Louisiana presents an interesting problem when it comes to neologisms. There are cultural events that are well known with titles in English, but what does one refer to these as in French when everyone already understands English? For example, Super Sunday just passed in New Orleans. This festival is one of Mardi Gras Indians’, where they parade through the Central City neighborhood, but what does one call this? “Le Super Sunday” is clear, yet it’s English. “Le Super Dimanche” is pretty much French, but it’s the French of France. “Le Dimanche Magnifique” could work, it’s local, but the signification isn’t completely the same. In a country where English is a foreign language, this problem would be fixed by considering whether the name is so strong that it’ll be recognized without being translated or whether the name requires a translation in order to be understood. In Louisiana, every single person will recognize it without translating because English is the dominant language.
Maybe an example that’s even more difficult is “le second line,” or “la deuxième affilée.” This is a traditional parade in New Orleans and, at the same time, a the title is a compound noun that doesn’t clearly denote what it means, but nearly every that lives in the city will understand it in English. So, should it be left in English or changed into French? How would this change ever happen if no one truly needs to find a French version of the word in order to understand it? I don’t have the answers to these questions but I suppose that this is one of the reasons that words like “drive,” “peanut-beurre,” and “gone” came about in Louisiana French.
In any case, I’d like to leave y’all with these videos of Super Sunday.. or Dimanche Magnifique.. whatever.
I went to the New Orleans Opera to see The Barber of Seville this past fall and one thing in particular struck me: we sang the national anthem before the performance began.
I’ve never been to the New Orleans Opera, in fact I’ve only been to The Met once and the San Francisco Opera once, even though I’ve seen over a hundred operas on video. (They’re just too damn expensive for my poor soul and I’d rather dish out the money only if it’s a new opera, a rare creature these days.) At the other two performances, the national anthem was not played, though, and I assume it normally isn’t. I don’t know why, but it struck me as a bit odd to use it for such a European art form. I mean, we were all there to see an Italian opera. Nationalism is nothing new to opera, but I don’t think it’s ever been done in this way. It usually involves developing a style distinct from that of the operas composed in other countries, or simply using the language of one’s own country.
This might not be obvious to people who don’t listen to opera, but it was historically not composed in one’s native language. Italians had such a stranglehold on the form for so long that Mozart, for instance, wrote most of his operas to Italian language librettos, even if they were premiered in Vienna. It makes me wonder what audiences did to cope back then. Today, if you go to see an opera, you’ll be given supertitles somewhere so you can still understand what the singers are saying but I don’t think this technology existed in the 18th and 19th centuries.
I had only the vaguest idea of what the opera was about. But listening to her uncannily sumptuous singing, I was overcome with indefinable feelings of longing, sadness, bliss and loss.
Before supertitles, people could enjoy opera purely for the music. Maybe this is part of the reason composers always get top billing in operas while the librettists are often so overlooked that only hardcore fans even know who they are. By contrast, musicals often give equal billing to the composer and the the writer (just look at Rodgers and Hammerstein or even teams that put together psuedo-musicals like Arthur and Sullivan). The difference between musicals and operas here is musicals are usually adapted to the language of their audience. Les Misérables was originally in French but it’s known in England and the US in English. In fact, it’s known in a number of languages as is made obvious by this special performance:
To my understanding, translation of operas is extremely rare, although The Met has begun doing it for works like Mozart’s The Magic Flute. The difficulty lies in how intertwined the words and music become in opera, as attested to in the linked to New York Times article. Translations of writing are difficult enough, let alone singing. There’s also the issue of how absurdly conservative opera audiences are (attested by the fact that there are many many opera houses who put on season after season of works all dated before 1900).
The extent to which this is about nationalism might be questionable, though. The premier of Wagner’s Lohengrin in Italy was actually performed in Italian, for instance. Of all people, Wagner, the pillar and effective founder of German opera, was performed in Italian while he was still alive. I’m fairly certain that he approved and wanted this to happen more often, too. I can’t find it now but I recall a tweet by @CosimaWagner that claimed Wagner expected his operas to be translated. Yet, Wagner was about as nationalistic as composers come.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I think my whole point is that this is simply an unusual way of asserting one’s nationality. I understand it for baseball games, it would even make sense to me if they were performing an American opera, but it’s just an unusual coupling with Rossini. Although this wouldn’t be the first time the United States National Anthem has found its way into an opera. I’ll leave you with American music in Italian by Giacomo Puccini, sung beautifully by a Swede:
English
Français
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