Abstract
Despite the significant presence of multilingualism in both opera production and reception as well as in the context of opera translation, the coexistence of different languages in the world of opera has only sporadically received any research attention, either from musicologists or translation scholars. After a brief discussion of the problematic language issue in the history of opera, this article will examine the multilingualism which marks the genesis of opera texts and many opera productions. Next, it will present different types of multilingualism in opera pieces, with examples of each type. Finally, it will study the relationship between translation and multilingual operas from different standpoints, including a brief analysis of the plurilingual reception context often created by the various translation modalities applied to opera works. A descriptive and contextual approach will mainly be used in this study, which aims to do justice to the presence of multilingualism in the opera house, in both source and target contexts, as well as to encourage further research on this topic within Translation Studies.
Highlights
For historical and artistic reasons, multilingualism has had a significant presence in both opera production and reception as well as in the context of opera translation
A descriptive and contextual approach will help us observe this phenomenon in its various forms and functions, and the best way to start is by briefly considering the thorny language issue in musical drama
The musical drama works which were provided as examples of multilingualism in section 3 can be studied in relation to translation from two different standpoints at a textual level, depending on whether we consider the role of translation in multilingual opera texts before or after they have been created
Summary
Opera is musical drama, which means that “[m]usic, performance and verbal text all collaborate in the creation of meaning. In Britain, for instance, audiences generally rejected operas sung in English throughout the 18th and 19th centuries and during Queen Victoria’s reign works originally composed in French, German, Russian or English had to be turned into Italian in order to be performed at Covent. 88), is a good example of the debates sparked by the question of language in relation to opera, which have continued to the present day Other languages, such as German, English, Czech and Russian, gradually joined Italian and French in European opera houses throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries According to Desblache (2007), paradoxically for a genre steeped in tradition and often criticised for its highbrow focus, opera is the only artistic form which carries its repertoire in Italian, French, German, Russian and a few other languages, making multilingualism today more visible than in any other creative strand. According to Desblache (2007), paradoxically for a genre steeped in tradition and often criticised for its highbrow focus, opera is the only artistic form which carries its repertoire in Italian, French, German, Russian and a few other languages, making multilingualism today more visible than in any other creative strand. (p. 161)
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