I’ve been going to opera for thirty years. I’ve seen the art form struggle with its reputation as elitist, inaccessible, stuffy. Companies bend over backwards trying to make opera “cool” with modern dress productions or EDM remixes of Verdi.

But the single most important accessibility innovation in opera history? A screen with text on it.

Supertitles, those projected translations above the stage, completely changed who can enjoy opera. And yet they’re still controversial in some circles. Let me tell you why that’s absurd.

The Old Way Was Genuinely Exclusionary

Before supertitles became standard in the 1980s, you had two options for understanding opera in a foreign language. You could study the libretto beforehand (and hope you remembered it in the dark while watching the stage), or you could be fluent in Italian, German, French, Russian, and Czech.

Guess who that excluded? Almost everyone.

I remember older patrons insisting that real opera lovers didn’t need translations. You should understand the music, they’d say. The emotional truth transcends language.

That’s nonsense. Opera is sung theatre. The text matters. Composers spent enormous effort setting specific words to music. Pretending you don’t need to understand those words is either elitism or self-delusion.

What Changed

The Canadian Opera Company pioneered supertitles in 1983 with a production of Elektra. The response was immediate and overwhelming. Audiences who’d found opera impenetrable suddenly understood what was happening.

Attendance increased. Younger audiences showed up. People laughed at the jokes because they could actually understand them.

Opera Australia adopted supertitles in the late 1980s, and I saw the shift firsthand. Suddenly you didn’t need to be part of an exclusive club to follow the story. You just needed to read.

The Resistance Was Telling

Some critics hated it. They argued that reading text would distract from the visual spectacle. That it would ruin the aesthetic purity of the production. That it dumbed down the art form.

Notice how all those arguments are about protecting some idealized version of opera rather than serving actual audiences?

The “distraction” argument is particularly weak. We’re perfectly capable of processing visual information while reading. We do it constantly with subtitled films. Within five minutes, your brain adjusts and you’re not consciously aware you’re reading anymore.

What these critics really objected to was democratization. If anyone could understand opera, it wasn’t special anymore.

What Good Supertitles Actually Do

The best supertitle translation isn’t literal. It’s interpretive. You’re condensing complex poetic text into readable chunks that match the pacing of the music.

A good supertitle translator understands both languages, the music, and what the audience needs to know at that precise moment. It’s its own art form.

I’ve seen productions where the supertitles made jokes land that I’d missed in previous productions. Where they clarified plot points that even people who knew the story had misunderstood.

For complex operas like The Ring Cycle or Moses und Aron, supertitles aren’t just helpful, they’re essential. Without them, you’re watching elaborate staged action with no idea what’s motivating it.

Beyond Language Access

Supertitles also help people with hearing difficulties participate in opera. Yes, it’s sung loudly, but understanding sung text is harder than understanding spoken dialogue even if you can hear it.

They help people with processing difficulties who might struggle to parse sung text in real-time.

They let newcomers follow unfamiliar stories without doing homework first. You can show up to La Bohème having never heard of Puccini and still have an emotionally complete experience.

The Technology Has Improved

Early supertitles were clunky. Now we have high-resolution screens with excellent typography. Some opera houses offer individual seat-back screens where you can control the language or turn them off entirely.

The Metropolitan Opera’s Met Titles system offers translations in multiple languages simultaneously. You can choose Spanish, German, Italian, or English depending on your seat location.

This is what accessibility looks like when you actually invest in it.

The Productions That Get It Right

I saw Satyagraha at Opera Australia a few years ago. Philip Glass’s opera is sung in Sanskrit. Without supertitles, it would be completely impenetrable to 99.9% of any audience.

The supertitles didn’t just translate the text. They provided historical context for the scenes from Gandhi’s life being depicted. They turned a potentially alienating experience into something profound and moving.

That’s what happens when you treat accessibility as a feature, not a compromise.

Why This Still Matters

We’re still fighting battles about opera accessibility. About ticket prices, about dress codes, about whether casual audiences are “real” opera lovers.

But supertitles proved something important: when you remove barriers to understanding, more people engage with the art form. The quality doesn’t diminish. If anything, it improves because artists are performing for audiences who actually understand what they’re doing.

Every time someone insists that opera should remain exclusive, that newcomers need to “earn” their place by doing research or learning languages, I think about supertitles. About how much resistance there was to such an obvious improvement.

Access doesn’t cheapen art. It reveals who was actually interested in preserving art and who was just interested in preserving their own status as gatekeepers.

If you’ve avoided opera because you thought you wouldn’t understand it, find a production with supertitles. You’ll be fine. You’ll probably love it.

And you can ignore anyone who tells you that reading the text is somehow doing it wrong. They’re just mad that the club got bigger.