Perfido! Briccone! Scellerato!

The !*&%(^ supertitles* aren’t done yet! Every year I say I’m going to write them in the spring when things are calm. But the spring passes, and summer shifts into high gear, and somehow the calm period never comes. There no reason on earth why I put them off this long, but I did. Grrrrr.

Giovanni contains more colorful Italian insults than almost any other opera I can think of. It’s a particular challenge to find good equivalents for its long list of epithets. The English language (or at least the portion that has come down to us here in the 21st century) seems to have a paucity of strong, non-vulgar, non-comical insults.

*Supertitles are the English translations that appear above the stage in most opera performances. Some people hate them, most love them. The downside is that they split your attention between the real people onstage and the screen above the stage. The payoff is that they exponentially enrich our understanding of the drama.