to study the librettos exclusively, as I did, without knowing the grammar and modern usage of the language. When I joined the Metropolitan Opera orchestra in the early Sixties, the foreign guest conductors spoke very little English. Every rehearsal began with an apology from a guest maestro, begging forgiveness for his bad English. But since tempo, dynamic, and articulation directions are usually in Italian, and most of our Met older musicians were multilingual refugees from World War II Europe, we English-speaking newcomers could always turn to our European stand partners for a quick translation. Still, for an American singer who is fresh out of conservatory, or a National Council competition winner, the foreign language problem is more complex.
In my case, I was mistaken to imagine that by immersing myself in the librettos of operas, I could somehow master Italian, German, and French. I knew a morsel of Russian, from my grandmother, but it was diluted with Yiddish, and the French I learned in a Brooklyn high school, and later, through a correspondence course in the Marine Corps, was on the plume-de-ma-tante level. I started listening intently to the singers onstage. I picked up a decent accent, but it was difficult to follow the text while fiddling and trying to follow the maestro on the podium and the singers onstage simultaneously.
Consequently, my first European Met tour was a linguistic disaster. In Germany, thanks to Richard Wagner, I could speak only of love and death, with a syntax and archaic vocabulary that had the natives choking on their bratwurst and beer. And thanks to the poetic librettos of Italian opera, my summer visit to Italy, as a tourist, had the natives grinning every time I opened my mouth.
A fish peddler in Pescara, for example, was weighing some mussels on a scale. I said, “Abbastanza!” Wagging his cupped hand at me, he smiled and said, “Basta! Basta!” (A Manhattan butcher slicing salami might respond similarly if a customer said “sufficient!” instead of “enough!”) When I asked an elderly Roman gentleman directions to a synagogue, he pointed east and shouted: “La giù! La giù!” My wife whispered in my ear, “How does he know we’re Jewish?” We never found the synagogue, but I did invest in a Berlitz phrase book and pocket dictionary at this point, neither of which, incidentally, contained la giu (“down that way”).
In Paris I fared no better. Despite my careful accent and a vast vocabulary culled from Massenet and Gounod librettos, every query I made to a native in French received a surly reply in English. Whenever I ordered a meal in a restaurant (peeking at my French pocket dining dictionary), the waiter would sneer and say “yes, sir,” then bring me a wine twice the price of what I had selected. Eventually I realized that when you argue with a manager or waiter in a foreign country, he always triumphs if you ordered in his native tongue. So the best strategy, I discovered, was to repeat everything in English when ordering meals and shopping—in the event of a billing dispute you have the linguistic advantage.
Now the budding opera singer is wondering, “Isn’t it enough to sing with a flawless pronunciation of the libretto? Why is it necessary to understand every word, as long as you have read the synopsis and know the plot of the opera (which is usually silly and unbelievable anyway)?” Yes, some superstars in the opera world can sing in a foreign tongue with a perfect accent and not know the language. A master diction coach, such as the Met’s Nico Castel, can even train Asian singers to overcome their “l” and “r” problems and render a near-perfect Schubert Lied or Bel Canto text.
The Met opera’s amazing children’s chorus is another example of singing with excellent pronunciation by rote alone. (My younger daughter spent five happy years there.) To hear these children, some so young they can barely tote the wooden swords in Carmen, you could swear they were fluent in the tongue of the opera. Similarly, some superstars can learn a role in Russian or Czech phonetically, gaining perfect diction by rote from a coach, but they would be linguistically helpless in the suburbs of Minsk or Prague. You might validly argue: Why should superstars waste their valuable time and energy struggling with the grammar and vocabulary of languages they may never have to use in the real world?
On the other hand, the bizarre event of a great singer getting a well-deserved standing ovation, yet mispronouncing the Italian libretto, occurred at Joan Sutherland’s Met debut in Lucia de Lammermoor. My Italian stand partner groaned and moaned with every Aussie-tainted vowel and elision. I wanted to grab him by the throat and throttle him. Not, mind you, because my second wife happened to be Australian, but because this diva sang the mad scene with such power and finely focused intonation, hitting every high note with ease, without scooping, that even the orchestra rose to its feet and joined the audience in the 10-minute standing ovation—with the lone exception of my stand partner, who sat slumped in his chair, still lamenting his beloved, mispronounced mother tongue.
Another problem involved in this bevy of examples: Even when the opera is sung in English for an American audience, the audience may not understand the words. (The Met’s new production of Tobias Picker’s An American Tragedy had English subtitles on the audience’s computers!) Singers will, by artistic license, or whatever you want to dub it, distort a vowel or consonant to suit an awkward range, express an emotion (like the contrived crack of a tenor’s high notes in a tragic aria), or simply for an easier projection of the word without straining their vocal cords. Similarly, crooners, pop, and country singers, never mouth the lyrics of a song like a high-school English teacher. “I love you” becomes “ah luv yew,” and if the artist is a folk singer from the deep South, or a blues crooner from the Bayou, forget it, Yankee. “Yo’all jes aint’a-nohow gonna git it!”
Now what about this belief that “the language of music is universal”? If, by this, people mean that even a native in the Amazon jungle will respond to a Brahms lullaby or a Sousa march, the cliché that “music soothes the savage breast” might apply here. Yet to assume that every musician and singer who graduates from a music conservatory is automatically fortified with musical terms in the four common languages of music is, I have found, erroneous. Old World European musicians have an advantage here, since they’re usually multilingual from childhood. (Of course, a polyglot is not necessarily a person of superior intelligence. I have known Central Europeans who were fluent in several tongues, but were morons in each of them!)
I recently had a young lady violinist, a graduate from a top New York music conservatory and a crackerjack fiddler, turn to me, in the middle of a Bel Canto opera, and ask, “What language are they singing in?” I have seen new colleagues marking symbols for con sordini and dampfer auf (mutes on!) that would have been ludicrous in our scores in the Old Met days. I am forever recommending they procure an inexpensive paperback dictionary of foreign musical terms, but am beginning to feel like an evangelist in the Belgian Congo.
To budding opera singers, my advice (based on 45 years in the Met pit and my own bumbling polyglot trials and errors) is as follows: If you are content singing in a church choir, or in an opera chorus of a company that doesn’t tour outside of the United States, study your librettos with a good diction coach, marry, have many pets and children, and enjoy domestic life in a linguistic vacuum.
If you intend to sing opera roles abroad, however, and you don’t want to appear a cretin when the maestro asks for something a bit more complicated than simply slower or faster, or softer or louder, or the choreographer asks you to move to your left or right or come nearer downstage, you must know the language. Arm yourself with a course in conversation. Read foreign newspapers with a dictionary at your side. Memorize basic phrases of politeness, the names of food and drink, directions, and the mundane chore of numbers, dates, time, etc. Chat with natives as much as possible. Ask questions. Read the local newspapers. Watch TV with subtitles. Better still, if you wind up with a comprimario contract in La Scala, Paris Opera, or Vienna, marry an Italian, a French person, or an Austrian. If that is not possible, then cohabit with one of these. At least you’ll be able to talk about more than just love and death.
