Les Passions du récit à l’opéra. Rhétorique de la transposition dans Carmen, Mireille, Manon (review)

At nearly seven hundred pages this book extends a challenge to its readers, but it is a challenge that could turn into a rewarding experience. Through the lens of genetic criticism, the author studies the adaptation of three nineteen-century literary narratives into operas: Jules Massenet’s Manon Lescaut (1884) inspired by l’Abbé Prévost’s novel of l’Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut (1731), Georges Bizet’s Carmen (1875) adapted from Prosper Mérimée’s short story (1835), and Charles Gounod’s Mireille (1864) based on the narrative poem Mireio by Frédéric Mistral (1859).

The importance of the musical score in relation to the linguistic text has been debated by musicologists and composers for centuries. To wit: in 1786, Antonio Salieri composed a one-act opera on a libretto written by Giovanni Battista Casti entitled Prima la musica e poi le parole, decidedly putting words in second position and two centuries later, in 1942, Richard Strauss in Capriccio reviews the arguments of this long lasting debate, but leaving it unresolved in his opera. For Christine Rodriguez, in the nineteenth century, the French lyrical stage and more particularly l’Opéra comique —both Manon Lescaut and Carmen were first produced there—stand in opposition to the Italian and German domination of the international musical world. According to Rodriguez, music did not escape the impetus of nationalism in the nineteenth century and “l’exception française” rated le parole first over la musica, thus giving libretti status among literary genres.

In Rodriguez’s genetic approach, the narrative serves as the original text, while the libretto is taken as a rendition. Musicologists have often noted major changes in the adaptation of stories from literature to the lyrical stage. But Rodriguez’s critical approach uses formal elements found in the theories of Barthes, Genette, Greimas, Propp, and Ubersfeld to focus on the function of characters, structural repetitions, semiotic variations, rhetorical strategies, and recurrent themes. The extensive network of components studied by Rodriguez—the suffering subject, time and space, literary and operatic stereotypes, the quest for love, the vraisemblable, narrative strategies, dramatic constrictions, and the stages of passion and the staging of their scenes—occasionally brings forth unnoticed aspects of the novel or the opera. Genetic criticism takes as its object of study not the text per se, but the creative process. By contrasting libretti with their sources of inspiration, Rodriguez found fertile ground to observe the strategies employed, on the one hand, by the creative imagination of writers and, on the other, by those attempting to respect themes and episodes of a plot while writing within the confines and requirements dictated by different artistic purposes.