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

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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 adaptation 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 interest 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 calling 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 adaptation 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. Fairfax (mezzo-soprano), Mrs. Rochester (contralto), and Rochester (bass). The economy of characters and setting results in a more intense dramatic situation and a highlighting of the psychological relationship among Jane, Mrs. Rochester, and Rochester. Rewriting of Jane Eyre 195

Although the libretto compresses and even excises parts of the novel, two key elements remain: the gothic atmosphere and Jane as the narrator. To start with Jane’s voice, Malouf reminds us that “It is the voice of the narrator in Jane Eyre that holds the book together and holds us too; commands our attention and inward consent; engages our emotions, convinces us, however improbable the events and the turn of events it is recounting, that the world of the novel is our own, as close to us as our own breath.”18 The librettist had to find a means to dramatize Jane’s voice and to adapt it for an operatic work: “What any dramatisation of Jane Eyre must find is an equivalent for that voice, something that will engage us with the same intimacy, catch us in the same web of enchantment.”19 Consequently, as a theatrical counterpart to the use of first-person narrative in the novel, Malouf astutely presents the events taking place at Thornfield through Jane’s remembered tale: “The opera is the unfolding in Jane’s memory of the events at Thornfield, but, as we see it, in real space and real time.”20 When she recollects her past, she sits downstage at her nee- dlework (see act one’s first stage direction) and, whenever she takes part in the action on stage, she puts her work down, as it happens at the very end of the last act when she stands up to meet Rochester after he has escaped the ruins of his home (act two: Jane puts her work down. Listens. The whirling of wind. Thornfield. Far off his voice, calling). The whirling of wind alluding to the ghost-like presence of Mrs. Rochester contributes to the gothic atmosphere familiar in Bronte’s novel and already evident in the opening scene of the opera. Jane Eyre’s words mimic the whirling of wind, as in “when storms rock the air,/ and the wind out on the moor shakes/ the wainscot, rattles the pane.” These words sound in sharp contrast to those she has just uttered before, “Silence. Quietness.” The music as indicated by the stage direction, “Soprano, alto, child, creating the sound of wind on the moors.” This passage illustrates how the words leave space for the music in the opera as well as Malouf’s literary technique, which is “accomplish[ed] through a combination of expressivity and empti- ness,” as Tom Service aptly puts it.21

Musical Quotations: Operas within the Opera The glissandi played by the cellos in the opening scene of Jane Eyre recall Benjamin Britten’s “Screw Motif” in The Turn of the Screw, an opera based on Henry James’s novella. Michael Berkeley’s musical 196 Jean-Philippe Heberlé pastiche of Britten’s Screw Motif is most apposite for the given situation as James’s narrative also relates a gothic and psychological ghost story narrated by a governess. The prevailing ominous atmosphere in Jane Eyre materializes in the recurring use in the score of a tritone, also known as diabolus in musica, literally “The Devil in Music.” Another reference to a famous opera appears at the beginning of Berkeley’s work. Now it is not simply the playing of a few notes remi- niscent or imitative of another melody or mood; instead, Berkeley quotes verbatim a few bars taken from Lucia di Lammermoor, the famous opera by Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti (1797–1848) premiered in Naples in 1835.22 The libretto bases itself on The Bride of Lammermoor, the novel by Walter Scott (1771–1832), first published in 1819. The novel narrates the story of a girl forced to marry someone she did not like instead of the man she loved. As a conse- quence, she falls into madness. The extract from Donizetti’s opera comes from the famous “Mad Scene” of act three, sung by Adèle when, at the beginning of the opera, she asks Jane Eyre if she knows the scene. In Brontë’s novel, the narrator presents Adèle as the daughter of a Paris opera dancer too and, in volume I, chapter 11, she also describes her singing an operatic song about a betrayed woman, but nowhere does she allude to an extract from Lucia di Lammermoor:

“Mama used to teach me dance and sing, and to say verses. A great many gentlemen and ladies came to see mama, and I used to dance before them, or to sit on their knees and sing to them: I liked it. Shall I let you hear me sing now?” She had finished her breakfast, so I permitted her to give a speci- men of her accomplishments. Descending from her chair, she came and placed herself on my knee; then, folding her little hands demurely before her, shaking back the curls and lifting her eyes to the ceiling, she commenced singing a song from some opera. It was the strain of a forsaken lady, who, after bewailing the perfidy of her lover, calls pride to her aid; desires her attendant to deck her in her brightest jewels and richest robes, and resolves to meet the false one that night at a ball, and prove to him by the gaiety of her demeanour how little his deser- tion has affected her. Adèle sang the canzonette tunefully enough, and with the naïveté of her age.23

All the more, the opera alluded to in Brontë’s novel involves the story of a woman bewailing the perfidy of her lover, which is not the case in Lucia di Lammermoor as the heroine is not forsaken by Rewriting of Jane Eyre 197 a perfidious lover; she must reject him because of her family. Then, why did Malouf and Berkeley choose to refer to and quote a musical extract from the Mad Scene? First, the quotation of the most melodi- ous and recognizable bars of the Mad Scene foregrounds one of the themes of the opera and novel: Mrs. Rochester’s madness and the reason for her madness. Second, the pastiche of the Screw Motif from The Turn of the Screw serves as some metadramatic comment upon the way Michael Berkeley approaches and considers the art of opera.

Malouf and Berkeley’s treatment of Mrs. Rochester’s Lunacy Mrs. Rochester’s madness is a central theme of the opera. It explains why three out of the four episodes of Brontë’s novel, where the madness is manifest, are retained largely unaltered in the opera: the first episode shows Mrs. Rochester setting fire to Mr. Rochester’s room (volume I, chapter 15); the second depicts the mad woman as she tears at Jane’s veil (volume II, chapter 10); and the third depicts the burning of Thornfield (volume III, chapter 10). The events kept by Malouf sometimes combine with others. For instance, the scene in which Bertha sets Mr. Rochester’s room on fire merges with the episode in which she attacks her brother Richard Mason (volume II, chapter 5), since Mr. Rochester, contrary to Mason, is not scratched by Mrs. Rochester in the novel. All the events connected to the physical manifestation of her madness and her confrontation with the other characters—especially Jane—undergo operatic adaptation by Malouf. The quotation of excerpts from the Mad Scene by Adèle contributes to an equivalency between Mrs. Rochester’s madness and Lucia’s. This equation reinforces itself in the use of the flute to convey and symbolize musically the madness of both characters. Placing their lunacy on a par humanizes Mrs. Rochester as a victim. Lucia is not responsible for having become mad; it simply results from what she had to endure. She is a victim. The humanization of Mrs. Rochester by Malouf and Berkeley probably amounts to one of the major differences between the novel and the opera as noted by Tom Service: “The characterisation of Mrs Rochester marks Malouf and Berkeley’s most significant rethinking of Brontë’s work. And, accord- ing to Berkeley, ‘she is not as wicked as we have been led to believe.’; she is rather a ‘tragic figure, somebody you sympathise with, who does not know why she has been locked away like she has.’ ”24 By drawing a parallel between the two characters through Adèle’s allusion, Malouf and Berkeley present Mrs. Rochester with sympathy. This sympathy 198 Jean-Philippe Heberlé affects Jane in the opera and leads her to show compassion to her rival, another major difference between the opera and the book. In the novel, Jane feels no compassion for Mrs. Rochester; she simply has pity, perhaps a more moral response than compassion: “ ‘Sir,’ I inter- rupted him, ‘you are inexorable for that unfortunate lady: you speak of her with hate—with vindictive antipathy. It is cruel—she cannot help being mad.’ ”25 Discussing Mrs. Rochester’s madness in a letter from January 1848, Charlotte Brontë insists on the moral nature of Bertha’s lunacy and the necessity to respond to it with pity:

The character is shocking, but I know that it is but too natural. There is a phase of insanity which may be called moral madness, in which all that is good or even human seems to disappear from the mind and a fiend-nature replaces it. The sole aim and desire of the being thus pos- sessed is to exasperate, to molest, to destroy, and preternatural inge- nuity and energy are often exercised to that dreadful end. The aspect in such cases assimilates with the disposition; all seems demonized. It is true that profound pity ought to be the only sentiment elicited by the view of such degradation, and equally true is it that I have not sufficiently dwelt on that feeling; I have erred in making horror too predominant. Mrs Rochester indeed lived a sinful life before she was insane, but sin itself is a kind of insanity: the truly good behold and compassionate it as such.26

Pity is not missing from Malouf’s libretto in act two, but Jane’s feelings definitely place a greater emphasis on her compassion and on the humanization of her feelings for Mrs. Rochester after they confront each other. In act two, Jane no longer calls Mrs. Rochester a beast; rather, she perceives Rochester’s wife a human being (“unhappy woman,” “your wife”). The humanization of Mrs. Rochester provides undoubt- edly the best case in point to illustrate how Malouf and Berkeley depart from the characterization by Charlotte Brontë. This operatic characterization strengthens itself by two elements: She speaks (sings here)—another similarity with Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw27—in a contralto voice. In the novel, Mrs. Rochester has no voice, whereas she claims a voice in the opera. Her ability to express herself clearly shows her human qualities and not the lunacy Mr. Rochester attributes to her in volume II, chapter 11.28 She thinks over her identity (“Who am I then? Who then I am?”) and considers her abandonment illegitimate (“Oh Edward, Edward—why have you put me away?”), conscious of having been imprisoned and cut off from life at Thornfield. Moreover, like Caliban in The Tempest, she may be Rewriting of Jane Eyre 199 monstrous, but she also shows a sensitivity to music, illuminating her complexity and humanizing her: “As Adèle begins to sing she is joined offstage by the voice of Mrs Rochester, a strange, unintelligible sound, half wail, half song”29 (stage direction, act one). Thus, she does not perform as a monster but as at least an “in-between creature,”30 to use the term Malouf employs to describe Gemmy Fairley in his 1993 novel Remembering Babylon. The very nature of her voice leads us to consider her humanity. Mrs. Rochester sings contralto, a voice not usually associated with the dramatization of a lunatic. On the contrary, in the world of opera, a lunatic, by convention, usually sings in a coloratura soprano voice as illustrated by Lucia in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor and Ophelia in Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet, for instance. A coloratura sings at such a high register that the singer barely manages to articulate words with precision and clarity. Language and discourse seem difficult and that suggests insanity. Thus, Mrs. Rochester’s voice does not correspond to that of a lunatic; it actually bespeaks her erotic and seductive nature in a conventional operatic way and translates musically what Mr. Rochester evidences of her in act two.31 One last point that proves that Mrs. Rochester is not a ghost occurs in the dramatization of the scenes “simply” narrated by Jane so that the spectator can directly witness the events at Thornfield (“in real space and real time”).32 Because Jane’s narration no longer mediates these events, Mrs. Rochester no longer appears as a haunting ghost- like figure but as a real person whose presence and acts can be clearly perceived by the audience. The immediacy created by the dramatization of events proves particularly noticeable in two important scenes with Mrs. Rochester: first, in the scene in which Jane directly con- fronts Bertha, and second, in the scene in which the mad woman sets Thornfield on fire. In the novel, Jane Eyre reports both events. The first, Jane narrates in hindsight during a walk with Mr. Rochester. Through indirect narration, the governess recounts the latter event told her by the innkeeper. To adapt operatically the indirect narration of the fire, Malouf devised the following stratagem: he makes Jane leave the middle of the stage and return to where she was sitting at the beginning of the opera (She begins to walk downstage. [ . . . ]. Jane moves downstage to where we first found her. Sits), so that she becomes a spectator of the action and not an eyewitness. Jane’s observation of the event as an audience member is a mise en abyme of the situation for the viewers of Malouf and Berkeley’s Jane Eyre, since they all per- ceive the event in real space and time. It is one of several metafictional and self-reflexive33 elements permeating the opera. 200 Jean-Philippe Heberlé

Metadramatic Aspects of the Opera The citation from the Mad Scene of Lucia di Lammermoor serves to humanize Mrs. Rochester, but, with other operatic references, it also foregrounds the traditional and cultural roots of Malouf and Berkeley’s opera. As French literary theorist and semiotician Roland Barthes (1915–1980) put it: “The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.”34 David Malouf, as a post- colonial writer, evinces a particular interest in hybridity and the multiplicity of cultures. By incorporating a number of references to other texts (musical or literary), Malouf and Berkeley also play with the audience’s erudition. The meaning one ascribes to the text as a spectator depends on one’s knowledge, education, and ability to rec- ognize allusions. In other words, Malouf and Berkeley play intention- ally with intertextuality to establish that their text echoes many other literary and operatic texts and that its interpretation, like the interpretation of any text, rests finally in the hands of the spectator (or the reader/listener) as asserted by Barthes in the conclusion of “The Death of the Author”: “Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.”35 Furthermore, Lucia di Lammermoor and The Turn of the Screw as quoted in Malouf and Berkeley’s Jane Eyre represent musico-dramatic works generally based on classic fiction or on less famous novels and plays.36 Metadramatically, the adaptation of Jane Eyre refuses to be totally faithful to Brontë’s work, just as Lucia di Lammermoor by Donizetti and The Turn of the Screw by Britten differ from Walter Scott’s and Henry James’s works. Adapting a book into an opera does not imply merely reproducing the original text or hypotext, to use the term coined by French literary theorist Gérard Genette (born 1930).37 Apart from references to operas that partly diverge from the hypotext, a passage in Malouf’s libretto hints at the gap between the original text and its operatic adaptation. It occurs in act one in the stage direction when Mr. Rochester arrives at Thornfield: “He turns: his arm in a sling.” In the opera, he has his arm in a sling after falling from his horse, whereas in the novel his ankle is sprained: “John Rewriting of Jane Eyre 201 is gone for a surgeon: for master has had an accident; his horse fell and his ankle is sprained.”38 This minor change concerning Rochester’s injury has nothing to do with preventing the singer playing his character from limping on stage but points rather to the divergence a hypertext may take. If some passages of the hypertext are different from those of the hypotext, Malouf’s libretto also reinforces and foregrounds some aspects and elements of the novel. This has been studied earlier and further analyzed by Walter Bernhart in “Myth-making Opera: David Malouf and Michael Berkeley’s Jane Eyre”: “What Malouf is doing in his libretto is exactly what opera expects him to do, namely to strengthen and highlight an archetypal and mythical pattern that lies behind a realistic, ‘primary world’ story.”39 The archetypal and mythical pattern lying behind a primary world story—a definition Walter Bernhardt borrows from W. H. Auden40—and foregrounded by Malouf’s libretto are the fairy-tale element, the Byronic and hero- like character of Mr. Rochester, as well as the gothic aspect of Brontë’s novel. Thus, Berkeley and Malouf’s opera is as much a metacomment on the novel as a metacomment on how an operatic genre functions and what it consists in; the highlighting of mythical patterns or the explicit or implicit allusions and references to other operas most particularly foregrounds the artificiality and fictitious aspects of the work, inscribing it unambiguously in the postmodern vein.41 When operatic rewriting involves changes, it depends on both the adaptation of the novel into the opera genre and the necessity or desire of the adaptors to reevaluate the original work within a new ideological context; sometimes both elements dovetail when the untraditional use of operatic conventions calls into question ideol- ogy or conventions. A prime example of ideological modification shows itself in the way Mrs. Rochester’s madness plays out in the opera. She is not mad by nature but because of events she had lived through in the past. Malouf’s approach is thus psychodynamic and inherited from the writings of Sigmund Freud or Carl Gustav Jung, for instance. In adapting the novel to the opera genre, the passion between Jane and Edward Rochester belongs to the triangular relationship between Jane Eyre, Mr. Rochester, and Mrs. Rochester. Triangular relationships between the characters figure as one of the most commonplace conventions of the operatic narrative. The story of Jane Eyre seems to be the perfect vehicle to deal with this convention. Yet, if the triangular relation between the three characters garners respect, their voices do not correspond to the traditional soprano-tenor-baritone (or mezzo-soprano) triangle since the opera 202 Jean-Philippe Heberlé features a soprano-bass-mezzo-soprano triangle. The traditional soprano-tenor-baritone (or mezzo-soprano) triangle symbolizes the harmony between the two lovers (soprano and tenor voices have similar ranges). And because their voices are similar, they symbolically enjoy a requited love. On the contrary, the rival (baritone or mezzo- soprano) has a lower voice than that of the lovers, which symbolically points at an unrequited love between him/her and the soprano or tenor. As any perceptive reader will notice, in the Jane Eyre triangle, Jane (soprano) has a much higher voice than Mr. Rochester (bass), which, applying convention, points at the lack of harmony between the two characters. On the contrary, Mrs. Rochester has a lower voice than Jane; her lower range does not constitute the ideal counterpart to Mr. Rochester’s deep voice. She is his wife, but vocally and symbolically, she must be doomed to rejection. Anyway, the Jane Eyre vocal triangle, if we apply the vocalic convention described here, suggests that from Mrs. Rochester’s perspective/point of view, Jane Eyre stands in as her rival. Yet, Jane Eyre, in spite of not being adapted vocally to Mr. Rochester, also matches him as shown at the end of the opera in the concluding duet, an operatic convention allowing two characters to proclaim their love for each other. Malouf and Berkeley retain some conventions while debunking others. The convention of the duet emphasizes the passion between Jane Eyre and Edward Rochester. In the conclusion of the opera, the two characters sing. Typical of the words in a lovers’ duet, each lover expresses his/her love for her/his lover, but in that moment Jane Eyre freely and openly gives vent to her love and desire for Rochester. She no longer has to repress her love for him and stick to Victorian moral values such as that of a particularly strict set of moral behavior. She can open the door to her desire. She has eventually listened to the words uttered by Mr. Rochester at the beginning of the opera and opened all the doors, whether mental, metaphorical, psychological, or physical.42

Conclusion Malouf and Berkeley’s palimpsests of Jane Eyre function as both a tribute to Charlotte Brontë’s novel and as a reassessment of some of its values and ideas in a postmodern context. The main features of the novel, the gothic atmosphere and the importance of Jane Eyre as a narrator, remain but undergo an adaptation necessary to the dramatization of the book and to the genre of the opera. This adaptation cre- ates a feeling of immediacy so that the spectators immediately register Rewriting of Jane Eyre 203 the events presented as they are directly confronted by them, a confrontation that may call on them to react to what they see in a more emotive and less cerebral way than in the novel. Because of the format of the chamber opera genre, the action remains circumscribed to one place and the cast to a limited number of characters. The librettist and composer then focus on the main characters in the story, recreating the classical operatic triangle of the two lovers and a rival and empha- sizing Mrs. Rochester’s humanity as well as Jane Eyre’s journey to free herself from her moral values. Although the action still takes place in the nineteenth century, the psychology of the two main characters exemplifies a twentieth-century perspective in which the discovery of modern psychology is taken into account; in many ways David Malouf operates as English novelist John Fowles (1926–2005) did in his 1969 novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman, a text that also particularly studies Victorian moral values from a mid–twentieth-century perspective through—again—the story of a governess. Furthermore, Berkeley and Malouf’s Jane Eyre is not a simple rewriting of a famous book; it is also an opera that pays tribute to the operatic genre and foregrounds its artificiality by alluding to other operas through quotations (Lucia di Lammermoor) or pastiches (The Turn of the Screw). Finally, Berkeley and Malouf’s operatic adaptation of Jane Eyre contributes to show that any work of art (whether a book or an opera) is not isolated from any other literary or operatic works but recycles elements of the past because there is no creation ex nihilo in art. The choice of Brontë’s novel to write a new opera is already a case in point.

Notes * The analyses on the musical possibilities offered by an operatic adaptation of the novel, on the Gothic atmosphere and on Mrs. Rochester’s lunacy are partly borrowed from a previously published article in French: Jean-Philippe Heberlé, “Jane Eyre de Michael Berkeley et de David Malouf: La transposition opératique d’un grand classique de la littérature anglaise” [Re-Writing Jane Eyre], in Revue LISA/LISA e-journal (PUR, CLEO, EHESS, CNRS) 4, no. 4 (2006): 144–57. http://lisa.revues.org/1956. Accessed November 2012.

1. Chamber opera is “[a] term used to designate 20th-century operas of small and relatively intimate proportions using a chamber orchestra.” “Chamber Opera,” The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1992), 1–816. Jane Eyre’s orchestration is: flute (+ piccolo and alto flute), oboe (+ cor anglais), clarinet (+ clarinet in A and Eb), bassoon (+ contrabassoon), trumpet, horn, trombone (+ bass trombone), percussion, harp, and strings. Source: “Berkeley: Jane Eyre—Oxford University Press,” (Oxford: Oxford University 204 Jean-Philippe Heberlé

Press). http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780193352803.do# .UJZJ7IaXN8E (Accessed November 1, 2012). 2. Duration of the opera based on the recording of Jane Eyre by Michael Rafferty and The Music Theatre Wales Ensemble. See the bibliography section at the end of this article for full biographical information. 3. I will use the term intertextual as defined by Gérard Genette: “For my part I define it [intertextuality], no doubt in a more restrictive sense [than Julia Kristeva], as a relationship of copresence between two texts or among several texts; that is to say, eidetically and typically as the actual presence of one text within another. In its most explicit and literal form, it is the traditional practice of quoting (with quotation marks, with or without specific references). In another less explicit and canonical form, it is the practice of plagiarism [ . . . ], which is an unde- clared but still literal borrowing. Again, in still less explicit and less literal guise, it is the practice of allusion; that is, an enunciation whose full meaning presupposes the perception of a relationship between it and another text, to which it necessarily refers by some inflections that would otherwise remain unintelligible.” Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the second degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 1–2. 4. Bruno Lessard in one article about Malouf and Berkeley’s Jane Eyre has already and rightly pointed to the necessity of an intermedial approach to any study of the opera: “Berkeley’s music and Malouf’s libretto demand more than the study of the intertextual references to Brontë’s novel. Indeed, working in the musical environment, the composer and librettist have tried to integrate in their work what might be called intermusical references to other operas that stage issues of gender, confinement, secrecy, and madness similar to those explored in Brontë’s novel. Such intermusical references must be assessed and included in the general discourse of intermediality studies.” Bruno Lessard, “The Madwoman in the Classic: Intermediality, Female Subjectivity, and Dance in Michael Berkeley’s Jane Eyre,” in A Breath of Fresh Eyre: Intertextual and Intermedial Reworkings of Jane Eyre, eds. Margarete Rubik and Elke Mettinger-Schartmann (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), 332–33. 5. See David Malouf, Jane Eyre: A Libretto by David Malouf (London: Vintage, 2000), 14. 6. Michael Berkeley, in Tom Service, “Michael Berkeley: Jane Eyre,” booklet to the recording of Jane Eyre (Colchester, UK: Chandos, 2002), 6. 7. “Oxford University Press celebrates the World’s Classics series by reissuing some of the best loved novels in their hardback format, with special introduction by today’s most distinguished writers.” Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), front flap of the dust jacket. Rewriting of Jane Eyre 205

8. David Malouf, “Introduction,” in Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), v. 9. Malouf, “Introduction” in Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, v. 10. Malouf, “Introduction,” in David Malouf, Jane Eyre: A Libretto, ix. 11. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Michael Mason (London: Penguin, 1996), vol. II, chap. 2, 182. 12. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, vol. II, chap. 2, 190. 13. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, vol. II, chap. 2, 117. 14. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, vol. II, chap. 2, 117. 15. The lines added by the composer and not printed in Malouf’s libretto appear in italics. 16. See Malouf, “Introduction,” in David Malouf, Jane Eyre: A Libretto, xi. 17. See Malouf, “Introduction,” in David Malouf, Jane Eyre: A Libretto, x. 18. Malouf, “Introduction,” in David Malouf, Jane Eyre: A Libretto, viii. 19. Malouf, “Introduction,” in David Malouf, Jane Eyre: A Libretto, ix. 20. Malouf, “Introduction,” in David Malouf, Jane Eyre: A Libretto, x. 21. Service, “Michael Berkeley: Jane Eyre,” 6. 22. The French version entitled Lucie de Lammermoor was first per- formed in Paris in 1839. Here Malouf and Berkeley achieve an effect of verisimilitude as it is then chronologically possible for Adèle to have heard the opera when she was living in Paris. 23. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, vol. I, chap. 11, 117–18. 24. Service, “Michael Berkeley: Jane Eyre,” 6. 25. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, vol III, chap. 27, 339. 26. Charlotte Brontë, “Letter of January 1948,” in Jane Eyre, ed. Michael Mason (London: Penguin, 1996), 524–25. 27. The two ghosts (Quint and Miss Jessel) are speechless in Henry James’s novella, but speak (sing) in Britten’s operatic adaptation. 28. “Gentlemen, my plan is broken up:—what this lawyer and his client say is true: I have been married, and the woman to whom I was married lives! You say you never heard of a Mrs. Rochester at the house up yonder, Wood; but I daresay you have many a time inclined your ear to gossip about the mysterious lunatic kept there under watch and ward. Some have whispered to you that she is my bastard half- sister: some, my cast-off mistress. I now inform you that she is my wife, whom I married fifteen years ago,—Bertha Mason by name; sister of this resolute personage, who is now, with his quivering limbs and white cheeks, showing you what a stout heart men may bear. Cheer up, Dick!—never fear me!—I’d almost as soon strike a woman as you. Bertha Mason is mad; and she came of a mad family; idiots and maniacs through three generations! Her mother, the Creole, was both a madwoman and a drunkard!—as I found out after I had wed the daughter: for they were silent on family secrets before. Bertha, like a dutiful child, copied her parent in both points. I had a charm- ing partner—pure, wise, modest: you can fancy I was a happy man. I went through rich scenes! Oh! my experience has been heavenly, 206 Jean-Philippe Heberlé

if you only knew it! But I owe you no further explanation. Briggs, Wood, Mason, I invite you all to come up to the house and visit Mrs. Poole’s patient, and my wife! You shall see what sort of a being I was cheated into espousing, and judge whether or not I had a right to break the compact, and seek sympathy with something at least human.” Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, vol. II, chap. 11, 326–27. 29. This stage direction, clearly laying emphasis on Mrs. Rochester’s Caliban nature, is quoted from the libretto accompanying the premiere recording of Jane Eyre. It is slightly different from the following stage direction that appears in the Vintage edition of the libretto: “As Adèle begins to sing she is joined offstage by the voice of Mrs Rochester singing her own version of madness.” 30. “He was accepted by the tribe but guardedly; in the droll, half- apprehensive way that was proper to an in-between creature,” David Malouf, Remembering Babylon (London: Vintage, 1994), 23. 31. See Malouf, Jane Eyre: A Libretto, 14. 32. Malouf, “Introduction,” in David Malouf, Jane Eyre: A Libretto, x. 33. See Lucien Dällenbach, Le Récit spéculaire: Essai sur la mise en abyme (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1977). 34. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image–Music–Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 146. 35. Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 148. 36. In his article, Bruno Lessard also alludes to Bartok’s Bluebeard Castle and Strauss’s Salome as implicit intermedial references to Berkeley and Malouf’s Jane Eyre. See Bruno Lessard, “The Madwoman in the Classic,” 333, 341–42. 37. See Gérard, Palimpsests. 38. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, vol. 1, chap. 12, 134. 39. Walter Bernhart, “Myth-making Opera: David Malouf and Michael Berkeley’s Jane Eyre,” in A Breath of Fresh Eyre: Intertextual and Intermedial Reworkings of Jane Eyre, eds. Margarete Rubik and Elke Mettinger-Schartmann (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), 317–29. 40. Bernhart, “Myth-making Opera,” 319. “Malouf’s ideas are very much in keeping with W. H. Auden’s well-known views on opera, which he has expressed in various places, as someone who was obsessed with the genre. Auden distinguishes the ‘primary world’ of our ‘historical’ reality from the ‘secondary world’ of a transcendent ‘poetic’ reality, which has a mythical quality and represents such an ‘Edenic’, ‘enchanted’ state beyond our everyday world of experience.” 41. Glenn Ward, Postmodernism (London: Hodder Education, 1997), 33. “The postmodernist novel is concerned with being fiction.” 42. In the Vintage edition of the libretto, although they were sung at the premiere of the opera, the following lines and cues are omitted: (Jane) Swing shut/the door of our soul—/(Rochester) The door— open the door. Rewriting of Jane Eyre 207

Bibliography Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press, 1977. Berkeley, Michael. Jane Eyre (Premiere Recording). CD. Chandos 998. Colchester, UK: Chandos Records, 2002. Bernhart, Walter. “Myth-making Opera: David Malouf and Michael Berkeley’s Jane Eyre.” In A Breath of Fresh Eyre: Intertextual and Intermedial Reworkings of Jane Eyre, edited by Margarete Rubik and Elke Mettinger- Schartmann, 317–29. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Introduction by Michael Mason. London: Penguin, 1996. ———. Jane Eyre. Introduction by David Malouf. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Dällenbach, Lucien. Le Récit spéculaire: Essai sur la mise en abyme. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1977. Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Heberlé, Jean-Philippe. “Jane Eyre de Michael Berkeley et de David Malouf: La transposition opératique d’un grand classique de la littérature anglaise” [Re-Writing Jane Eyre]. In Revue LISA/LISA e-journal (PUR, CLEO, EHESS, CNRS) 4, no. 4 (2006): 144–57. http://lisa.revues.org/1956. Malouf, David. Jane Eyre: A Libretto by David Malouf. London, UK: Vintage, 2000. Malouf, David (with additional words by Michael Berkeley). Jane Eyre. In The booklet to the Premiere Recording of Jane Eyre, 24–69. Colchester, UK: Chandos Records, 2002. Lessard, Bruno. “The Madwoman in the Classic: Intermediality, Female Subjectivity, and Dance in Michael Berkeley’s Jane Eyre.” In A Breath of Fresh Eyre: Intertextual and Intermedial Reworkings of Jane Eyre, edited by Margarete Rubik and Elke Mettinger-Schartmann, 331–46. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007. Sadie, Stanley, ed. The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. 4 vols. London: Macmillan, 1992. Vol.1: 816. Service, Tom. “Michael Berkeley: Jane Eyre.” In Michael Berkeley: Jane Eyre (Premiere Recording), 6–8. CD. Chandos 998. Colchester, UK: Chandos Records, 2002. Ward, Glenn. Postmodernism. London: Hodder Education, 1997.