Sogni di una notte di mezza estate: an experiment with surtitles

The idea of translating an audiovisual performance through written text is rather old. The first experiments were made with silent films. The so called “intertitles” or “title cards”, were portions of film, containing only text, that appeared between scenes (rather than on scenes, as happens with modern subtitles) (Díaz Cintas 2007: 26).
Mostly, they were printed with white characters on a black background, (ibid.) at times with decorative frames. Intertitles died soon with the arrival of sound films; a set of different translating devices was then invented, before reaching the actual twofold system, dubbing vs. subtitling. Intertitles are now part of the past, together with silent films.
It took time, however, for these means of audiovisual translation to approach the rather conservative world of opera.
The issue of language has always been strong in opera. Since it was born in seventeenth-century Tuscany, its original language was Italian (Desblache 2013: 12), and often theatre companies, travelled across Europe, spreading the operas in their native language, performing in front of foreign audiences. This did not end in the seventeenth century however.

Referring to Faust, and the high society of the 1870s in New York, Edith Wharton could still write in 1920 that "an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences” (Wharton 2010: 3, in Desblache 2013: 14)

Because of travelling companies, but also because of the intrinsic difficulty of translating music, operas tended to be sung in the original language, or contain more than one language; "[i]n the past, the choice of language that a work was performed in was dependent on cultural norms". (Chalmers 2013: 50) It was therefore paramount to make this "musical Babel" somehow understandable to monolingual audiences.

The history of opera has seen many aids to understanding the texts during performance: once upon a time, listeners were able to read the words and (if in a language not their own) a parallel translation that conveyed not only the sense but also, on occasion, some of the poetry of the original as well. [...] When it was decided to dim the lights in the theatre this support solution was no longer a practical option, but for a long time the custom of reading the text and translation in real time survived in the concert hall, with the attendant risk of intrusive noise as hundreds of pages were turned simultaneously. (Ibid.)

The next solution were surtitles. They were born much later, although scholars disagree on the exact time and place of the first instance: according to Griesel, "surtitling on theatre stage exists since the 1980s and was first used in Scandinavia." (2009: 120)
However, the first application of surtitles to opera was in January 1983, in Toronto, according to Díaz Cintas and Remael (2007: 25). Jonathan Burton, has a different opinion, and claims that the first surtitled opera was performed in Beijing in 1983, "although there are reports of live surtitling (in Danish) in Copenhagen before this date" (2010: 180). Burton acknowledges that the first opera with English surtitles was that of Toronto, but claims that it happened in 1984, not 1983, as reported by Díaz Cintas.
It is not in the interest of this work to find out which was the very first instance of live surtitles. What is important, is that it happened in the early '80s, and its use expanded in the following decades.

Academic interest came much later. There is no trace of studies on audiovisual translation before the '50s; the first essay on subtitling was Le sous-titrage de films by Simon Laks, published in 1957. Interest rose mostly in the '80s, with several conferences and books. Díaz Cintas defined the 1990s as "AVT's golden age" (2009: 3). Surtitles received a little attention in some more comprehensive works, such as Ivarsson and Carroll's Subtitling (1998) since the late '90s. Only in recent years, however, extensive works on opera surtitles have been published, such as the volume Music, Text and Translation by Helen Julia Minors (2013), which dedicates one of the three section of the book to opera surtitles. Audiovisual translation is an expanding sector, and studies on surtitles will probably become more and more important in the following years.