A tragic turn for librettos

We all know reading is declining and we all know that video and the Internet have a lot to do with the reasons why. So too does the closing of bookstores, along with the downsizing of publishers, magazines and newspapers. Obviously, if you give people less to read, they will read less. Now the literary predicament has hit opera, where we are also faced with more screens and less access to printed text.

Let's return, for a moment, to another time, when automobiles had proper fins and the newspaper arrived in the evening. If you wanted to listen to an opera recording, say, you put the record on the turntable. Included in the boxed set of LPs would be a large libretto. You listened while following the text, letting your imagination carry you away while creating the perfect "Norma" in your noggin. When attending live opera, you read up on the opera at least a little. If you were serious, you studied the libretto before you went.

The world has changed. Today, we slip the disc into the DVD player, then turn on the TV and adjust the video and audio settings. Next, we attend to the amplifier, making sure that it's properly connected to the player and that all the various speakers are in proper alignment. Then we're faced with the menu on the disc, from which we can choose the audio format (Honey, are you in the mood for PCM Stereo, DD 5.1 or DTS 5.1 tonight?), and finally, exhausted, we watch the opera.

The DVD, the most common format for new opera releases, will not include a libretto and, in some cases, even a synopsis, since subtitles are supplied. Some opera CDs no longer come with librettos. Downloading services such as iTunes are not in the text business.

And who bothers to read the libretto before, say, going to "Carmen" at the Music Center? Los Angeles Opera, like all companies, still provides the synopsis in the program, but the supertitles are good enough for most people. Selling the libretto for the evening's performance in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion lobby is not exactly what keeps the Opera Shop in business. With many new operas -- such as with David Henry Hwang's libretto to Howard Shore's "The Fly" -- the text is never published.

There are benefits to the dearth of printed words

Breaking the link between listener and language has caused a radical reshaping of our relationship to the art form. Without grounding in the language of opera, we tend to approach it more as a narrative experience than a poetic one. Contemporary operagoers expect from the lyric stage the same sort of immediate experience they have at the theater and cinema.