Michael Berkeley and David Malouf's Rewriting of Jane Eyre: an Operatic and Literary Palimpsest*

CHAPTER 6 Michael Berkeley and David Malouf’s Rewriting of Jane Eyre: An Operatic and Literary Palimpsest* Jean-Philippe Heberlé English composer Michael Berkeley (born 1948) is the son of Lennox Berkeley (1903–1989), himself a composer of instrumental music and operas including, for instance, A Dinner Engagement (1955) and Ruth (1955–56). To this day, Michael Berkeley has written three operas and is currently working on a new operatic project based on Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement (2001). For his first two operas (Baa Baa Black Sheep, 1993, and Jane Eyre, 2000), he collaborated with acclaimed Australian novelist David Malouf (born 1934). This chapter addresses Berkeley’s second opera, Jane Eyre, a chamber opera1 premiered at the Cheltenham Music Festival on June 30, 2000. The opera by David Malouf and Michael Berkeley appears to be an operatic and literary palimpsest in which Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is compressed and distorted into a concentrated operatic drama of little more than 70 minutes.2 Five characters form the cast, and the storyline focuses exclusively on the events at Thornfield. In this intertextual3 and intermedial4 analysis of Berkeley and Malouf’s operatic adapta- tion of Jane Eyre, a study of the text and the music reveals whether the librettist and the composer focalized or not on particular elements and episodes of the original novel. The artists at times amended, distorted, or retained elements of the novel, allowing their new work to interpret Charlotte Brontë’s novel’s psychologically developed characters and its gothic atmosphere. Finally, the opera and its libretto function metadramatically. S. Qi et al. (eds.), The Brontë Sisters in Other Wor(l)ds © Shouhua Qi and Jacqueline Padgett 2014 192 JEAn-PHILIPPE HEBERLÉ The Inception of the Project David Malouf initiated the opera and libretto project by suggesting to Michael Berkeley that they should write a work based on Jane Eyre. Both men collaborated for the first time on Baa Baa Black Sheep in the early 1990s. Before working on Berkeley’s first opera, Malouf was already an experienced librettist fully aware of what the making of an opera entailed as he had already penned the libretto of two operas by Australian composer Richard Meale (1932–2009): Voss (1986) after Patrick White’s eponymous novel, and Mer de glace (1991), based on an original story by David Malouf, through Claire Clairmont’s recol- lection of the event, revolving around the famous meeting between the Shelleys and Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva. Not only was Malouf an experienced librettist and novelist when he started working with Berkeley, but he was also a poet and a short story writer, which meant he knew how to write in a condensed and concentrated way to leave space for the music in an opera. Moreover, his poetic craftsmanship has infused many scenes of Jane Eyre as illustrated by Rochester at the end of act one with the poetical sym- bols of a flower, of waking birds, as well as of the coming of a new day after the night, all pointing at a renewal or a rebirth.5 In a very poetical way, Mr. Rochester invites Jane to forget Mrs. Rochester’s haunting presence after she had just appeared to the title character for the first time. Although better known today for his novel, Malouf’s earliest literary work took the form of poetry rather than prose, and poetry remains a preferred genre as testified to by his latest collection, Typewriter Music (2007). His novels typically deal with matter from the nineteenth century, as in Remembering Babylon (1992) and The Conversations at Curlow Creek (1996); his latest novel, Ransom (2009), recycles an earlier text as it retells books 16–24 of the Iliad. Those two features also shape his libretti, as they all tell stories from the nineteenth century and rewrite earlier books in a postmodern vein. Only Mer de glace deviates from this pattern by drawing on historical events. With Jane Eyre, David Malouf proposed the idea of adapting one of the most widely read novels in the English language to Michael Berkeley. At first, as reported by Tom Service in the booklet of the premiere recording of Jane Eyre, the composer was skeptical about the project and somehow felt daunted by the prospect of turning Brontë’s novel into an opera: “When David first suggested the idea of doing Jane Eyre, I really took a very big breath. It is no good just putting on REWRITING OF JANE EYRE 193 a Hollywood rerun of Jane Eyre. You have to show it in a new light and refract it somehow.”6 In the end, the reading public’s familiarity with the novel proved to be more an advantage than a disadvantage as the spectators could easily fill in the gaps or retrace missing parts, even if Berkeley and Malouf’s operatic rewriting of Jane Eyre did not adhere faithfully to Brontë’s text. Why did Malouf choose Jane Eyre? The year before the first per- formance of the opera, he wrote the introduction to the 1999 Oxford World’s Classic reissue of the novel in its hardback format by Oxford University Press (OUP). In the late 1990s, as inscribed in the front flap of the dust jacket of the reissue, OUP asked several writers to write a new introduction to their favorite novel.7 Malouf’s renewed attention to Brontë’s novel surely contributed to the author’s inter- est in a rewriting of the novel. In his introductory comments to the reissue, Malouf speaks of the novel’s power: “There are some books that make such a vivid impression on us, put us so deeply under their spell, that our first acquaintance with them becomes a watershed in our lives, and the actual reading—the excited turning of pages over a period of hours or days—seems in retrospect to have taken place in a country all its own, with a light and weather like no other we have ever known.”8 Malouf’s comment shows the tremendous impact the novel has on its readers as well as its importance in our collective unconscious. Then, he writes of his own early reading of Jane Eyre, revealing how this experience marked him deeply, which explains why he has such a precise knowledge of the book.9 A Novel Full of Musical Possibilities Similarly, Malouf points to the way in which the text invites a musical setting or “space”: I have always felt that in any action that presents itself as a subject of opera there should be an element that for its fullest expression demands music rather than simply tolerating it. The voice of Mr. Rochester call- ing to Jane out of the night, which is perhaps the strongest memory we carry away from the book, the strangest, the most romantic, seems to me to offer such an essentially musical possibility. Music makes its own space.10 Rochester’s and Jane’s voice both resound. Rochester’s voice has a special musical quality, as established in this exchange between Jane and Mrs. Fairfax in the original novel: “ ‘Mr Rochester? I was 194 JEAn-PHILIPPE HEBERLÉ not aware he could sing.’ [ . ] ‘Oh he has a fine bass voice, and an excellent taste for music.’ ”11 On Rochester’s return from the Leas, accompanied by guests, Jane notes: “A joyous stir was now audible in the hall: gentlemen’s deep voices, and ladies’ silvery accents blent harmoniously together, and distinguishable above all, though not loud, was the sonorous voice of the master of Thornfield Hall.”12 On this textual evidence, Michael Berkeley employs the bass voice for Mr. Rochester. For him, Adèle’s character allows for a strong musical dimension, again on textual evidence in the scene in which Jane meets Adèle, who asks of her new governess: “ ‘Shall I let you hear me sing now?’ [ . ] Descending from her chair [ . ] she commenced singing a song from some opera.”13 Not only is Adèle presented as someone who can sing but also as someone who can dance: “Mama used to teach me dance and sing.”14 This emphasis on these abili- ties leads the composer to have her dance a waltz with Jane on what sounds like a pastiche of a French air. The passage where she dances with Jane does not appear in Malouf’s libretto, having been added by Berkeley, who also wrote his own lyrics after Malouf’s words to justify dramatically the presence of a “French” dance in the opera: “(Adèle) That’s why he cannot stay with us,/ why he is here/ one day, then gone/to Paris. (Jane and Adèle) Oh the music and the dance and oh, what style, such clothes./ (Jane) I don’t know Paris, I’m afraid./ (Adèle) Come, dance, Miss Eyre (they dance together).”15 The allusion to Paris subtly refers to Céline Varens, the Paris opera dancer who is Rochester’s mistress and Adèle’s mother in Brontë’s novel. After pinpointing the musical possibilities offered by an operatic adapta- tion of the novel, Malouf considers the specificity of the language of opera at the end of his introduction to underline how music conveys drama and how the balance between words and music inheres in the libretto.16 Walking in Charlotte Brontë’s Footsteps: Jane as Narrator and the Gothic Atmosphere The chamber opera is in two acts with the setting exclusively at Thornfield. All the episodes occurring after or before Jane Eyre’s stay at Thornfield are left out as the libretto’s introduction warns the audience.17 These five characters appear: Jane Eyre (soprano), Adèle (soprano), Mrs.

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