Two Examples
O In Leporello's aria at the beginning of Don Giovanni occurs the line Ma mi par che venga gente (But it seems to me that people are coming).
To begin with, we decided that Leporello must say something else. He is on guard outside the house where Don Giovanni is raping or trying to rape Donna Anna. Da Ponte's line suggests that a crowd of strangers are about to come on stage; actually, it will only be Don Giovanni pursued by Donna Anna and some time will elapse before the Commendatore enters. Our first attempt was
What was that? There's trouble brewing.
Spoken, che venga gente and there's trouble brewing sound more or less metrically equivalent, but the phrase is set to three eighth notes and two quarter notes, so that gente which, when spoken, is a trochee becomes a spondee. But brewing, because of the lack of consonants between the syllables, sounds distorted as a spondee, so we had to revise the line to
What was that? We're in for trouble,
2,) When Tamino approaches the doors of Sarastro's temple, a bodiless voice cries Zuriick!, strongly accentuating the second syllable. This looks easy to translate literally by Go Back! and, were the tempo a slow one, it could be. Unfortunately, the tempo indication is allegro assai and at that speed, the two English monosyllables sound like a nonsense disyallable geBACK. Another solution had to be found; ours was Beware!
Sometimes the translator is forced to depart from the original text because of differences in the sound and association between the original and its exact English equivalent. Take, for example, the simple pair, Ja and Nein, Si and No, Yes and No. In the Leporello-Giovanni duet Eh, via buffone which is sung allegro assai, Leporello's two stanza's are built around the use of no in the first and si in the second.
Ed io non burlo, ma voglio andar. No, no, padrone, v'andar vi dico. No! No! No!
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Non vo' resteer, si! Si! Si! Si!
Si, si, si, si, si, si, si, si, si, si!
In English as in Italian, one can sing rapidly no, no, no, no . . . but one cannot sing yes, yes, yes, yes . . . The opening lines of Tamino's first aria run
Dies Etwas kann ich zwar nicht nennen, Dock fiikl ich's kier wie Fewer brennen;
Soil die Empfindung JLiebe sein?
Ja, J a,
Die Liebe ist's allein.
The tempo this time is moderate so that it is physically possible to sing Yes, Yes, but Yes-Yes in our culture has a comic or at least unromantic association with impatience or boredom. Similarly, one cannot translate Komm, Komm which occurs in one of the choruses in the same opera as Come, Come, without making the audience laugh.
Another problem is that feminine rhymes which are the commonest kind in Italian and frequent in German, are not only much rarer in English, but most of the ones that do exist are comic rhymes. It is possible for a competent versifier to copy the original rhyme scheme but often at the cost of making the English sound like Gilbert and Sullivan. On rare occasions such as Leporello's Catalogue aria, the tendency of double rhymes to be funnier in English than in Italian can be an advantage but, in any tender or solemn scene, it is better to have no rhyme at all than a ridiculous one. The marble statue rebukes Don Giovanni in the churchyard scene with the couplet
Hibalde, audace,
Lascia'l morti in pace.
Here any rhyme in English will sound absurd.
Then, languages differ not only in their verbal forms, but also in their rhetorical traditions, so that what sounds perfectly natural in one language, can, when literally translated, sound embarrassing in another. All Italian libretti are full of polysyllabic interjections; such as Traditore! Scelerato! SconsigliatoI Sciugurato! SventuratoI etc., and these sound effective, even at moments of high emotion. But in the English language, aside from the fact that most of our interjections are one or two syllables long, they are seldom, if ever, used in serious situations and are mosdy employed in slanging matches between schoolboys or taxicab drivers. In serious situations we tend, I think, to make declarative statements; instead of shouting Traditoref (Vile seducer!) to shout You betrayed me!
Now and again the translator may feel that a change is necessary, not because the habits of two languages are different but because what the librettist wrote sounds too damn silly in any language. When Donna Anna, Donna Elvira, and Don Ottavio arrive at Don Giovanni's party in the finale of Act I, Donna Elvira sings
Bisogn' aver corraggio,
O cari' amici miei.
which is perfectly sensible, but Don Ottavio's reply is not.
L'amica dice benel
Corragio' aver conviene.
that is to say:
Our lady friend says wisely;
Some courage would do nicely.
Nor in the finale to Die Zauberflote when the Spirits see Pamina approaching distraught, can one allow them to say, as they do in German:
Where is she, then?
She is out of her senses.
With such alterations, no musician or musicologist is likely to quarrel. A more controversial matter is syllabification, for some purists consider the original syllabification and slurs to be as sacrosanct as the notes themselves. We believe, however, that there are occasions, at least in libretti written before 1850, when changes in syllabification are justifiable. In the days of Mozart and Rossini, the speed at which operas were expected to be turned out made any studied collaboration between librettist and composer impossible. The librettists produced his verses and the composer set them as best he could; he might ask for an extra aria but not for detailed revisions. The insistence shown by Verdi in his later years, by Wagner and by Strauss upon having a text which exactly matched their musical ideas was unknown. Mozart frequently spreads a syllable over two or more notes, and not in coloratura runs only. In many cases, his reason for doing so was, we believe, quite simple: his musical idea contained more notes than the verse he had been given contained syllables—just as, when he has not been given enough lines for his music, he repeats them.
Now it so happens that in English, on account of its vowels and its many monosyllabic words, there are fewer syllables which sing well and are intelligible when spread over several notes than there are in either Italian or German; English is, intrinsically, a more staccato tongue. The first stanza of the duet between Papageno and Pamina runs thus: