There is a small black bar on the back of the seat in front of you. It is about eight inches wide and two inches tall, dark and unremarkable until the house lights fall and the overture begins. Then, line by line, in time with the voices on the stage, it begins to glow with words you can read. This is the Met Title, and to the first-time pilgrim it can feel like a small private miracle — a translator whispering only to you, invisible to your neighbor, dimming or vanishing entirely if you choose to look away and simply listen. Most people who slide into a seat at the Metropolitan Opera never wonder where that little screen came from, or why it sits on the chair-back rather than glowing above the stage like a movie subtitle. But the answer is one of the most quietly human stories in the building — a story about access, about stubbornness, about three men in the desert solving a problem that the grandest opera house in America had refused to solve any other way.
This is a pilgrim’s guide to reading the opera. Not the music — the words. Because the single biggest fear that keeps newcomers away from the Met is the fear of being lost in a language they don’t speak, sitting in the dark for four hours wondering what just happened and why everyone around them seems to know. The truth is the opposite of intimidating. The Met has spent decades, and quite literally miles of wiring, making sure you will never be lost. Understanding how that little screen works, and how to use the long evening that surrounds it, is the difference between enduring your first opera and falling in love with it.
The Problem Opera Spent 300 Years Ignoring
For most of opera’s history, not understanding the words was simply part of the deal. Audiences read a printed libretto by candlelight, or knew the plot well enough not to care, or — most often — let the language wash over them and trusted the music to carry the meaning. An opera in Italian was sung in Italian whether you spoke it or not. This was considered not a bug but a feature: opera was an aristocratic art, and a little inaccessibility was part of its perfume.
The reckoning came late, and it came from Canada. On January 21, 1983, the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto tried something that opera purists found close to sacrilegious. As singers performed Richard Strauss’s Elektra in German on the stage of the O’Keefe Centre, an English translation was projected, line by line, onto a screen above the proscenium arch. The idea belonged to the company’s artistic director, Lotfi Mansouri, who had been inspired by watching a televised opera at home with its subtitles. He hired Sonya Friedman — who had written subtitles for a Metropolitan Opera television broadcast — to prepare the text, and the first system was almost comically primitive: 35-millimeter glass slides fed through projectors, a setup one observer compared to a glorified home slideshow.
It worked. It worked so well that within roughly six months more than a hundred opera companies around the world had adopted some form of projected title. A new word entered the language: surtitle, from the French sur — “over” or “above” — fused to the English “title.” The wall between the audience and the words had come down almost overnight. Almost everywhere.
“Over My Dead Body”
Almost everywhere — but not at the Metropolitan Opera. As the rest of the opera world raced to install screens above their stages, the Met held out, and the holdout had a name and a temperament. James Levine, the Met’s artistic director and the towering musical conscience of the house for decades, regarded a translation screen hovering over the proscenium as a desecration. A glowing band of text above the singers, he believed, would yank the eye upward and away from the drama, flattening a live performance into something closer to watching television. The line attributed to him in the press of the era was blunt: a screen over the stage would go up only over his dead body.
For years the Met absorbed the consequence of that conviction. Audiences who had grown used to understanding the opera everywhere else were left, at the most prestigious house in the country, to fend for themselves. The pressure built. And rather than capitulate to the overhead screen it had rejected, the Met went looking for a different answer — one that could give every patron the words without imposing them on anyone who didn’t want them. It would take the house two years of development and a partnership with an unlikely company a continent away in the New Mexico desert.
Three Men, the Desert, and a Better Idea
The company was Figaro Systems, and its origin is the warm, unglamorous heart of this entire story. It began as a conversation in 1992 among three opera colleagues: Patrick Markle, then production director of the Santa Fe Opera; Geoffrey Webb, a design engineer for the Metropolitan Opera House itself; and Ronald Erkman, at the time a technician at the Met. The Americans with Disabilities Act had just become law in 1990, and Markle was wrestling with a real and pressing problem — how to make a live opera accessible to patrons who could not hear it at all, including the profoundly deaf.
The overhead screen did nothing for them; it served the general crowd and ignored the individual. So Markle, Webb, and Erkman built a prototype of something nobody had quite made before: a personal titling screen mounted on the back of a seat, delivering text to one viewer at a time. John Crosby, the legendary general director of the Santa Fe Opera, saw the prototype and immediately grasped that what solved an accessibility problem could also transform the experience for every patron in the house. The three founded Figaro Systems in 1993, headquartered in Santa Fe, and applied for the patents that would eventually issue — United States Patent 5,739,869, “Electronic libretto display apparatus and method,” granted April 14, 1998 — protecting an invention that would spread to the Royal Opera House in London, La Scala in Milan, the Liceu in Barcelona, the Vienna State Opera, and opera houses across America.
It was the perfect resolution to Levine’s objection. The words would not float above the stage for everyone; they would sit quietly in front of each individual seat, available to whoever wanted them and ignorable by whoever didn’t. The Met had found a way to give in without giving up.
The Night the Met Finally Read Along
On October 2, 1995, the Metropolitan Opera opened its 112th season with Verdi’s Otello, and for the first time in the company’s history the audience could read a translation as it sang. The system was christened Met Titles, a copyrighted name for the Met’s own implementation of the seat-back technology. The engineering had consumed the entire preceding summer. Conduits for more than fifteen miles of electrical wiring were drilled into a concrete floor ranging from nine to thirty-six inches thick. A computerized display — that unobtrusive eight-inch-by-two-inch bar — was mounted on every one of the house’s 3,989 seats, with another 176 screens installed throughout the standing-room areas so that even the patron leaning on the rail at the back of the Family Circle could follow every line.
The cleverest part was optical. The screens were engineered so that the text is legible only to the person seated directly in front of it; a glance sideways at your neighbor’s screen shows you nothing. And from the very beginning, the system could be switched off by any patron who preferred to take the opera in its original language alone, the way audiences had for three centuries. The display technology itself has quietly evolved over the years — from the early vacuum fluorescent displays to liquid-crystal screens around 2000 and organic LED screens by 2004 — but the principle has never changed. Eight channels of simultaneous translation, one screen per person, one button to control it, each line cued to appear at the instant it is sung.
How to Actually Use It (A Pilgrim’s Field Manual)
Knowing the story is lovely; knowing how to work the thing in the dark is essential. When you take your seat, look for the screen on the chair-back in front of you and the small control — usually a single button or a short menu — that lets you turn it on, switch it off, or in some configurations choose your language. English is the default at the Met, but the system carries multiple languages, a gift to international visitors and a reminder that the house belongs to the world.
Here is the advice no listicle gives you: decide in advance how much you want to read. A first-timer at a plot-heavy opera — Verdi, Puccini, anything with a tangle of disguises and dying lovers — should leave the titles on and lean on them gladly. There is no shame in it; the technology exists precisely so you are never lost. But as you grow more comfortable, experiment with turning the screen off for a famous aria you already know, and let yourself watch the singer’s face and the orchestra’s swell without the words pulling your eyes down. Many seasoned pilgrims do exactly this — titles on for the recitative and the plot machinery, off for the great set-piece moments when the music says everything the words could. The screen is a tool, not an obligation. Used well, it disappears.
One small courtesy: the screen is engineered to be private, but the temptation to fidget with the button mid-scene is real. Set your preference early, settle in, and resist the urge to keep toggling — the glow of a screen flicking on and off is one of the few things that can pull a neighbor out of the spell. The Met solved the problem of the distracting overhead screen so thoughtfully that the only remaining distraction is the one you might create yourself.
Surviving the Long Night: The Intermission
The other thing that intimidates newcomers is simple duration. A grand opera at the Met can run three, four, sometimes well over four hours including intermissions, and the pilgrim who arrives unprepared can spend the back half of the evening fading. The intermission is not dead time to be endured — it is part of the architecture of the experience, and learning to use it is part of becoming an opera-goer.
Intermissions at the Met typically run a generous length — long enough that the house empties into the grand lobbies beneath the Sputnik chandeliers and the crowd spills out onto the balconies overlooking the Lincoln Center plaza and its fountain. Use the first half of the intermission to move: stand, walk the curving lobbies, step out onto the terrace if the weather allows. Save the line for the restrooms — which form quickly and famously — for the moment the crowd thins, or duck out a beat before the lights come up if you can read the act’s pacing. If you want a glass of wine or a bite, the house offers concessions and bar service throughout the lobbies, and for those who plan ahead, the Grand Tier Restaurant inside the opera house lets you pre-order an intermission course that will be waiting for you, transforming the break into a small ceremony rather than a scramble. Pre-ordering is the single most civilized move available to a newcomer, and almost no first-timer knows to do it.
A word on timing the whole evening: arrive early. The plaza, the fountain, the sweep of the staircase, the murals — the Met is a pilgrimage site before the curtain ever rises, and rushing in at the last moment robs you of half of what you came for. Give yourself thirty to forty-five minutes before curtain to take the building in, find your seat, locate your Met Title screen, and read the synopsis in the program so the plot machinery is already in your head before the first note. Then, when the lights fall and that little black bar begins to glow, you will be exactly where the three men in the desert and the stubborn maestro and the summer of fifteen miles of wiring all intended you to be: ready, unafraid, and free to fall in love.
The Quiet Lesson of the Little Screen
It is easy to walk into the Metropolitan Opera and see only the grandeur — the gold, the chandeliers, the 3,800 souls in their seats, the voices that seem to come from somewhere beyond the human. But the Met Title in front of you tells a smaller and in some ways more moving story. It is the story of an art form that spent three hundred years assuming you should already understand, finally deciding that you deserved to. It is the story of an accessibility problem — how does a deaf patron experience an opera? — that turned, almost by accident, into a gift for everyone. And it is the story of a house so devoted to the integrity of what happens on its stage that it would rather rewire its entire floor than hang a single screen where it might break the spell.
You do not need to speak Italian, or German, or Russian, or Czech to belong at the Metropolitan Opera. You never did, and since the autumn of 1995 you have never had to pretend otherwise. The words are right there in front of you, glowing only for you, yours to read or yours to silence. All you have to do is take your seat, and let the night begin.
Stay close to the music: the 46-Day Pilgrim’s dispatch
Plotting a pilgrimage to the Met, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, or the great jazz rooms? Our 46-Day capture brings the next wave of New York concert-hall guides, ticket-window intel, and pilgrim’s-pick concerts straight to you.
[TODO — PASTE 46-DAY CAPTURE FORM SHORTCODE HERE]
