The curtain should have fallen long ago on the debate over opera supertitles. No one’s forced to gaze above the stage, so why not let others look where they will? But they came up again at last Saturday’s Lyric Opera seminar on A Wedding, when New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini asked if we’ll ever have an American opera without the projected cheat sheets. Lyric general manager William Mason replied that “the audience wants and appreciates those titles”—and got a round of applause fit for a diva.
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The symposium, held at the Chicago Cultural Center, offered a mostly geriatric crowd an opportunity to gawk at an equally geriatric panel, including director Robert Altman, composer William Bolcom, and librettist Arnold Weinstein. (Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the U.S.S. Enterprise, in his guise as the merely middle-aged conductor Dennis Russell Davies, was there too.) It also offered an opportunity to see Lyric’s elusive artistic director, Matthew Epstein, in action. While Mason is the genial public face of the Lyric, Epstein has been the company’s behind-the-scenes powerhouse. A former A-list vocal agent and a consultant to the Lyric before he joined its staff in 1999, he’s one of the most influential people in the opera world and considered a casting genius. He hasn’t consented to a solo interview with the press since the New York papers reported more than a decade ago on everything from his HIV status to grumblings about a potential conflict of interest between his casting and agent roles. But he can be spotted at Lyric performances, conducting with an open palm from his aisle seat and rewarding the best work with a sharp bark of “Bravo!” On Saturday it was Epstein who, in another response to the supertitle complaint, pointed out that not everybody can sit in the first eight rows. “In our 3,800-seat theater,” Epstein said, “they’re necessary.”
Meanwhile, ambitions at the Lyric are large. “Overriding everything,” Mason told the crowd, “is the desire to increase the repertoire so 50 years from now there will a body of American work produced in the opera houses of the world.” According to Epstein, “Our work is not complete until the works of Bill Bolcom become standard repertoire.”
