I recently got into a Facebook discussion about the relative merits of opera productions in English and the use of those big screens with subtitles, or surtitles as I’m told they’re called. Mind you, I’m no opera aficionado. I’ve seen two productions in the past twelve months, which might be a record for me. So clearly I’m not an expert.
But, while both performances I saw had many excellent and appealing qualities, what struck me both times was how distracting I found it to have all the words—the libretto—up there on stage, flashed across a screen.
According to my friends on Facebook, there is good reason to read along with an opera, especially if the plot is tricky or the concepts being explored are intellectually nuanced. Fair enough. And I do realize that if the words on the screen bother me I can just close my eyes! But it felt like a massive intrusion, more annoying even than the constant streaming news ticker on so many TV shows, which used to be only for emergencies or actual breaking news, but will now fill me in 24/7 on the latest diet trends and celebrity gossip, whether I like it or not.
The TV thing is bad enough, but I can turn the TV off any time and be done with it. When I walk into a theater, I want a different experience than that. I want the magic, the incomparable enchantment, of living breathing human beings creating art in front of my eyes. And come to think of it, I want something very like that experience in church, too.
I’m not a Luddite—I spend large portions of my day in front of screens, emailing and texting and Googling my hours away. That is probably why I balk at screens invading certain places—places that I consider sacred, like church, but also places that have a near-sacred function, like art museums and theaters. I’m not saying screens are never appropriate there, I’m simply saying that we ought to resist a too-easy acceptance of them.
I go to theater and concerts for an experience out of time, where the normal rush and clatter of daily life subsides and something like a taste of eternity descends, wrapping me in its own rhythms and transporting me outside my usual constrained and constraining patterns of thought. That can happen when I’m caught up in reading a great book, too, but somehow that’s not the kind of reading that occurs on those surtitle screens, is it?
It’s possible that I’m falling into a ridiculous Romantic fallacy here, but I clearly remember the two or three opera performances I saw as a child. They were sung in Italian or some other language totally foreign to me, and there were no surtitles in sight. But I would read the synopsis and then, when the lights went down, I would simply swoon with the passion and glory of it all. Did I really need to understand the literal meaning of the words to know the feelings being expressed by Carmen or La Boheme? Of course not.
Even as a musical ignoramus, I know that music can tell stories quite well without any accompanying words at all. In the opera I saw this summer, for instance, there was so much emotion in the music and in the staging, so many arresting and touching images, that I found myself yearning for fewer words altogether, whether flashed up onto a screen or not.
It is not only over-reliance on technology that worries me, but the rampant literalism that has encroached on so many areas of our culture. At the risk of sounding anti-intellectual, sometimes I wish that in both art and religion we would stop dissecting everything so carefully, parsing it all so precisely.
As a writer and preacher I rely on the power of words, but as a priest I sometimes have to be reminded that music, gesture, and ritual are just as important--arguably even more important--to the experience of worship. It is possible to talk all the mystery away, and when the mystery is gone, so too is our experience of sacredness, prayerfulness, and awe.
The Rev. Pamela Dolan serves as rector of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Town and Country. Her Civil Relgion blog is "AN INQUIRING STRANGER • Posts from an Episcopal priest."
