Back in 1980, when I was on the music staff of the San Francisco Opera, I was the pianist for an English-language production of Don Pasquale, with the budding young coloratura soprano Erie Mills* as Norina.

    At the end of that season in San Francisco, I returned to my home base in New York City; Ms. Mills relocated there and began coaching with me.  As a rising star, she was continuously needing to learn new opera roles, so I began making "Role Study Sheets" for her with original texts, literal translations, idiomatic translations, and IPA pronunciation.
 

    My passion for translating had been brewing since I'd seen, in a small published book of Italian song texts, the name "Nice" translated as Nice, the city in France, rather than Nice, the Greek goddess!
 

    I'd studied Italian and French in college and German in New York privately with Robert Cowart, of the Manhattan School and the Metropolitan Opera, who didn't mind a late night phone call about a linguistic puzzle.  The late Corradina Caporello, scholar and teacher, was extraordinarily kind and helpful when I was confronted with rare or antiquated Italian words and expressions.

    One day I had some of those "Role Study Sheets" with me as I went to a piano lesson with the extraordinary Seymour Bernstein, who had asked to see what it was I had been doing.  When I showed him, he immediately said they "should be published," and he was going to send them to the publisher of his piano compositions at the Hal Leonard Publishing Corporation.

    A few days later I received a phone call from Richard Walters, then vice-president for vocal music publications at Hal Leonard, who said that he wasn't interested in publishing the Role Study Sheets, but "was I interested in doing the translations for a new Opera Anthologies series?" And, as they say, the rest is history!
 

    Once I'd begun to notice idiosyncrasies and real errors of translation in the vocal literature for which I was coaching singers, unravelling the poetry of sung texts and offering good English translations became my guilty pleasure.