Think, as Jonathan Dean does, of opera as a tripod, with each leg vital to the success of the production. Lose one, and the opera topples.
There’s opera as a visual experience. Send in the set, costume and lighting designers.
There’s opera as an auditory experience. Cue the musicians, the conductor and the singers.
And there’s opera as great story and compelling narrative. Enter Jonathan Dean, who writes the English translation captions that accompany many Seattle Opera productions and makes them accessible to everyone.
It’s not enough to simply know what the opera’s about; today we want to follow the story word for word, like watching a foreign movie with subtitles. That’s where Dean’s titles come in. They are concise and direct, tell the story, are sometimes funny and are perfectly timed to the music and the story, adding a luster and depth to Mozart, or Wagner, or Puccini, that we might otherwise miss.
His translations, projected as titles above the opera house stage, add immeasurably to the audience’s understanding and enjoyment of opera, be it a dark tragedy or a lighthearted lark such as the company’s production of Rossini’s “The Italian Girl in Algiers” that opens Saturday.
This comic romp is a showcase for some bravura singing in the much-loved bel canto style (beautiful singing) of Italian opera, and Seattle Opera plays it in high style with an acclaimed, eye-popping design created by Santa Fe Opera and a sparkling cast that includes Stephanie Blythe, a Metropolitan Opera star who has sung in “The Ring” in Seattle and sang Carmen here in 2004.
Director Chris Alexander, an opera hit maker here (“Falstaff,” “Ariadne auf Naxos,” “Tales of Hoffmann” and “Die Fledermaus”) has twice won a Seattle Opera “Artist of the Year” award.
After a decade and some 50 operas (“I’ve lost count,” he says), Dean is an acknowledged master at condensing and capturing the essence of an opera text into titles that can be quickly read, be the opera in German, Italian, French or even English. Audiences and critics praise his work.
Seattle Opera was a pioneer in the use of English captions, and making opera accessible has helped make Seattle one of the hottest opera-going cities in the country. Yet for something so seemingly indispensable, the popularity of projected captions or “supratitles,” once frowned on by opera purists, is relatively new.
It all started in a Canadian Opera Company production of Strauss’ “Elektra” in 1983. Speight Jenkins, the new general director of Seattle Opera, was at that performance and quickly realized that projected translations, like subtitles in a foreign movie, were the future, Dean said in a recent interview.
A year later, Seattle Opera introduced them in a production of “Tannhauser.” Back then, captions were done with slides, a costly and bulky operation; think hundreds and hundreds of slides clicking through multiple carousels. Computers came to the rescue with their speed and flexibility, and with Power Point, the technical side of the job got a lot easier.
Dean, who has been with Seattle Opera since 1995, brings an impressive background to the job, a sort of opera renaissance man. He knows music, is fluent in Italian, French and German, is passionate about opera and is a gifted teacher. He wears many hats with Seattle Opera (his official title is education artistic administrator), but for opera fans, his ability to tell the opera’s story is where the rubber meets the road.
Each opera poses its own translation challenges, from finding just the right English translation of an Italian word, to delivering a comic punch line for maximum laughs, to understanding the director’s vision of the production.
Dean begins with the written text, translating every word “to really understand every utterance, the text and the music.” He writes the English captions and then figures out exactly where they go in the performance, making notations on the opera score. This is the playbook for the projectionist, another skilled professional.
“It’s a little bit like playing a video game,” Dean said.
Timing of the captions is critical. Audiences will instinctively look up when a new musical phrase begins; they want to quickly see what’s been sung, or said, then turn back to the stage. Sometimes the same words are sung over and over again – it happens in opera – and Dean’s captions must convey that without looking silly.
Each opera brings its own challenges. “The Italian Girl in Algiers” is a comic opera. “The power of this opera is in the music,” Dean said. “This is the essence of bel canto … and you have to tell the audience to just relax and listen to the singing.”
Rozarii Lynch photo
Jonathan Dean with projection equipment in the title booth. Dean is responsible for the supratitles for Seattle Opera.
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