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Novel into Opera

Adapting a novel for the stage involves several processes. You will probably have to cut characters and episodes for reasons of length. You may have to reduce the number of settings to what can be handled on the stage. And you will have to convert indirect speech into actual dialogue that can be spoken or sung. So far, this applies equally to spoken theater and opera.

But the addition of music both opens wider possibilities and imposes further restrictions. Music can take over much of the mood-painting and even scene-setting of the original, but you have to leave room for it to do so, which means further cutting. It offers the possibilities of solo arias and simultaneous ensembles; these can replace dialogue in many instances, but you need to build them into what will eventually be a much a musical structure as a dramatic one. And words to be sung are different from those to be spoken; you will need to think in terms of short images rather than extended syntax, and provide vowels that can be colored by the singer and sustained as a musical line.

This course (which is an enhanced version of the very first one I taught for Osher, in 2016) will examine these and similar issues in order to give a deeper understanding of what goes into making an opera. We shall start with the mechanics and building-blocks of the form, looking mainly at shorter examples in English; these will include a few of my own texts, if only because I can speak about them with more authority. Depending on interest, I may also throw in a couple of brief exercises you can try for yourselves. After that, we look in detail at three American operas, which I shall analyze and play complete. Finally after Thanksgiving, in a section I call "Fraternal Twins," we will see how the same text has been adapted by two different composers, writing in quite different styles.

No outside reading is required to enjoy the course, as I shall provide handouts for the shorter works and give summaries of the longer ones. But you would obviously get more out of the operas if you happen to know the novels on which they are based; see the Biblography for further information. All examples that involve close scrutiny of the sung texts will be in English. To widen the range, however, I do include some examples by familiar composers in other languages, but these are all concerned with the non-verbal aspects of the process, and I will always provide translations. Roger Brunyate.

Clicking on the orange RESOURCES links will take you to the web page for that class.

A. How Opera Works
Four classes about the mechanics of opera: its structures, the way it handles time, and the kinds of words most suitable for singing.
		1. Stopping the Clock		September 22
		Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas is hardly typical of the kind of operas you might see at the Met—but it is short, sung in English, and easy to understand. The problem faced by Purcell in 1689 is the same as that met by Mozart a century later or by any opera composer today: how to combine drama that moves at one kind of pace with music that often requires another. Purcell's solutions are his own, but his basic approach of dividing the action into short sections that stop and start the clock has become part of the standard opera toolbox. So a detailed study of this particular opera should reveal some of the basic challenges inherent in reshaping a story (in this case from the Aeneid of Virgil) into an opera.
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2. The Opera Aria		September 29
To different degrees, the operas of Handel, Mozart, Verdi, and Puccini are built around solo arias through which the characters plumb their emotional depths. In the first hour, we shall look at some arias from The Marriage of Figaro to see some of the different ways in which an aria can be used. In the second hour, we shall consider the question of what kinds of text are most suitable for lyrical singing in English, distinguishing what opera can do well from what it can scarcely do at all. Among other examples, we shall refer to my own adaptation of EM Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread for the composer Mark Lanz Weiser, which had its professional premiere in San Jose, California, in 2015.
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		3. Opera Structures		October 6
		In adapting his novel The Lady of the Camellias for the stage in 1852, Alexandre Dumas fils had already done some of the work that Verdi's librettist Francesco Piave would need to turn the piece into an opera, La traviata, the following year. A direct comparison between the spoken and sung versions affords a fascinating insight into Verdi's technique of constructing one of those dramatic scenes for two characters that are the life-blood of his operas. We shall also look more briefly at ways in which Verdi uses larger ensembles to create a dramatic climax.
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4. Singing Shakespeare		October 13
Almost all the Shakespeare plays have been adapted as operas, some, like Romeo and Juliet, many times. Any such adaptation involves the usual tasks of pruning and rearrangement, but English-speaking composers face an additional challenge: whether to retain Shakespeare's words or no. Until quite recently, this was not even an issue; Shakespeare operas used Shakespeare's language as a matter of course. But Thomas Adès' The Tempest (2004) and Brett Dean's Hamlet (2017) take a different approach. Their librettists Meredith Oakes and Matthew Jocelyn respectively have sliced and diced the text, assigned it to other characters, or reduced it to its key verbal images, in order to offer their composers more musical freedom than the iambic pentameters of the original.
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B. Three American Authors
Three operas adapted from American authors, Edith Wharton, Henry James, and Herman Melville, all played complete and analyzed in detail.
		5. Roman Fever		October 20
		The first of my libretti to receive a professional setting and performance was the one-act opera Roman Fever, my adaptation of the 1934 story by Edith Wharton for the Pulitzer-prizewinning composer Robert Ward. Written for the specific purpose of being performable by college and conservatory music departments that typically have a surfeit of sopranos, it makes no claims to being a great work, and the PBS television production that we shall watch is relatively simple. But it is something that I can talk about with obvious insight, and the adaptation involved the unusual recourse of adding rather than removing characters. Also, the story is short enough to read complete.
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6. The Turn of the Screw 1		October 27
Myfanwy Piper's libretto for Benjamin Britten's chamber opera The Turn of the Screw (1954) is one of the great opera texts of the modern era. It is based upon the 1898 novella by Henry James, a ghost story about a young and inexperienced Governess who comes to take charge of two children in the country, only to become convinced that they are being haunted and manipulated by the ghosts of her predecessor and the former valet, who may have driven her to suicide. In this first class, we shall summarize the James story, look at some of Britten's inventive strategies for recreating its characteristic spooky claustrophobia, and watch a substantial portion of Act One.
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		7. The Turn of the Screw 2		November 3
		We continue with Act Two of the opera, possibly comparing scenes from other productions. The James story is a locus classicus of the device of the unreliable narrator, in that we can never know whether the ghosts have any objective reality or are merely a figment of the Governess's imagination. So does the decision to bring these characters onto the stage and give them words and music necessarily eliminate these ambiguities?
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8. Moby Dick 1		November 10
Turning even a short novella into an opera always involves cutting, but that is nothing compared to the daunting task of compressing Herman Melville's 800-page novel Moby Dick (1851). But in some ways, composer Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer may have found it easier in preparing their 2010 opera, for it was no longer an agonizing decision about what to cut out, but the surely-simpler one of what to keep in. Calling on a video interview with Heggie and looking closely at the opening scenes of the opera, we shall compare their remarkable achievement to the Melville original.
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		9. Moby Dick 2		November 17
		One result of presenting Melville's book in terms of live singers on the stage is to emphasize that Moby-Dick is less about the hunt for some whale than the conflict between human beings, their personalities, and beliefs. We shall finish watching the complete opera in the 2012 production from San Francisco, now in longer sections and with fewer comments, to appreciate its cumulative power as this human tragedy draws towards its inevitable conclusion.
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C. Fraternal Twins
Three novels (all French, as it happens) that have inspired multiple settings: Manon Lescaut by the Abbé Prévost, Scenes from Bohemian Life by Henry Murger, and Carmen by Prosper Mérimée.
10. Manon's Two Lovers		December 1
When Giacomo Puccini decided to set Prévost's Manon Lescaut as an opera (it premiered in 1893), he was undeterred by the success of Jules Massenet's Manon in 1884. "A woman like Manon can have more than one lover," he said; "Massenet feels it as a Frenchman, with powder and minuets. I shall feel it as an Italian, with a desperate passion." It turned out to be his first big success. Although both works tell essentially the same story, the difference between what each composer chose to show, and more importantly the musical raiment in which he clothed it, is highly instructive not merely in terms of these two composers, but also the musical traditions that each represents.
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		11. The Bohemian Life		December 8
		Henry Murger published most of his Scenes from Bohemian Life serially between 1847 and 1849; he later collected them into a novel (1851), adding some connective tissue and tying up a few loose ends. So it is not surprising the Puccini's opera La bohème (1986) also takes the form of relatively short acts, with time elapsing between them. But it was another composer, Ruggiero Leoncavallo, who first drew Puccini's attention to the Murger; he even offered him a libretto. But Puccini went his own way, and Leoncavallo composed his text himself. Knowing it was truer to the spirit of the original, Leoncavallo expected it to conquer at its premiere a year later. Instead, it was quickly forgotten—which is a pity, as it contains much fine music.
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12. Carmen Translated		December 15
Prosper Mérimée's 1845 novella Carmen is a first-hand account of the author's supposed encounters with Romany people in Spain; the story that Georges Bizet elaborated into his opera of 1875 occupies only the third of its four parts. Originally conceived as a popular opéra comique (opera with spoken dialogue), it was soon elaborated into a grand opera, full of spectacle, and sung throughout. More recent productions and adaptations have brought it back to the grittiness of the original, restoring the dialogue, translating it into the vernacular, and even rearranging its music, like Peter Brook in his celebrated Tragédie de Carmen or Oscar Hammerstein in the all-black movie musical Carmen Jones.
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