Having just finished Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-morte, the source material for Die Tote stadt, and currently enjoying, Dumas fils’s La Dame aux Camélias, I’ve decided to embark on a reading project of source material for operas. Some I’ve read before and will be re-reading, some will be new to me. This is my list so far, with the proviso that I’m going to give all the all the Walter Scott novels a miss. I enjoyed Ivanhoe in the day, but I’ve never managed to get anywhere with the others.
Beaumarchais: Le barbier de Séville ou la précaution inutile; La Folle Journée ou le Mariage de Figaro; L'autre Tartuffe, ou La mère coupable (The latter to see for myself what happens with the countess and Cherubino)
Belasco: the Girl of the golden west (La Fanciulla del west)
Crabbe: Peter Grimes from “the Borough”
Dostoyevsky: The gambler
Goethe: Faust, The sorrows of the young Werther
Gozzi: Turandot, L'amore delle tre melarance (e-book?)
Gutiérrez: El trovador, Simón Bocanegra (if I can find the e-books in English, or even at all)
Hugo: Le Roil s’amuse (Rigoletto); Hernani (Ernani)
James: The Turn of the Screw
Mann: Death in Venice
Melville: Billy Budd
Mérimée: Carmen
Schiller: Don Carlos; Die Jungfrau von Orleans/The Maid of Orleans (Giovanna D’Arco); Die Rauber/The robbers (I Masnadieri); Mary Stuart (Maria Stuarda); Wilhelm Tell (Guglielmo Tell), Turandot
Shakespeare: Othello; The Merry wives of Windsor (Falstaff); Hamlet; A Midsummer Night’s dream; the Tempest; Macbeth; Much Ado About Nothing (Béatrice et Bénédict)
Prévost: Manon Lescaut
Pushkin: The queen of spades; Eugene Onegin; Boris Godunov
Tolstoy: War and Peace
Virgil: The Aeneid (Les Troyens)
Please feel free to add to the list, make recommendations (links are always welcome), share your reading history and so on.
Beaumarchais: Le barbier de Séville ou la précaution inutile; La Folle Journée ou le Mariage de Figaro; L'autre Tartuffe, ou La mère coupable (The latter to see for myself what happens with the countess and Cherubino)
Belasco: the Girl of the golden west (La Fanciulla del west)
Crabbe: Peter Grimes from “the Borough”
Dostoyevsky: The gambler
Goethe: Faust, The sorrows of the young Werther
Gozzi: Turandot, L'amore delle tre melarance (e-book?)
Gutiérrez: El trovador, Simón Bocanegra (if I can find the e-books in English, or even at all)
Hugo: Le Roil s’amuse (Rigoletto); Hernani (Ernani)
James: The Turn of the Screw
Mann: Death in Venice
Melville: Billy Budd
Mérimée: Carmen
Schiller: Don Carlos; Die Jungfrau von Orleans/The Maid of Orleans (Giovanna D’Arco); Die Rauber/The robbers (I Masnadieri); Mary Stuart (Maria Stuarda); Wilhelm Tell (Guglielmo Tell), Turandot
Shakespeare: Othello; The Merry wives of Windsor (Falstaff); Hamlet; A Midsummer Night’s dream; the Tempest; Macbeth; Much Ado About Nothing (Béatrice et Bénédict)
Prévost: Manon Lescaut
Pushkin: The queen of spades; Eugene Onegin; Boris Godunov
Tolstoy: War and Peace
Virgil: The Aeneid (Les Troyens)
Please feel free to add to the list, make recommendations (links are always welcome), share your reading history and so on.