Opera in the Novel from Balzac to Proust (review)

Investigating how opera can be made to tell other stories, Cormac Newark's bountiful interdisciplinary assessment of the soirée à l'opéra genre is a welcome contribution to word-and-music studies as well as to the cultural history of opera. Taking us through case studies on authors who write about the experience of opera in their fictional projects, with particular focus on Balzac, Dumas, Flaubert, Verne, Leroux, and Proust, Newark also brings these texts into play as evidence of opera reception. After all, many of the novelistic stories under scrutiny were originally published alongside the vast body of opera criticism that neighboured these feuilletons in the pages of the nineteenth-century press. Demonstrating how the soirée à l'opéra initiates a break from surrounding conventional narrative practice, Newark examines the often dramatic twists that witnessing the music-drama provokes. An opera can foretell, displace, undermine, invoke spirits as well as confuse characters and their authorial writers. It is also a technique that seeks to bring 'back to the ear of the reader [. . .] music she or he can be counted on to know' (p. 97). The stability of the operatic text is called into question, particularly because, as Newark is at pains to point out, writers misremember, mistranslate, reorganize, or reinvent the operas they work with. Dumas père reorders the acts of Rossini's Guillaume Tell; Flaubert's anxiety at a lack of musical expertise is demonstrated, Newark suggests, through an excess of technical detail, as, for example, when he gets Emma Bovary to describe the specific key of a cavatina from Lucia de Lammermoor, which confirms Pierre Brunel's observation that 'it is writers who know less about music that are more specific when it comes to musical detail' (p. 101). Proust's narrator is also chastised for the implausibility of thinking about matters poietical at considerable length while ostensibly playing a score of Tristan at the piano, on the basis that the score is so difficult it would demand total concentration. These avowedly prosaic considerations do not, on the whole, undermine a sensitive and rich explanation of the operatic encounter in Proust (or Flaubert) and in particular the disembodied reception of the operatic spectacle via the théâtrophone, a device that permitted subscribers to tune in to live transmissions from the Opéra or Comédie-Franc¸aise. In a fascinating chapter on Gaston Leroux's Le Fantôme de l'Opéra, Newark confirms the widespread influence of the reception of Gounod's Faust, by far the most frequently performed work in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, and brings this together with a consideration of the digging up in 2008 of copper urns full of recordings, one of which was Faust, buried at the Palais Garnier a century earlier. These voices of a ghostly opera past ultimately disappointed in the contemporary present, and Newark indicates that the latency of silent buried recordings is preferable and even more meaningful. This is a fine and original study that goes beyond more mundane aspects of opera reception, successfully bringing together two major aspects of cultural production in the long nineteenth century.