When Literature Becomes Opera: Study of a Transformational Process (review)

When Literature Becomes Opera: Study of a Transformational Process. By Léonard Rosmarin. (Chiasma, 8.) Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. [160 p. ISBN 90-420-0694-3. $30.]

In this book, Léonard Rosmarin, a professor of French at Brock University in Ontario, departs from the subjects of his past research--Charles de Saint-Denis Saint-Evremond and the novelist Robert Pinget--to consider a different kind of topic, the manner in which literary works become first librettos and then operas. Addressing a long tradition, from Samuel Johnson through Theodor Adorno, that regards opera as an odd, ungainly hybrid of entertainments and socially irrelevant materials, Rosmarin takes the not-altogether-new position that operatic settings transform literature into a different kind of object, one with its own artistic concerns and interpretive strategies. If this position pays little attention to opposing critical traditions--notably those of Italy and Germany--it nevertheless addresses an attitude musicians and musicologists know all too well. In studying this act of transformation, Rosmarin seeks to refute critics who dismiss opera out of hand.

Thus armed with a manifest love of opera and back issues of L'avant-scène opéra, the author sets out to contribute to a long and prestigious practice of literary commentary on opera, one that includes the writings of Gary Schmidgall, Peter Conrad, Catherine Clément, and Michel Poizat (and, though in a very different sense, Joseph Kerman's early writings on opera). Rosmarin's plan is twofold. On the one hand, he has selected a finite set of operas for consideration: Rigoletto, La traviata, Carmen, Thaïs, La bohème, Tosca, Pelléas et Mélisande, and Dialogues des Carmélites. On the other, he approaches each of these works twice. In part one, he traces the way literature's "center of gravity" is refined, displaced, or focused in the course of its transformation into a libretto. By this means, the librettist or composer "zer[oes] in on the profound dramatic tendencies of the original text," as opposed to its narratological tendencies, and "throw[s] them into striking relief" (p. 13). For example, Giuseppe Verdi and Francesco Maria Piave's work on Victor Hugo's play Le roi s'amuse, in order to create Rigoletto, required a compression of the original story, its situations, and its text. In part two, Rosmarin observes how librettists and composers turn literary characters into "exemplary figures," illustrative emblems portrayed through a limited number of traits and musical gestures: "Through its stunning evocative power and immediacy of impact, music infuses the various operatic characters with the ability to embody a dominant or dominant emotions [sic]. They then become illustrations or prototypes of such emotions" (p. 78). Thus Mélisande seeks love and acceptance from those around her, and Tosca is an "archetypal diva" (p. 124), always onstage, always acting.

The audience for this book is opera enthusiasts with little or no formal musical training, for, aside from the occasional interpretive nuance, there is little here that will be new for musicologists. Such an intention, at least, explains the text's general clumsiness in treating its subject, both in the large sense and in the page-to-page presentation of works. The process of transformation Rosmarin pursues is, to some extent, part of every competent discussion of an opera, including most of the scholarship he has here avoided. Moreover, lack of experience in dealing with opera leads him to some amateurish mistakes, the kind common to anyone working on opera for the first time. There is, most notably, the unwieldy strategy of having to discuss each opera twice, first with respect to its center of gravity and again concerning its exemplary figures. From there, When Literature Becomes Opera quickly becomes entangled with problems familiar to those who write regularly on opera: long histories and synopses that interrupt arguments; confused and contradictory references to acts and scenes; vertiginous shifts between descriptions of text and music; overdependence on that most...