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