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My reading project: Books and plays adapted into operas

9K views 73 replies 18 participants last post by  Sloe 
#1 ·
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.
 
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#2 ·
I have García Gutiérrez's El Trovador, but in the original Spanish (it's a verse play). You could kill two or three birds with a stone by reading Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, as several of the librettos that Handel set to music are cribbed from that long poem.
 
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#3 ·
Maybe some Maeterlinck would also be a nice reading.

Of course Pelléas and Mélisande is his more famous play in the world of opera, due to Debussy's adaptation (both Gabriel Fauré and Jean Sibelius composed also incidental music for the play, and Arnold Schoenberg wrote a tone poem). But there is Ariane et Barbe-bleue, too, adapted by Paul Dukas. Other, more obscure works, are Monna Vanna or L'oiseau bleu.

However, the more poignant story is that of La princesse Maleine. French composers like Debussy himself, Vincent d'Indy, Erik Satie and the ill-fated Lili Boulanger were working on its adaptation. Boulanger spent most of the last years of her life trying to complete the opera, before her death at 24 years old. This is a beautiful and sad story. Anyone interested can read the article published by Annegret Fauser in 1997: "Lili Boulanger's La Princesse Maleine: A Composer and her Heroine as Literary Icons".
 
#19 ·
I think you should re-consider with Sir Walter Scott and The Bride of Lammermoor. I found it a brisk and entertaining read, at least in the translation I tried (which is whatever the free version is)]
OK, I still have it on my e-reader, I'll give it another whirl. Any other operatic Scott novels that you can definitely recommend (as well as Aramis's suggestion for the poem The Lady of the Lake)?
 
#6 · (Edited)
Remaining on the Richard Strauss wavelength, you might want to consult Greek Tragedy for Elektra and Ariadne Auf Naxos (Euripides?). I'm not sure which if any version Strauss's librettist consulted for Elektra: Sophocles' or Euripides'? Or maybe even Aeschylus' Choephorae (The Libation Bearers)? I read all of them in my wasted youth.

Greek tragedy is a trove: Oedipus (Stravinsky) and a lot of opera seria, particularly Gluck.
 
#21 ·
I'm not sure which if any version Strauss's librettist consulted for Elektra: Sophocles' or Euripides'?
Wiki says that Elektra was based on Hofmannsthal's play of the same name, so there is definitely at least one degree of separation there. Can't find the play on Gutemberg, but I reckon at that stage you might as well just read the libretto.
 
#7 ·
Do get the Schiller plays, all of them. Verdi doesn't give you a glimpse of what's really there, so it won't be like "ah yes, I remember this from opera!" all through. His plays are great literature, Verdi's librettos based on them range from low-brow mess (I Masnadieri) to something still far from original's quality (Don Carlo). Donizetti's Maria isn't that much of profanation, but still differs greatly. You can find out that Leicester is combination of two characters from the play, one of which (Mortimer) was way more interesting dramatic persona than this conventional hybride from libretto. You shouldn't forget the Luisa Miller play, don't remember English title - it's Kabale und Liebe in German.

Expand your Dostoyevsky list? From the House of the Dead, made into opera by Janacek?

Regarding Walter Scott, you refuse to read the novels - remember that La Donna del Lago is based on his poem, not novel. So you might want to consider reading it.

Have some Byron? There's Il Corsaro. Major omission on the list is Giovanni Verga's short story that served as source for Mascagni's hit opera. Or Torquato Tasso. You like baroque, so why isn't he on the list? And it's not only baroque, there's Tancredi too, for example.
 
#9 · (Edited)
In college I studied Bernard Pomerance's play The Elephant Man, which was one of the sources for the fairly recent French opera of the same name. Actually, anything about Joseph Merrick, "the Elephant Man," might be considered source material for the opera -- including the 1981 movie, which has always been a favorite of mine, even though many people find it too disturbing or upsetting to watch.

Also, A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller was made into an opera. It's a great, great play; in my opinion, the opera, though good, doesn't come up to its level on the whole.
 
#22 ·
Oh, I quite enjoyed EO. Although I was taken aback at how cynical it was, and how much it was concerned with society rather than the intimate story, compared with the romanticism of the opera. But I want to give it another go now that I know a bit better what to expect. I believe that Queen of Spades is also a lot more cynical than the opera.
 
#11 ·
Tell us how the source material compares with the operas! Some of those books an plays (Beaumarchais, and, of course, Tolstoy) have reputations for being stand-alone classics in their own right. Very interested to find out if this is true.
 
#12 · (Edited)
Mozart's Mitridate is based on Racine's play of the same name, Gounod's Mireille on Mistral's eponymous poem. Aside from Ariodante, Alcina and Orlando, it's also Haydn's Orlando Paladino, Mayr's Ginevra di Scozia and Vivaldi's, duh, Orlando furioso that are based on Orlando furioso (there's more but I'll stop - it's a good book, I recommend it - the bit with Alcina is rather racy and there are many feats of arms by both men and women knights), Rinaldo - on Tasso's Jerusalem delivered. Rossini's Tancredi is based on Voltaire's play of the same name.
 
#13 ·
Maybe you could read (some of) the tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann! they must be fun to read.

and what about "The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest" ("El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra") by Tirso de Molina? it's one of the earliest versions of the Don Juan story but i'm not sure if it was a source for Da Ponte... it's probably a very interesting play even if it wasn't!
 
#14 · (Edited)
Massenet's Le Cid was based on Corneille's play from the same name (which is basically an adaptation and translation from the Spanish of Guillén de Castro's Las Mocedades del Cid).

Bellinilover, another opera based on a classic American play is, of course, A Streetcar Named Desire. I think there's also an opera based on Wilder's Our Town.
 
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#15 ·
btw, off your list I read the Beaumarchais plays (not the third one, seems to be hard to come by), which were both funny and the libretti are pretty close to the original, Werther (a good book, if you're a romantic at heart :cool: otherwise it will annoy you to no end), Faust (eh), Schiller's plays (eh, I really don't like the ethos; more over the top-ness; you have to read them in your Che Guevara phase, otherwise they lose the appeal; but Mary Stuart ain't bad), Le Roi s'amuse (good but I read it when I was a kid, so maybe I missed a lot), War and Peace (I struggled with it, started it 3 times, finished it by way of audio book - good but a bit much and the characters are a bunch of idiots aside from the Bolkonskys who are cool).
 
#24 ·
War and Peace (I struggled with it, started it 3 times, finished it by way of audio book - good but a bit much and the characters are a bunch of idiots aside from the Bolkonskys who are cool).
Prince Andrei is one of my major literary loves, along with Mr Rochester from Jane Eyre, John Thornton From North and South, and Captain Wentworth from Persuasion.
 
#23 ·
Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones was made into an opera in the early 1930s. Lawrence Tibbett created the role onstage. Paul Robeson created the role in the original play but I don't know if he ever sang the opera version. Probably would be perceived as too "politically incorrect" (they never say according to whose politics and why they're telling us what to think) for a modern revival afaik. But a George London recording of "Standing in the need of prayer" is heartrending.
 
#25 · (Edited)
Thanks for so many wonderful contributions, keep 'em coming!

Updated list so far, almost all of which I have found on Project Gutenberg:

Ariosto: Orlando furioso (Ariodante, Alcina ,Orlando, Orlando Paladino, etc)

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)

Bouilly: Léonore, ou l'amour conjugal (Fidelio)

Byron: The corsair (Il corsaro)

Corneille: Le Cid

Crabbe: Peter Grimes from “the Borough”

Dostoyevsky: The gambler; The house of the dead

Dumas fils: La Dame aux Camélias (La Traviata)

Goethe: Faust: The sorrows of the young Werther

Gozzi: Turandot, L'amore delle tre melarance

Gutiérrez: El trovador, Simón Bocanegra

Hoffmann: Tales

Hugo: Le Roil s’amuse (Rigoletto); Hernani (Ernani)

James: The Turn of the Screw

Maeterlinck: Pelléas et Mélisande, Ariane et Barbe-Bleue

Mann: Death in Venice

Melville: Billy Budd

Mérimée: Carmen

Molière: Dom Juan (Don Giovanni), Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (Lully), Le Malade imaginaire (Charpentier)

Murger: Scènes de la vie de bohème (La bohème)

Prévost: Manon Lescaut

Pushkin: The queen of spades; Eugene Onegin; Boris Godunov

Racine: Phèdre (Hippolyte et Aricie), Mithridate (Mitridate Re di Ponto)

Rodenbach: Bruges-la-Morte (Die tote Stadt)

Schiller: Don Carlos; Die Jungfrau von Orleans/The Maid of Orleans (Giovanna D’Arco); Die Rauber/The robbers (I Masnadieri); , Kabale und Liebe (Luisa Miller) 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)

Scott: The Bride of Lammermoor, the Lady of the Lake

Tasso: Gerusalemme liberata/Jerusalem delivered (Rinaldo, Armida, Armide etc)

Tolstoy: War and Peace

Verga: Cavalleria Rusticana

Virgil: The Aeneid (Les Troyens)

Voltaire: Tancrède (Tancredi)

Wilde: Salomé
 
#26 ·
Also Eugene Scribe for Tosca. Iirc it was theatrical producer David Belasco himself who adapted as a play the short story on which Madama Butterfly was based, but I'm not sure of this.
 
#28 ·
Also Eugene Scribe for Tosca.
I think it might be Sardou...:)

The pointer to Scribe was useful, because he DID write La Muette de Portici and Le comte Ory.

it was theatrical producer David Belasco himself who adapted as a play the short story on which Madama Butterfly was based, but I'm not sure of this.
Yes Belasco wrote a short play, based on John Luther Long's Madame Butterfly, in turn partly based on Madame Chrysanthème by Loti. The latter is on Gutenberg.
 
#31 · (Edited)
About Walter Scott, and apart from "The Lady of the Lake", "The Bride of Lammermoor" and "Ivanhoe", of which there are quite a few adaptations: Rossini (a pastiche), Pacini, Thomas Sari, Bartolomeo Pisani (Rebeca), Castagnier (Rebecca), Otto Nicolai (Il Templario), Heinrich Marschner (Der Templer und die Jüdin) and Arthur Sullivan's Ivanhoe, some of them quite interesting, there are several other readings, for instance:

"Guy Mannering", was the main inspiration behind the libretto written by Eugène Scribe for François-Adrien Boieldieu's La Dame Blanche. Bellini's I Puritani was also inspired by "Old Mortality". From "Kenilworth" we got Donizetti's Il castello di Kenilworth and Auber's Leicester. Bizet adapted "The Fair Maid of Perth"....
 
#33 ·
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 ...
:tiphat:

Thanks Nat, great idea & project. I've already uploaded The Gambler to my e-reader.

One to add?

Massenet Don Quichotte - Loosely based on Cervantes: The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha

also "Le chevalier de la longue figure" a play by Jacques Le Lorrain
 
#34 ·
I've read Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor and enjoyed it very much -- but then, I like all of Scott's novels. I've also read (in translation) Dumas fils' La Dame aux Camelias and Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers. Goethe's Werther is about as insufferable as Massenet's with all his lovelorn mooning around.

Since you're reading opera source materials, what about a translation of the Norse Volsungasaga or the German Nibelungenlied? I've read fragments from both, and they're quite different than Wagner's hybrid version of the two.
 
#36 · (Edited)
Goethe's Werther is about as insufferable as Massenet's with all his lovelorn mooning around.
Very wrong to compare these to it is. Massenet's libretto follows the worst tradition of "nice story, let's have it that some guy loves some lady and then somebody dies... all the rest, even if essential to understand who is some guy and some lady and why somebody dies, doesn't interest us".

So the Werther opera is insufferable with all it's blankness, the Goethe thing is widely hated but it's far more than "lovelorn mooning around". If there is chance to symphatize with operatic Werther, it's by connecting him with what's not in the opera but what one can read in the book.
 
#43 · (Edited)
Hm and thinking about it, there's really a surprising lack of Jesus based operas, given how he was sorta influential and all. Maybe it was considered heretical? But I mean, that's gotta be a dream role for any tenor. (Judas would be a baritone of course, and Mary Magdalene a coloratura soprano I think.)
 
#49 ·
I've mentioned these on other threads, but both are worthy of repeating:

I've just gotten through Stanley Mitchell's 2008 tranlation of Onegin. I don't know how much was due to Pushkin and how much to Mitchell, but I found it to be a jaunty, engaging, brisk, and just plain fun read. I actually consulted the website below before making my $15 investment. It has an interesting link showing the same single sample stanza from ten different translations:

http://stephenfrug.blogspot.com/2009/03/eugene-onegin-in-english-comparing.html

For La Traviata, this book went beyond Dumas and put Marie DuPlessis, the real life inspiration for the character, in historical context. Fascinating person, fascinating read.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Girl-Who-Loved-Camellias/dp/0307270793
 
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