Chris Merritt – Operatic Tenor

Born: September 27, 1952
American Tenor

INTERVIEW

Chris Merritt, what’s the difference between singing the big act for aria in French and Italian, the difference between singing omuto azille and singing the French version?

I think that it’s the inherent difference between French and Italian themselves. You find in the translations, of course, an impossibility to translate anything directly because there are idiomatic phrases that just don’t translate from one language to another and  I feel very sorry indeed for translators who have to search for something to fit the same mood of a sentence or a phrase that is being said and have to put it to a certain rhythm of music at the same time in a different language than what it was composed.
As a singer, we have constantly the salieri fight, what comes first, the music or the word. I am of the school that the word comes first and therefore the music is composed to reflect the emotion of what is being said. And therefore I find myself, the French version, more homogenous to portray just from a simple lyrical standpoint. It seems to be almost like an old, forgotten, but very comfortable pair of shoes when you put them on, after one has sung it, especially in Italian. Italian has quite a bit of dramatic thrust just inherent in the language itself.
The French have a great tradition for lyricism in their plays, in their literature. The lyrical aesthetic beauty of the language is very, very particular to that particular language, to the particular sound of the language. And that really has a lot to do with what it feels like to sing this aria, for example, Omutu Azil which is the translation in Italian from Asil Eraditerra.
The French comes out as being much more, I don’t want to use the word delicate because it’s not delicate. don’t think that the music allows it to be delicate, but it feels like you’re doing something that was written for a cause, for a reason. When you sing or when I sing the Italian version, I feel like I’m singing something that has been changed, something that does not belong to the music. And that’s not a reflection on my part of the translators. They did the best they could. But like I said back at the beginning, it’s a very hard job indeed for anybody to translate something for music.