music & society
January No one attending a concert, listening to the radio or perusing a CD booklet can fail to be struck by the internationalism of art music. Composers from all corners of Europe, North and South America, Australasia, even occasionally eastern Asia and other regions, are all part of the standard art music repertoire.
However, one of the things that can give rise to charges against art music of elitism or exclusivity is the preponderance of foreign names and terminology, a natural corollary of multilingual cosmopolitanism (and in sharp contradistinction to the ubiquitous American or British English of pop). The foreignness of foreign composers' names is naturally unavoidable, but many titles of music works and other terms seem to have lingered inexplicably untranslated for decades and even centuries. Newcomers and detractors alike could be forgiven for drawing the conclusion that such nomenclature persists to exclude at worst, at best to confuse - reinforcing the prejudice that art music is primarily the domain of a cliquish band of illuminati.
There's no doubt that coteries of broadcasters, critics, composers and music industry bigwigs do exist (and thrive - neoliberal capitalism depends on economic, political and cultural oligarchies); and ironically, whilst there is a concerted effort by the media industry to draw new listeners into 'classical' music (as they call it) - as an underexploited market, naturally - once there, those listener-consumers inevitably find themselves in a strange world where the flowery, affected and often vacuous language of music journalists presupposes the sovereignty of the performer, and the enjoyment of art music becomes subjugated to an endless discussion of the finest nuances of supposedly competing interpretations of musical works. But such an arrangement is almost tailor-made for the business of selling CDs and concert tickets.
One notable way in which this rarefication is perpetuated is through the abundant use of foreign titles where there is no earthly reason that they should not be translated into the local language and always used in translation. Why should (for example) English-speaking audiences be expected to remember (and pronounce) Schubert's Schwanengesang or Milhaud's Le Boeuf sur le Toit, or French-only speakers Ives's Three Places in New England or Holst's Egdon Heath?
Naturally, when a composer gives a work a title that is not his or her first language, then that language should (with few exceptions) always be used by speakers of any language, out of courtesy and to protect artistic integrity - the title being an important aspect of the work, having been chosen by the composer (admittedly sometimes preciously) for a particular effect or association.
But when, for example, a German composer (born or adopted) gives a German title, then it should be translated into English for English-speaking audiences, French for French speakers, and so on - so that the title has the same effect and meaning as it does for the composers' same-language compatriots. Ravel's La Valse is not La Valse to French audiences, it is (in effect) The Waltz. There's no element of 'foreignness' whatsoever; therefore, assuming the universality of art, there should be none for speakers of other languages.
A second effect of this unnecessary and bogus use of untranslated titles is that of very often making an ass of anyone lacking multilingual prowess (the huge majority of Americans, British, Australians, French, Italians etc) attempting to render a phrase or even a word in the original language. With few honourable exceptions, broadcasters are wont to make a hash of French, German, and especially Russian and other east European names, rendering them often unrecognisable to native speakers.
In fact, the case of Russian underlines the spuriousness of the whole business. There seems to be a historical favouritism directed towards French, German, Italian, Spanish and English: titles (aside obviously from those that are proper names) in other more 'exotic' languages, Czech, Hungarian or Finnish are almost never given in the original language (Smetana's Má Vlast being a lonely and inexplicable exception). The Russian language is another perfect case in point: Chaikovsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich are three of the world's most performed and recorded composers, but how many of their original Russian titles are ever heard or written (even in transliteration) outside Russia (and Ukraine and Belarus)? The answer is zero. Why?
Looking from a different angle, Telos, publishers of a new CD of Polish songs reviewed in this month's (March 2010) Gramophone, receive short shrift from the reviewer for their "basic failure of communication" in omitting to provide translations of the texts: "companies who aim at an export market are ill-advised to neglect this essential part of their presentation". Yet the same review lists one of the recording's titles simply (and obviously unknowingly) as "Aus 12 Mazurkas für Singstimme und Klavier". The reader is expected to accept the untranslated German, but the reviewer wants the Polish translated.
Surely, if this linguistic pluralism is not spurious, all languages should be equally treated. Or might it be that the middle-class cliques who dominate art music journalism and the media in general know no Russian or Czech or Hungarian, but most certainly do have a smattering of one or two of the historically dominant international languages, picked up at university or perhaps from frequent trips to western Europe (to second or third homes, even), and, in the style of many well-to-do opera-goers, love to show the world how cosmopolitan they are?
Musoc.org has listed below some of the commonest titles that are regularly left untranslated for English speakers for no apparent reason, in radio listings, CD booklets and concert programmes; in some instances an English translation is bizarrely almost never heard or seen (Debussy's La Mer or Saint-Saëns's Danse Macabre, for example). This list is representative, and does not include subtitles, nicknames or historical mistranslations, nor does it recommend pronunciations; these related issues will all be dealt with later.
Appropriate translations have been given alongside the original titles. These cannot of course be enforced, but the English-speaking art music world wo do well to follow them if they wish to try to dispel charges of elitism.
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