German would carry the day at any first-class assembly. The reason lies in the prestige of Italian opera. Englishmen care little in what language it is performed, so they can have their favourite singers. It is music—it is a fine voice that the public flock to hear; and so the soprano’s notes soar clear and bird-like, and the tenor’s voice attains the perfection of a musical instrument, they can shrug their shoulders both at the sentiments and the phraseology. Insipid verses uttered in the fervour of operatic rapture by a Patti or a Piccolomini, are more palatable to the ear than the finest drama indifferently performed; and a Lablache has moved millions by libretto-twaddle, which, stripped of its music, would not have been tolerated at the lowest theatres.
But it must not be supposed that the libretto is without supporters. There are not wanting persons who consider it as essential to the proper enjoyment of an opera as the opera-glass itself. While Pope, Dryden, Goldsmith, and others lie in honourable retirement on the shelf (as far as the general public is concerned), the “Traviata” has been catering high and low for maintenance and applause—lying upon the piano of the innocent girl—taking a borrowed lustre from the fascinating music with which it is associated, and rivalling even the “Idylls of the King” in sale and reputation. Few works at Mudie’s have received more favour than this trashy and meretricious book. Few fashionable novels—happily defunct at the end of the season—have been more gladly welcomed, or more calmly tolerated; and the libretto-system has only escaped some very rough handling, out of consideration for the music with which it is eternally wedded.
We have heard of persons who maintain that a knowledge of Latin and French is equivalent to a knowledge of Italian, and that by their joint means an opera may be thoroughly mastered without the aid of a translation. We confess such a feat appears to us Herculean. We do not envy the student who attempts it. He will weave himself a web that will inevitably imprison his faculties during the whole performance of the opera, and go home minus the music. He will lose himself in a fable of his own invention, that will be at loggerheads with the stage-business—with the printed Italian—and with the authorised English translation. He will be placed in the position of the school-boy between two stools, and find neither of them available. Lion of the pit, and dandy of the amphitheatre! that book thou holdest to thy heart of hearts, in blissful reminiscence of thy opera-treats—that book thou porest over in thy solitude, calling to mind the voices that warbled to thee in the past, the dear incomprehensible ditties—that book, with all its English and Italian, is as great a sham as thou thyself art, if thou pretendest to learn aught from its perusal! The opera-book, quotha! It is a snare and an imposition. It is a fraudulent bankrupt’s ledger with faults on both sides. It is English in a fix, and Italian in a passion. It is a conglomeration of Alfred Bunnism and Italian sentimentality, which those who have an attachment for Italian opera had better leave in the hands of the publisher, or consign to the care of the housemaid for domestic purposes.
Witness these examples from the most brilliant of Verdi’s operas, the far-famed “Traviata.” It is amusing to see how complacently the translator of “Dumas diluted,” has blundered his way through the story of the “Dame aux Camélias,” and made nonsense of a very intelligible piece of immorality. Perhaps it is unfair in us to blame him for thus covering the impurity with so dense a garment. But where we do blame him, and when we feel we have a right to blame him, is in the utterly reckless manner with which he throws about sentences that have hardly any connection with the sentences they pretend to illustrate.
In the very first line of the “Traviata,” edited and “translated,” as we are rather pompously informed, by Manfredo Maggioni, we have the following error.
The chorus of guests assembled at Violetta’s house is made to sing:
“Dell invito trascorsa è già l’ora;
Voi tardaste.”
(The hour of invitation has already passed;
You dallied.)
—two distinct assertions which the editor has thus translated:
“Is this the hour appointed?
What causes this delay?”
a double interrogation by no means satisfactory.
Turn to scene 3rd in the same act, when the tenor and soprano are preparing for their celebrated duet.
Gaston breaks in upon them with the query, “Che diavol fate?” (What the devil are you doing?) mildly rendered into “What are you doing there?” and is assured by the lovers that they are merely “saying follies”—a miserable translation of “si follegiava” (we were fooling)—which causes the intruder to exclaim:
“Ah! ah! stà ben;—restate.”
(Ah! ah! tis well;—remain.)
A sentence thus atrociously rendered:
“Ah! ah! very well;—go on.”
—a contradiction as well as an absurdity, and sufficient of itself to condemn the book.
It is pitiable to see the manner in which such operas as the “Huguenots,” the “Barber of Seville,” the “Sonnambula,” and others are drugged for the English market. Scarcely an opera but has some fault or other in every paragraph, and certainly no opera, whether translated from the French, German, or Italian, or translated three-deep from all of them, but has some absurdity in every page. The worst translated operas are those of Verdi; the best the five-act tragedies of Meyerbeer. We have less fault to find with the “literature” of Bellini than with that of any of the other masters; and the translations of Rossini’s operas are better than those of Donizetti. With regard to Mozart, his story has often to pass through four hands, and “Don Giovanni,” after being translated from the French to the German (for the convenience of the composer), and again from the German to the Italian, by a different hand, for the convenience of the Italian, has to undergo the process of being translated from that language into English for the benefit of a London audience.
