Sonya Haddad (November 9, 1936 – June 15, 2004) was a libretto translator and surtitler for the

Metropolitan Opera The Metropolitan Opera (commonly known as the Met) is an American opera company based in New York City, resident at the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, currently situated on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The company is oper ...

in New York.

Life and career

Haddad was born in Canton, Ohio, on November 9, 1936, and grew up in

Akron Akron () is the fifth-largest city in the U.S. state of Ohio and is the county seat of Summit County. It is located on the western edge of the Glaciated Allegheny Plateau, about south of downtown Cleveland. As of the 2020 Census, the city ...

. She graduated from the

Eastman School of Music The Eastman School of Music is the music school of the University of Rochester, a private research university in Rochester, New York. It was established in 1921 by industrialist and philanthropist George Eastman. It offers Bachelor of Music ...

at the

University of Rochester The University of Rochester (U of R, UR, or U of Rochester) is a private university, private research university in Rochester, New York. The university grants Undergraduate education, undergraduate and graduate degrees, including Doctorate, do ...

in 1958. She subsequently worked in the classical music division of Columbia Records, and at ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

'' radio station WQXR. From 1960 until the early 1970s she worked at the

Festival of Two Worlds The ''Festival dei Due Mondi'' (Festival of the Two Worlds) is an annual summer music and opera festival held each June to early July in Spoleto, Italy, since its founding by composer Gian Carlo Menotti in 1958. It features a vast array of conce ...

Spoleto Spoleto (, also , , ; la, Spoletum) is an ancient city in the Italian province of Perugia in east-central Umbria on a foothill of the Apennines. It is S. of Trevi, N. of Terni, SE of Perugia; SE of Florence; and N of Rome. History Spolet ...

, Italy. During that time, she also lived part-time in Rome where she worked as an interpreter. She acted as courier with the kidnappers of

John Paul Getty III John Paul Getty III (; born Eugene Paul Getty II; November 4, 1956February 5, 2011) was the grandson of American oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, who was once the richest man in the world. While living in Rome in 1973, he was kidnapped by the 'Ndrangh ...

in 1973. Haddad was fluent in German, Italian and French. She began working at the Metropolitan Opera in 1994 and was referred to in her obituary in ''

'' as "one of the country's leading practitioners of her art". She wrote surtitles or subtitles for the

Washington National Opera The Washington National Opera (WNO) is an American opera company in Washington, D.C. Formerly the Opera Society of Washington and the Washington Opera, the company received Congressional designation as the National Opera Company in 2000. Perform ...

, La Scala in Milan, and the Public Broadcasting Service's series ''

Great Performances ''Great Performances'' is a television anthology series dedicated to the performing arts; the banner has been used to televise theatrical performances such as plays, musicals, opera, ballet, concerts, as well as occasional documentaries. It is p ...

''. She joined the editorial staff of '' Opera News'' in 1998,"Obituaries – Sonya Haddad" (with picture)
by Brian Kellow, '' Opera News'', vol. 69, no. 3, September 2004 and was a research associate for the magazine until her death in 2004. Throughout that time she remained living in the Gershwin Building in Manhattan's Upper West Side.

Brian Kellow Brian Kellow (March 1, 1959 – July 22, 2018) was an American biographer and magazine editor. As an editor at '' Opera News'' from 1988 to 2016, he commissioned hundreds of articles from a range of writers, seeking out well-known voices and culti ...

said of her in an obituary in ''Opera News'' that "As a titlist, her standards were high: she took pains to avoid the cute, the coy, the anachronistic; her titles were as precise and elegant and clearly thought out as her own prose." William Romano, in an article partly based around documentation supplied by Haddad, said of her work that "by extending the text's exposure in live performance by a fraction of a second, the titleist imperceptibly adjusts the viewer's engagement with the words'. He goes on to argue that

Titling challenges titleists and the houses that employ them not only to translate but to make the best case for awkward and weak librettos. The brief, repetitious texts and credulity-straining plots of the bel canto repertory, with their attenuated melodic lines and spectacular runs, can pose more challenges to a titleist than do the complex texts of an opera by Strauss or Wagner. Titling, like any aspect of performance, is a dynamic technical skill, and a titleist may return to an opera in subsequent seasons, adjusting and refining both word choice and the technical aspects of delivery. However the titleist resolves these questions, the resulting version becomes the audience's live-time reading matter.

Operas for which Haddad did the translation and surtitling in the course of her career include:

Tchaikovsky Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky , group=n ( ; 7 May 1840 – 6 November 1893) was a Russian composer of the Romantic period. He was the first Russian composer whose music would make a lasting impression internationally. He wrote some of the most popu ...

's '' The Queen of Spades'' in 1995; Prokofiev's ''

War and Peace ''War and Peace'' (russian: Война и мир, translit=Voyna i mir; pre-reform Russian: ; ) is a literary work by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy that mixes fictional narrative with chapters on history and philosophy. It was first published ...

'';

Verdi Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi (; 9 or 10 October 1813 – 27 January 1901) was an Italian composer best known for his operas. He was born near Busseto to a provincial family of moderate means, receiving a musical education with the h ...

's ''

Falstaff Sir John Falstaff is a fictional character who appears in three plays by William Shakespeare and is eulogised in a fourth. His significance as a fully developed character is primarily formed in the plays '' Henry IV, Part 1'' and '' Part 2'', w ...

'' and ''

I vespri siciliani ''I vespri siciliani'' (; ''The Sicilian Vespers'') is a five-act Italian opera originally written in French for the Paris Opéra by the Italian romantic composer Giuseppe Verdi and translated into Italian shortly after its premiere in June 1855. ...

''; Richard Strauss's '' Capriccio''; Rossini's ''

La donna del lago ''La donna del lago'' (English: ''The Lady of the Lake'') is an opera composed by Gioachino Rossini with a libretto by Andrea Leone Tottola (whose verses are described as "limpid" by one critic) based on the French translationOsborne, Charles 19 ...

''; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Mozart's ''Così fan tutte'' and ''Don Giovanni''; Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, Pergolesi's ''Lo frate 'nnamorato'' and Conrad Susa's ''The Dangerous Liaisons''.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Haddad, Sonya 1936 births 2004 deaths People from Canton, Ohio Eastman School of Music alumni American subtitlers Translators to English Literary translators Metropolitan Opera people 20th-century American translators 21st-century American translators People from Akron, Ohio