I agree with all the limitations that you outlined, and yet, until
something better, more in sync with the stage action, comes along, we
should live with surtitles and improve them.  The screen and lettering
used for the "L'Heure espagnole" surtitles appeared to be computer
generated text rather than slides.  The letters were in yellowish-green on
black, extremely clear and many more words at a time than with the standard
slide titles.  A harbinger of things to come? The biggest problems are the
out-of-sync titles that sometimes make a mockery of the moment, but as we
learn more about how to use the technique effectively, these kinds of blips
will pass.

You quote ENO director David Pountney as saying

a) Opera is a synthesis of music, text, acton and image.  Surtitles removes
one of these elements.

How can the addition of something, i.e., understandable text, remove
something from this list? Moreover, you charge today's audiences as
being unprepared and superficial.  I wonder whether in the past it was
much better.  With Opera (capital O) being very "in" among the social
elite, attendance was far more a social event than a true artistic
appreciation.  You have a generationof movie and stage charicature of the
boorish businessman being dragged to the opera by his social climber wife.
But even my parents' and their friends who loved opera, did so for the
music and the staging.  They often had very little idea of what was going
on from moment to moment.  "It's the music that counts," they would tell
me when I asked about plot or pointed out some ludicrous motivations.

The entry of the surtitles puts the plot back in much more strongly
than ever before and I would suggest that today's opera audience is much
more knowledgeable -- as a whole -- than ever before.  Of course, to the
afficianodo, who spends much more time with this art than the general
audience, and who has read and reread the libretto almost to the point of
memorizing it, who hangs upon every nuance and subtlety of interpretation
so that it can be compared in endless discussion against all other
interpretations -- i.e., the kind of folks who populate this list -- to
him or her the surtitles will never do.

But I don't expect this kind of devotion from the general audience.  And
if the yuppies keep coming back again and again, there must be a reason.

Finally let me pick up on the point of lack of inflection in the printed
surtitle.  You write:

A most crass example ...  for a most inappropriate surtitle might be the
magnificent opening, in Philip II's bedchamber in Don Carlos, where, after
the beautiful cello introduction, you hear enunciated as no surtitle can
illustrate "Ella giammai m'amo ..." To read the surtitle "She never loved
me..." is flat and cold and too ludicrous to contemplate.  Pountney's
example was Noel Coward's "Englishmen detest a siesta" likely to be
rendered as "Englishmen do not like afternoon naps".

Same as in subtitled movies, you hear the inflection as you read the word.
That's why we're in the audience - to hear and see.  The titles are just an
aide to understanding what we hear.  I'd rather know he's saying "she never
loved me" than be clueless as to what's hapening in this pyschologically
gripping scene.  The Noel Coward example is unfair - no kinds of verbal
jinks like this survive translations, though again, even the literal
translation may help the unfamiliar listener if there's more to it than
just a clever line.

Of course, opera composers have only themselves to blame for some
ludicrous lines.  Even without Anna Russell to point it out, Siegfried's
"Das ist kein Mann" (that is no man) upon beholding the sleeping
Brunnhilde, is enough to cause the sides of one's mouth to twitch.  And
sometimes, indeed, a clear translation helps to cut through Wagner's
convoluted alliterative verbosity (whew) so that we can get to the
essential drama and psychological tensions that are the real payoff for
us with the music.

Eric  Kisch
Pragmatist