Read Any Good Operas Lately?

Behind one of three panel-concealed openings above stage right at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, about where the box seats should be, sits Peter Somogyi. It is here, in a cramped space surrounded by stands holding the show’s musical score and cue sheets, that Somogyi, with expert timing and infinite patience, quietly calls the cues that enable less multilingual L.A. Opera devotees to follow just what the heck all those singers below are caterwauling on about.

Somogyi is the guy behind the opera’s supertitles: those helpful little sentences that appear on a small screen over the stage, translating the lyrics. (They’re like subtitles in foreign movies, only posted above the action, hence “supertitles.”) At the final dress rehearsal for the opera’s recent production of “Madama Butterfly,” for example, Somogyi must follow along simultaneously with the conductor, orchestra, his own cue sheet and the score (he has sufficient understanding of French, German and Italian to cue an opera based solely upon its score), as well as keep an eye on the stage and the small screen above it. His steady stream of “Fade up . . . Go . . . Fade in . . . Go . . . Cut . . . Go” is relayed, via headset, to the lighting booth technician who will jab at a keyboard space bar as many as 1,100 times during a show, per Somogyi’s cues.

Although the process is computerized, due to the nature of live performance (and temperament of opera singers), the timing is not. “There are some challenging performers who will often miss lines, and you have to be right there to cover their mistakes,” Somogyi says. “It’s a real art, especially the comedy, where you don’t want to anticipate the joke [with the translation] before it’s actually done on the stage.”

Somogyi, 39, a soft-spoken, fast-moving fellow with an unflappable demeanor, has been doing this sort of thing “basically since the inception of titles in 1984, at the San Francisco Opera, and in L.A. for the last 10 years.” While it severely enhances his job security that few can do what he does (as Somogyi modestly points out, if he gets hit by a truck one morning, that evening’s opera will have no supertitles), he is training an apprentice . . . just, God forbid, in case.

Despite upward of 500 to 1,100 lines of dialogue (even the English operas are given supertitle treatment), the luminous text is by no means a complete translation of everything sung. “They’re sound bites,” admits Somogyi. “Putting up all the words would be a real speed-reading exercise for the audience. We give them a sketch of the story. That’s all the audience really needs to figure out what’s going on.”

With such translations for “Madama Butterfly” as “I am consumed with the fever of sudden desire” and “The gods of Japan are lazy and fat,” perhaps it’s best that not all of the text is translated after all.