Magistrsko Delo

UNIVERZA V MARIBORU

FILOZOFSKA FAKULTETA

Oddelek za anglistiko in amerikanistiko

Eva ZORE

MAGISTRSKO DELO

Maribor 2018 UNIVERZA V MARIBORU

FILOZOFSKA FAKULTETA

Oddelek za anglistiko in amerikanistiko

MASTER’S THESIS

Operatic Adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

MAGISTRSKO DELO

Operna adaptacija Shakespearove drame Romeo in Julija

Mentor: Kandidatka: izr. prof. dr. Tomaž Onič Eva Zore

Maribor 2018

Lektor povzetka v slovenščini: Andraž Gradišnik, mag. prof. angl. in slov.

ZAHVALA

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly.

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Velika zahvala gre mojemu mentorju, izr. prof. dr. Tomažu Oniču, profesorju z veliko začetnico, za strokovne nasvete in vsestransko pomoč pri nastajanju tega magistrskega dela.

Hvala red. prof. dr. Michelle Gadpaille za jezikovni pregled magistrskega dela.

Hvala, mami in ati – brez vaju ta pot ne bi bila mogoča.

IZVLEČEK

To magistrsko delo analizira Gounodovo operno adaptacijo Shakespearove drame

Romeo in Julija. Ljubezenska zgodba med Romeom in Julijo je postala arhetip ljubezni, zato lahko njuna lika zasledimo v različnih umetniških disciplinah. Na področju glasbe je bila Shakespearova zgodba prikazana v številnih žanrih, med drugim najvidneje v Bellinijevi operi I Capuleti e i Montecchi (1830), Berliozovi simfoniji Roméo and Juliette (1839), Gounodovi romantični operi Roméo et Juliette

(1867), baletu Sergeja Prokofjeva Ромео и Джульетта (1938) in v Bernsteinovem muzikalu West Side Story (1961). Gounodeva opera Roméo et Juliette je delo v petih dejanjih na francoski libreto Julesa Barbiera in Michela Carréja. Prvič je bila uprizorjena leta 1867 v pariškem gledališču Théâtre-Lyrique.

Magistrsko delo analizira in primerja dve primarni besedili: Shakespearovo dramo

Romeo and Juliet in libreto opere Charlesa Gounoda Roméo et Juliette. Osrednja ideja tega dela je predstaviti, kako je drama preoblikovana v operni libreto in kakšne so morebitne ovire pri tem procesu. Na podlagi te ideje so nastale tri raziskovalne hipoteze, in sicer: 1. Zaradi adaptacije iz drame v operni libreto je novonastalo besedilo opazno krajše od Shakespearovega dela; 2. Libretista z ljubezenskimi dueti med

Romeom in Julijo v operi poudarita temo ljubezni iz Shakespearove drame; 3.

Morebiten manko, ki nastane zaradi krčenja besedila, Gounod kompenzira z glasbo.

Pri operni adaptaciji je ključno vprašanje, kako daljši tekst smotrno skrčiti na krajši obseg. Zaradi standardnih konvencij o primerni dolžini operne uprizoritve zahteva proces adaptacije drame v operni libreto krajšanje izvirnega besedila. V tem procesu se v libretu izgubi nekaj prizorov in skladno s tem tudi določeni sekundarni liki.

Krčenje besedila pri libretu za opero Roméo et Juliette ni vidno le na makrostrukturni, temveč tudi na mikrostrukturni ravni. Gounod je izpostavil tiste Shakespearove teme,

I ki so za operno uprizoritev najprimernejše. V operni adaptaciji sta vidnejši tema ljubezni in tema maščevanja.

Tovrstna krajšanja in spremembe je Gounod nadomeščal z glasbo (z dinamiko, s tempom, z notnimi okraski, s poudarki, z vokalnimi linijami ipd.). V tej operi je opaziti pogosto situacijo, ko ima glasba vidnejšo funkcijo kot libreto.

Teoretični del te naloge predstavlja tri načine adaptacije in odpre vprašanje plagiatorstva pri tem postopku. Največ teorij adaptacije pravi, da je skupni imenovalec adaptacijam fabula. Vsaka od adaptacij istega dela pa se z njo ukvarja na drugačen način. Vprašanje, ki se pojavlja na tem mestu in ki je v današnjem času postalo še posebej relevantno, je avtorstvo teh adaptacij.

Praktični del prinaša makro- in mikrostrukturno analize. Prva se osredotoča na razliko med Shakespearjevo in Gounodovo fabulo. V makrostrukturni analizi je zgotovljeno, da je Gounod skrajšal ali izpustil dele, ki so za razvoj ljubezenske teme manj pomembni. Ljubezenski prizori z Romeom in Julijo so pri Gounodu bolj poudarjeni ali celo preurejeni tako, da poudarjajo ljubezensko tematiko (npr. finale, kjer Romeo oživi za zadnji duet).

Mikrostrukturna analiza podrobneje obravnava tri dele, in sicer dva prizora, ki sta bolj ali manj neposredno prevzeta iz Shakespearove drame in njuni ustreznici iz

Gounodove opere (prolog v začetku drame in dvogovor pod balkonom) ter arijo »Je

Veux Vivre«, ki je sicer Shakespeare ni vključil v nobeno od različic omenjenega dramskega besedila.

Pri analizi prologa se izkaže, da je njegova funkcija je poslušalcu že v začetku razkriti tok fabule in usodo mladostnikov. Zbor pri Shakespearu, ki ta prolog izvaja, je posrednik med poslušalcem in igro, zato ga je bilo zaradi dramske učinkovitosti najverjetneje dobro ohraniti tudi v operi. Operna adaptacija tega prologa nam najprej

prinese pompozno uverturo, ki z žalostnim molom in inštrumenti v nizkih legah podpre napeto atmosfero dogajanja, nato pa preide v prolog,

Arija »Je Veux Vivre« gotovo sodi med najpogosteje izvajane arije vseh časov.

Gounod jo je dodal k Julijini vlogi in z uporabo retoričnih figur ujel njene karakterne značilnosti. Julijino mladost in nagajivost naznanja orkestralna spremljava, ki je za ta del napisana v hitrejšem tempu, z notnimi okraski in razgibano vokalno linijo.

Med najbolj znane prizore Shakespearovega opusa gotovo sodi pogovor Julije in

Romea pod balkonom. Shakespeare je tu predvidel dvogovor, poln retoričnih figur, ki opevajo ljubezen do Julije, Gounod pa je temu dodal še glasbo, ki ljubezensko temo dodatno poudari. V tem poglavju je poleg Shakespearove stopice analizirana tudi rima.

Izkaže se, da Shakespearjevega verza in rime Gounod ni ohranil, kar ima najverjetneje opraviti z dejstvom, da je libreto podrejen glasbi, ki ima v operi načeloma pomembnejšo vlogo kot besedilo.

Svoje mojstrstvo je Shakespeare kazal tudi s številnimi retoričnimi figurami, saj v drami skorajda ni figure, ki je ne bi uporabil. V delu je raziskano, kako sta libretista posamezne retorične figure ohranila, če so te sploh ohranjene. Rezultati kažejo, da sta sicer izključila večino retoričnih figur, a vedno ohranil ključne elemente fabule. V magistrskem delu za bil za jezikovno analizo uporabljen angleški prevod Josepha

Allena iz leta 1969 in ne francoski izvirnik, zato se kakšna figura morebiti mikrobesedilni analizi izmakne že tukaj. Gounod je jezikovni primanjkljaj, ki nastane zaradi adaptacije drame v operni libreto, zapolnil z glasbo. Okoliščine dogajanja prikaže z različnimi tempi, tonalitetami in dinamikami.

Roméo et Juliette je opera duetov, saj jih je Gounod za to opero predvidel kar deset.

Le-ti so pri Shakespearju večinoma dvogovori med Romeom in Julijo, v operi pa so podkrepljeni z glasbenimi temami, ki jih kot variacije lahko zasledimo na več mestih

v operi. Dueti poudarjajo ljubezensko temo, ki pri Gounodu prevlada. Glasba v poslušalcu prebudi drugačna čustva, zbuja asociacije in libreto obogati.

Opus francoskih skladateljev je bogat. Zanimivo bi bilo raziskati še več Gounodevih del in morebiti uporabiti francoske izvirnike za še natančnejšo jezikovno analizo libretov.

Ključne besede: drama, opera, libreto, glasba, adaptacija, mikrostrukturna analiza

ABSTRACT

This Master’s Thesis analyses Charles Gounod’s operatic adaptation of William

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The theoretical part introduces the theory of adaptation with a particular focus on operatic adaptations; it then moves on to three modes of adaptations, and discusses the correlation between adaptation and plagiarism. In the second chapter, the thesis identifies and interprets the sources for

Shakespeare’s and Gounod’s works, introduces the librettists Jules Barbier and

Michael Carré and discusses the background of the period of the operatic production.

The main purpose of this thesis is to identify and study stylistic correlation between

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and the libretto of Roméo et Juliette. The thesis further establishes whether the librettists make certain themes from the play more or less prominent. For this purpose, three passages were selected for the contrastive microstructural analysis of the play and its operatic adaptation in the final chapter of this thesis. The intent is to establish whether librettists managed to preserve

Shakespeare’s most salient stylistic elements as well as other textual characteristics that have an impact on the interpretative potential of the adaptation.

Key words: play, opera, libretto, music, adaptation, microstructural analysis

Contents Introduction ...... 1

1 Adaptation ...... 3

1.1 Modes of adaptation ...... 4

1.2 Adaptation as plagiarism ...... 6

1.3 Operatic adaptation ...... 8

1.3.1 From Shakespeare to Gounod ...... 10

1.3.2 Setting libretto to music ...... 13

2 Analysis of the selected works ...... 16

2.1 Hypotheses and methodology ...... 16

2.2 Macrostructural analysis ...... 17

3 Microstructural analysis ...... 23

3.1 The Prologue ...... 24

3.2 Je Veux Vivre ...... 29

3.3 The Balcony Scene ...... 34

3.3.1 Meter and rhyme ...... 34

3.3.2 Rhetorical devices ...... 35

3.3.3 Duets ...... 46

4 Conclusion ...... 49

5 Bibliography ...... 53

Introduction

The purpose of this Master’s Thesis is to offer an insight into Charles Gounod’s operatic adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet. The love story of Romeo and Juliet has often been reworked, rewritten and modernized. Love between Romeo and Juliet has become an archetype for love, and their story is “reappearing in diverse cultural contexts from opera to contemporary film” (Sanders 2006, 71). Many attempts have been made to put the romantic story about endless love into various artistic disciplines. In the field of music, Shakespeare’s storyline was reworked into Bellini’s opera I Capuleti e i Montecchi (1830), Berlioz’s symphony Roméo and Juliette (1839), Gounod’s romantic opera Roméo et Juliette (1867) and – in the 20th century – into a Broadway musical West Side Story (1961) by Leonard Bernstein, to name just a few. There are many more works of art where fragments from Romeo and Juliet are used as motifs. Gounod’s and Bernstein’s works, where Shakespeare’s play creates a scenario for the dramatic musical libretto, show how the play can be transformed into a musical work.

Charles Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette is an opera in five acts composed to a French libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré. Gounod’s opera borrowed the storyline from Shakespeare; it demonstrates slight plot variations and some additional characters. My initial idea was to depict how a play can be transformed into a libretto and point out the potential obstacles in the process. The primary goal for my primary research was to analyse the main sources: Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet (1597) and the libretto of Gounod’s operatic adaptation Roméo et Juliette (1867); the latter was analysed in the 1996 English translation (from French) by Joseph Allen.

The main sources for the theoretical part were Linda Hutcheon’s Theory of Adaptation (2013) and Julie Sanders’ Adaptation and Appropriation (2006), which illustrate three modes of adaptation; opens the issue of adaptation as plagiarism and deals with operatic adaptation. It displays Shakespeare’s and Gounod’s main sources for their works and present the librettists Jules Barbier and Michael Carré. Chapter two focuses on macro- and microstructural analysis of the libretto. The main point of interest is to

1 examine the extent to which Gounod changed the plot. Furthermore, the thesis tries to establish whether librettists stay strongly rooted in Shakespeare’s tragic circumstances and tone, or whether they are more interested in presenting the power of love as the central theme of their work. Later, the thesis analyses and compares Shakespeare’s and Gounod’s main characters. It refers to Aristotle’s Poetics, which today still offers a relevant comprehensive overview of the main pillars of literary theory and thus tries to establish whether the chorus in Gounod’s opera functions in the role of a narrator. Furthermore, I move on to research operatic adaptation of the libretto and attempt to determine if the lovers’ duets make the theme of romantic love more prominent than in the original play.

The research has shown that librettists changed and adapted almost all of Shakespeare’s work to make it correspond to the typical conventions regarding operatic length. Therefore, three passages were selected for microstructural analysis of operatic adaptation: the Prologue, the aria “Je Veux Vivre”, and the Balcony Scene duet. The analysis focuses on whether librettists manage to recreate Shakespeare’s main figures of speech and his style of writing.

1 Adaptation

Linda Hutcheon (2013, 2) sees adaptation as a frequent interpretative process; it occurs on the television and movie screen, on the musical and dramatic stage, on the Internet, in novels and comic books, and so on. Julie Sanders (2006, 26) a expounds similar definition as adaptation signals the relationship with an informing source text or original.

In Adaptations of Shakespeare, Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier clarify the problem that occurs when labeling a work an adaptation. They argue that adaptation is not a proper name for what we colloquially call adaptation. There are only labels with more or less relevance, connection to history, and connotations both helpful and misleading. Fischlin and Fortier (2000, 2) quote Laura Rosenthal, who claims that the eighteenth century plays that reworked pieces by Shakespeare were called alterations or imitations, rather than adaptations. They further state that in a current electronic Shakespeare discussion group, they are called 'spinoffs'. Additionally, they recommend the terms tradaptation, abridgement, version, reduction/emendation, and transformation. However, they believe that none of these labels is broad enough to be a general label and propose to use the term appropriation (Fischlin and Fortier 2000, 3). However, in this thesis, I use the term ‘adaptation’ to refer to literary works based on those originally written by Shakespeare.

Hutcheon (2013, 2) affirms that adaptations are not new to our era. Shakespeare transferred his stories from page to stage and made them available to a new audience. She discloses that adaptations were considered questionable; critics have attacked (especially film) adaptations of literature. She further recounts that it seemed to be more or less acceptable to adapt Romeo and Juliet into a respectable art form, like opera or ballet, but not to make it into a movie. Hutcheon (2013, 2-3) also quotes Virginia Woolf who called film a “parasite” and literature its “prey” and “victim”. Julie Sanders in Adaptation and Appropriation states that “adaptation can be a transposition practice, casting a specific genre into another generic mode, an art of re- vision in itself” (2006, 18). More philosophical views have been espoused by Fischlin and Fortier, who imply that whenever and whatever we perform, that performance is

3 a reproduction of something that has already been done before: “all creation is social creation, all production always reproduction: everything we think, say, or do relies upon ideas, words, and cultural norms that pre-exist us” (2000, 4). They further emphasize their point by saying that “[i]ntertextuality and citation suggest a generalized borrowing and rewriting of existing cultural material, more or less explicit, deliberate, or conscious, as the origin and limit of cultural activity” (Fischlin and Fortier 2000, 4).

In general, there are many reasons for adapting a certain work. Adaptations can also be used as critique; e.g., in the form of anti-war campaigns or other economic, cultural, political or personal motivation or intention. For example, Romeo, Juliet and Darkness is a film adaptation from 1960, based on the story of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The setting in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia is used as a means to comment on intra- societal tension and how it could lead to a situation where two lovers could find themselves on opposite sides of the cultural conflict, even when part of the same culture.

Fischlin and Fortier (2000, 6) recognize that to construe the cultural politics of adaptation, we must also examine how adaptations take place in the context of a structured relationship between the original work and the adaptation, and how this relationship operates within existing institutional norms. More so, Hutcheon (2013, 93-95) highlights that in the act of adapting, choices are made based on many factors, including genre or medium conventions, political engagement, and personal as well as public history.

1.1 Modes of adaptation

Various media can be used to show or tell a story. However, the perspective, and thus the grammar, changes with the audience, who interact with the story in the new media. Hutcheon (2013, 22) depicts three modes of presentation that can be used in portraying a story:

1. The telling mode (novels) immerses us through imagination in a fictional world; 2. The showing mode (plays and films) immerses us through the perception of the aural and the visual and 3. The participatory mode (videogames), which immerses us physically and kinaesthetically.

In the telling mode, engagement begins in imagination, which is controlled by text. A reader can stop reading at any page, re-read previous parts, or skip ahead. The performance mode, opera in the case of this thesis, teaches us that language is not the only way to express meaning or to relate stories. Music offers auditory “equivalents” for the character's emotions. Hutcheon (2013, 22-23) depicts how it also influences the audience’s perceptions of events; sound can enhance, reinforce, or even contradict the visual and verbal aspects of a work. The adapter can impose on a loosely episodic or picaresque narrative a familiarly patterned plot of rising and falling action with a clear beginning, middle, and end; or, argues Hutcheon “he might even deliberately substitute a happy ending to mute tragedy or horror” (2013, 37).

Hutcheon (2013, 12-13) claims that separate units of the story can also be transmediated – just as they can be summarized in digest versions or translated into another language (But they may well change in the process of adaptation, and not only in terms of their plot ordering. Hutcheon (2013, 13) epitomizes that pacing can be transformed, time compressed or expanded. In other cases, it might be the point of departure or conclusion that is totally transfigured in adaptation. Partly, we can see that in Gounod's version of Romeo and Juliet. Being shown a plot gives us direct and kinaesthetic experience. “To show a story, as in movies, ballets, radio and stage plays, musicals and operas, involves a direct aural and usually visual performance experienced in real time” (Hutcheon 2013, 13).

Sanders (2006, 45) claims that adaptations are dependent on the literary canon for the provision of a shared body of characters, storylines and ideas upon which new work can be made. The most common adaptations move from telling to showing mode, such as adapting from print to stage. When adapting in such a way, there is a potential

5 problem: there is a disconnect between the reading of a text and its dramatic performance. Hutcheon (2013, 39) asserts that in a very real sense, every live staging of a text could theoretically be considered an adaptation in its performance. “The text does not always tell an actor about such matters as gestures, expressions, and tone of voice” (Hutcheon 2013, 39). Usually, the director and actors decide how to interpret and recreate the text. There is often an overabundance of information presented through text in novels that is not easy to communicate through gestures or music in performance adaptations. David Lodge, as reported by Hutcheon (2013, 39), remarks that in the move from telling to showing, it is important to point out conflicts and ideological differences between characters. They must be made visible and audible. In the process of adapting there is inevitably a certain amount of refocusing of themes, characters and plot concludes Hutcheon (2013, 40). Similarly, Sanders notes that adaptation is frequently “a specific process involving the transition from one genre to another: novels into film, play into musical etc.” (2006, 19).

1.2 Adaptation as plagiarism

If we call a work an adaptation, we openly expose its correlation to another work. Despite the arguments that adaptations are not autonomous works, which should be interpreted and valued as such, many theories have insisted that they are. “This is one reason why an adaptation has its own aura; its own presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” (Hutcheon 2013, 7). Adaptation is frequently involved in showing commentary on a source text, which is mostly achieved by offering an aspect revised from the original or adding hypothetical motivation, indicates Sanders (2006, 19). An interesting view on copyright protections is offered by Fischlin and Fortier:

Long dead, Shakespeare lies outside copyright protection, but a moral right is still invoked by conservative critics on his behalf. /…/ [T]oday the adapter is the one who is protected to copyright; free to do whatever he wants to Shakespeare’s plays. This means adapters can withhold permission to produce or republish their adaptations and can, if they wish, full back on their legal status as authors and prohibit adaptations of their adaptations. (Fischlin and Fortier 2000, 6)

Fischlin and Fortier (2000, 5) clarify that an adaptation is not considered plagiarism, since according to legislation ideas themselves cannot be copyrighted. With the adaptation, the form changes, but the content remains. Fischlin and Fortier argue that “when we recontextualize, we inevitably rework and alter, even if we are trying to be faithful to our sense of the original” (2000, 5˗6).

Most theories of adaptation agree that the story is the common denominator offered via different media and genres, each of which deals with that story in an individual way. “Adaptation is repetition, but repetition without replication”, highlights Hutcheon (2013, 9). Even a glance in Oxford Dictionary offers some alternatives for the noun to adapt: “to make (something) suitable for a new use or purpose; modify.” Hutcheon further explains that “an adaptation is an announced and extensive transposition of a particular work or works, which can bring a shift in medium, e.g. a poem to a play, or genre, e.g. an epic to a novel, or a change of context” (2013, 8˗10). Furthermore, she maintains that “transposition can also mean a move in ontology from the real to fictional, or alternatively from historical or biographical to fictional” (2013, 8˗10). “The process of adaptation, therefore, always involves (re-)interpretation and then (re-) creation” (2013, 8˗10).

Hutcheon (2013, 12) claims that “we can define an adaptation as a form of intertextuality, seen as palimpsests through our memory of other works that resonate through repetition with variation or as a derivation that is not derivative, as work that is second without being secondary” (2013, 12). Hutcheon (2013, 7˗16) notes that adaptations are usually to a different medium; it means that they are transposed from one sign (words) system to another (images). As Sanders argues, “the adapting text does not always seek to consume or efface the informing source, but it is actually the very endurance and survival of the original text that enables the ongoing process of juxtaposed readings that are crucial to the cultural operations of adaptation” (2006, 25).

1.3 Operatic adaptation

Music has found a significant reference point in literature. Sanders (2006, 153) notes that musicology has had a long-standing interest in the field of adaptations. Simon Robinson in “What do Words Express That Music Cannot?” (Robinson 2013, 7) explains that music is a useful tool for arousing emotions. The combination of music and words, can form the best integrative display of all, communicating information which could not be expressed through the use of only words or only music. In his 1961 essay, Weisstein notes that, if the study of libretti is avoided, then “by the same token we would deprive ourselves the pleasure of studying sketches for a painting, a bozetto of a sculpture, the plans for a building or a film script” (1961, 15).

When it comes to operatic adaptations of literary works, the move to the showing from telling mode has the usual formal consequences, because reduction is crucial and necessary for both plays and novels. As Weisstein explains, “music lacks the speed and verbal dexterity, and fewer words are needed in opera that would be required in a play of comparable length” (1961, 15˗16). Librettos are usually shorter than the texts of adapted works, and this is why reductions in length are crucial when it comes to creating an adaptation. Abbott (in Hutcheon 2013, 37) defines this contraction of text as a “surgical art”. It is in opera that the loss of quality and quantity counts is particularly obvious, given its extremes in compression; it takes much longer to sing than to utter a line of text, much less to read one; the operatic mode “denatures” a text (Hutcheon 2013, 38).

Despite omitting some parts of the original story, an adaptation can have a coherent and powerful dramatic effect. Hutcheon (2013, 45) argues that a musical, which uses dialogue, might keep a literary text's words, but it may still preserve and translate its themes to a different medium. The change from a telling to a showing mode may also mean a change in genre and in medium. Hutcheon illustrates that with that “it can come to a shift in the expectations of the audience” (2013, 59). Moreover, it is argued that it is the music in such works that produces the spectacle by evoking a dimension of depth of introspection. Our bodies respond differently to various rhythms and tone colours. At its utmost, this must be true for live opera performance, for which it has been said

8 that music “conveys the rhythm of the emotions at the same time as language names them” (Hutcheon 2013, 60).

Hutcheon (2013, 60) claims that because of the necessary compression of their stories, characters in an opera may appear two-dimensional. Hutcheon (2013, 60) expounds that the reason for this can be found in the fact that characters on stage do not hear the music they sing, except when they self-consciously perform what are called “phenomenal songs” such as lullabies or toasts. This is why music can embody characters’ interiority. What is more, “opera, in fact, has a fixed convention for representing interiority: the aria” (Hutcheon 2013, 60-61). Dramatic action and conversation stop during the aria, but we can witness characters’ introspection and reflection through music. Hutcheon notes that “if operas do not contain arias, leitmotifs, usually as musical repetitions and variations, bring the audience what characters cannot consciously face” (2013, 60-61). An important and obvious fact regarding live performances is that they occur in real time, with their sounds and images correlated. “In a film, on the other hand, the relation between sound and images is engineered and constructed” (2013, 60-61). According to Hutcheon (2013, 56) we can see that time exposes a challenge for the adapter. The stage also has more limited means (not only changes in the story timeline but also the technicalities, for example, the time needed to change scenes) at its disposal for dealing with temporal issues. Hutcheon writes that even though arias offer us insight into a character’s psyche, they can cause temporal problems because the aria’s technical effect is to stop time. Another temporal dimension that can be both an advantage and a constraint is the pulse of music. When it comes to filmed operas, “directors and editors often derive the pacing of camera shots from rhythm of the music” (Hutcheon 2013, 66).

The theories usually teach about visual effect when it comes to the change from imagination to actual perception, but the aural experience is just as important as the visual. Stage performances have been called “the embodiment of excess”, which Tambling (1987, 10) explains: “when speaking characters break into song, they imply that life cannot be contained in its ordinariness, but must spill over into it and into rhythm, singing and movement.” Even more, in operas, music is arguably as important a narrating component as are the words, or furthermore; adaptations for ballet stage

9 not only add a visual dimension but they also subtract the verbal, reminds Hutcheon (2013, 41). “The adaptation of a novel or short story to the (spoken) dramatic stage also involves the visual dimension, as well as the verbal” (Hutcheon 2013, 41). With this added dimension “come audience’s expectations not only about voice but, as in dance, also about appearance, as we move from the imagined and visualized to the directly perceived” (2013, 41). There are some limitations of the physical stage. Hutcheon (2013, 42) notes that the minimal props and scenery on stage challenge creators to make the scene as useful as they can for all acts of the play.

1.3.1 From Shakespeare to Gounod

As long as there have been plays by Shakespeare, there have been adaptations. Fischlin and Fortier (2000, 1) reveal that for almost four hundred years, playwrights have been taking Shakespeare's works and remaking them. They further explain that Shakespeare himself was as adapter, since he took existing materials from various sources and crafting them into new artistic creation.

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was inspired by pre-existing works and legends. The first reference to the Romeo and Juliet variation of the story can be found in Ephesiaca of Xenophon of Ephesus in 3rd century A.D. (Narrative 1966, 269).1 Moore (1950, 3) illustrates that the concept of Capulets and Montagues is based on political faction, since the Montecchi and Cappelletti families never existed at all. Moore (1950, 21) says that the second reference to a Romeo and Juliet-like story is Giovanni Boccaccio’s Filostrato and Filocolo, which are considered to be a “dominant stylistic influence” on Shakespeare’s play. Furthermore, according to Moore, there is evidence that the writer took some main subplots (e.g. balcony scene)2 for the play from Luigi da Porto’s (1485-1925) Romeo e Giulietta.

1 Anthia was separated from her lover and to avoid marrying the man she disliked, she drank what she thought to be poison, but which was merely a sleeping liquid. 2 Romeo climbs up to Giullietta’s balcony and listens to her thoughts.

Moore (1950, 95) remarks that the first English writers that put Romeo and Juliet to paper were Arthur Brooke (publishing Romeus and Iuliet in 1562) and William Painter (publishing Rhomeo and Iulietta in 1566). Brooke’s play is known to set the foundations and to be the source for William Shakespeare’s later and most famous work, while Brooke had been inspired by the Italian poet Mateo Bandello. Even more, Shakespeare recapitulated Paris, Capulet and Montague almost entirely from Brooke’s characters (Moore 1950, 96). Shakespeare also used his works as a source for Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night.

As Newman (1930, 160) reports, Gounod wrote various forms of composition, including the symphony, as did every other French composer of that time; he also had to look to the theatre for a career. Charles Gounod lived from 1818 to 1893. Newman (1930, 160) suggests that when he came to the writing of Roméo et Juliette (1867), he was already a prolific composer, if not a very successful author. Besides, the only genre that lacked from his repertoire was dramatic theatre. His first opera was the three-act Sapho (1851), which did not keep on stage. Later he wrote Ulysse (1852), a five-act tragedy, La Nonne Sanglante (1854) and Moliere’s Le Médicin malgré lui (The Mock Doctor) in 1858. He was best known for his career as a church organist and his acclaimed opera Faust (1859). Among his other works are these: Philémon er Baucis (1860), La Reine de Saba (1862), Mireille (1864), La Colombe (1866), Cinq Mars (1877), Polyeucte (1878) and Le Tribut de Zamora (1881) (Newman 1930, 161).

Langford (2011, 157) writes that Roméo et Juliette debuted in 1867 in a new theatre in Paris, the Théâtre-Lyrique, which offered large-scale, serious works and lightweight comedies. At the time of writing this piece, Gounod was aware that two musical versions of Romeo and Juliet had already been done in the last thirty years: Bellini’s opera I Capuleti e i Montecchi3 (1830) and Berlioz’s Roméo and Juliette symphony with vocal solos and chorus (1839). The reason for writing Shakespeare, argues Langford, was that Gounod’s time was the era of operatic romanticism and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet seemed the perfect tale to be staged. It was also the

3 Bellini’s opera is less about romantic duetting and more about characters pursuing a course of action that will solve their problems. One unusual thing in his works was also that Romeo was a mezzo soprano (Langford 2011, 155).

11 most used source of adaptation in the nineteenth century; few earlier translations of Shakespeare’s work into other languages existed at that time. In the story of star- crossed lovers, affirmsLangford (2011, 154), one can find romanticism in the power of emotions, irrational thoughts, and belief in love at first sight. Another reason that Langford states for Gounod’s decision is that Shakespeare’s most successful years were a great era of classic drama led by French writers. The dramatic perception determined that a good play was one representing “an action that unfolded within a single twenty-four-hour period, one that took place in only one location, and one that involved only a single line of dramatic action” (Langford 2011, 155-156). This was antithetical to how Shakespeare worked. Most of his plays expand over a longer period of time, involve several changes of location and often include multiple intersecting lines of dramatic action. This is why Shakespeare was judged by eighteenth-century writers as a dramatic barbarian. Soon the age of reason and intelligence was swept away by a new spirit, in which the assertion of individuality and emotions ruled over all. His plays came into value again and composers like Verdi, Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Gounod, and Tchaikovsky rewrote Shakespeare for musical adaptations. Furthermore, Garben (in Hutcheon 2013) adds that adaptations of Shakespeare, in particular, may “be intended as tributes or as a way to supplant canonical cultural authority” (2013, 93-95).

Gounod appreciated Berlioz and his homage; he was modelling Roméo et Juliette after techniques he found in Berlioz’s works. As Langford (2011, 155) describes Gounod’s first attempts at the opera genre, he claims that Gounod took some ideas from Meyerbeer, who was the leading composer in French opera in the 19th century. But soon Gounod switched and “invented” his own opera style, called opéra lyrique4, which “relied less on scenic spectacle and massed choral effects, concentrating instead on the musical exploration of individual characters” (Langford 2011, 156).

In the writing of Roméo et Juliette, Charles Gounod cooperated with his librettists Jules Barbier and Michael Carré. Jules Barbier (1825–1901) and Michel Carré (1821– 1872) were the leading librettists in France, providing the text for many other works, including Mignon and Hamlet for Ambroise Thomas, and Les Contes d’Hoffmann for

4 Its manifestation was Faust in 1859.

Jacques Offenbach. Langford (2011, 156-157) notes that, after Faust, Roméo et Juliette was Gounod’s second consolidation with the librettists.

However, Gounod had several problems before successfully staging Roméo et Juliette. Huebner (1992, 166) lists some issues Gounod faced. Huebner writes (1992, 166) that his first problem was addressed in the letter to Choudens,5 where it appears that Gounod was pressured by his publisher, whose interest lay in producing a single version exportable to all houses, to write recitatives, which he refused to. Secondly, Huebner notes how the structure of the large internal finale gave rise to the revisions:

From the time he started sketching the opera in April 1865, Gounod complained about the formidable task of setting a succession of on-stage duels (there are no less than four) at the end of Act III. As first entered into the composition draft, the number is considerably different from that performed on opening night, and not surprisingly, the music that actually accompanies the Stéphano-Grégorio engagement is much shorter in the draft than in later sources. (Huebner 1992, 171)

Huebner (1992, 283) concludes that despite the quarrels he had with the authorities, Gounod achieved the restoration of a higher sense of artistic purpose to the French stage.

1.3.2 Setting libretto to music

A dilemma that occurs when adapting is to define the author of the adaptation. Hutcheon says that “the complexities of the new media also mean that adaptation there too is a collective one” (2013, 81). The name of the music director does not usually come to mind as a primary adapter, although he or she is the one who creates the music that “reinforces emotions or provokes reactions in the audience and directs our interpretation of different characters, perhaps solo violins for sweet innocence or a

5 Publishing house specializing in opera and other musical works.

13 snarling bass clarinet to make us uncomfortable around ambivalent characters” (Hutcheon 2013, 81). Although the music is of main importance in operatic adaptations, composers usually work from the script, not from the adapted text, because they have to write music to fit the production’s action, timing, and budget. Beyond this, Hutcheon points out that it is very important for adapters to know what kind of audience they are dealing with. Sanders argues that “the spectator must be able to participate in the play of similarity and difference perceived between the original work, source of inspiration to appreciate fully the reshaping or rewriting undertaken by the adaptive text” (2006, 45).

If the audience does not know what to expect, is it really an adaptation if we are not familiar with the original work? In this case, we simply experience an adaptation as we would any other work. If we know the basic story outline of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, for example, we are likely to fill in possible gaps caused by reduction of the plot. When the compilation of music is added, it seems to help if the story being portrayed is a familiar one. McNally (in Hutcheon 2013, 121) states that whether “the characters and situations are familiar, listeners can relax and let the music take them somewhere new and wonderful”.

There were some limitations to putting such a complicated play into words and music. This is why librettists faced some issues while writing the libretto for Gounod’s opera. The focal point in writing Roméo et Juliette was how to put Shakespeare’s text into an opera libretto of manageable length. Langford (2011, 157) notes that some cuts must be made in the text of any play bound for the operatic stage. In addition, the number of characters and the complexity of their relationships in a Shakespearean play require simplifications to make the play manageable and understandable. He further expounds that, if adapted to opera, a play loses its movement and description of details. In addition, Langford affirms that the mixture of comic and serious parts in almost all Shakespeare’s works was something that serious opera of that time would not tolerate.

Music is often used to involve the viewer emotionally; empathetic quality is provided by the musical score, affirms Watson’s Art Journal in “Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet”. Adding music to mere words creates mood and illustrates atmosphere to feel the whole art of literature. Orchestra and voices can interpret characters; establish time and place

14 and express people’s feelings. Watson’s Art Journal (1867, 244) notes that, after listening attentively to certain scenes one feels sad, without knowing exactly why. Music and moving images have to be brought together in harmony within a dramatic context. Composers need to be careful about when they introduce music to a scene. Tomaž Onič (2016, 61) proves that if it is brought suddenly, it can be too obvious and can draw attention to itself and away from the action. “It is best when the entry point of music has a dramatic action” (Onič 2016, 61). As Roccatagliati (1995, 82) notes, librettists’ procedures are strongly conditioned by the compositional conventions of the operatic milieu in which they live and further declares that this “usually comes across disjointedly as part of the operatic amalgam on the stage” (Roccatagliati 1995, 82-83). Gianetti (in Onič 2016, 63) specifies that high-pitched sounds usually evoke feelings of tension and suspense, just before the action reaches the climax. Onič (2016, 64) clarifies that these can be used to emphasize the seriousness of a scene, or they can suggest emotions like anxiety, fear, disappointment, regret or grief. The implications of volume and tempo are similar: loud sounds are forceful and threatening, accelerating music enhances tension, while quiet music slows down the action.

According to Conn (2001, 8) Gounod’s decision to make Romeo a tenor lies in operatic history, where lovesick, courageous characters were often tenors, while lower voices (baritone and bass) are reserved for older, authoritative characters like Friar Laurence. Conn (2009, 1) demonstrates that by making him a tenor, Gounod defined Romeo as a heroic young man, and by making Juliet a light-lyric soprano, he supported her soft and innocent character. She, being an only child, and having a happy and joyful character, Gounod emphasized by adding laughter and giggles to her opera parts. For composers, it is important to choose appropriate voices for characters, since the vocal range can reflect characters’ personal features. Juliet’s musical lines are “airy and light, with a hint of coloratura” (Conn 2001, 9). Choosing appropriate voices for certain roles is very important. Tybalt being a tenor and Mercutio a strong baritone, reflects their characteristics. Conn (2001, 15) interprets that Mercutio’s voice illustrates his manliness. This bass line creates tension in the scene where Tybalt and Mercutio fight. Fast tempo, accelerations and short vocal inserts create an even more special atmosphere for audience.

2 Analysis of the selected works

2.1 Hypotheses and methodology

This thesis analyses and compares two primary texts: William Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet and the libretto of Charles Gounod’s opera Roméo et Juliette. My research is based on the following hypotheses:

Hypothesis 1: This being an adaptation of a play to an opera libretto, a decrease in the amount of text is anticipated.

Hypothesis 2: Librettists make the theme of love from Shakespeare’s play more prominent in the libretto, mostly owing to the inclusion of several lovers’ duets.

Hypothesis 3: The reduction of Shakespeare’s text, together with a variety of its stylistic elements, is compensated for with various musical themes and other features.

In order to comply with the conventions regarding length of an opera, the process of adapting a play to an opera libretto requires text reduction. In the process of shortening the play, certain parts of the plot and sometimes the corresponding scenes need to be cut. In the process of plot compression, some characters, too, are omitted. This reasoning leads to Hypothesis 1. The second hypothesis refers to literary themes and motifs. Not only did Gounod’s librettists have to limit a certain amount of text and, therefore, several secondary characters, they also had to make choices regarding which Shakespearean themes to preserve (and possibly make more prominent) and which ones to set aside. Since the theme of love is proverbially suitable for musical genres, one would expect Gounod to make this theme from the play more prominent in the libretto. To achieve this, he would be expected to focus on the scenes in which a conversation between Romeo and Juliet can be shown and to transform these into love duets. In this way he would compensate for a decrease in quantity of the text and, possibly, for the potential loss of figures of speech as well as several other stylistic

16 elements by introducing a variety of musical features (musical ornaments, vocal passages etc.), which is an expectation set as Hypothesis 3.

Since most of the microstructural analysis was focused on stylistic issues, the main approaches used in this piece of research were the analytical and comparative ones. The results might, to some extent, be influenced by the fact that one of the primary texts used in the microstructural comparative analysis was not the French original but its translation into English. Still, the chosen translation, provided by Joseph Allen, is a (close) word-for-word translation of the French original from 1969.

2.2 Macrostructural analysis

The macrostructural analysis demonstrates how the original Shakespeare play is adapted into the form of the libretto. Additional alterations in performance adaptations range from stylistic changes to inserting new characters. Since music flows in a different way than language, it is expected that some parts of the play will not be preserved; however, structurally the play and the opera libretto are quite similar.

The plot of the libretto is divided into 5 acts, as it is in Shakespeare. The setting of Act I is a party at the Capulet's house, which takes place in Act I Scene V in Shakespeare. It portrays Juliet’s and Romeo’s love at first sight as well as Tybalt’s anger. “Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet” (1867, 244) remarks that there is an abundance of life in the music that Gounod found for his first act. The author of this article exemplifies how the dance at the party is three-four measure, which both begins and terminates it, and by its frequent appearance may be said to bind the whole together. As “Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet” (1867, 244) demonstrates, it is tuneful and comprises two choral themes: “L'heure s'envole” (The hour flies past) and “Nuit d'ivresse” (Night of madness). The short and tuneful chorus “Allons, jeunes gens” (Let’s go, youngsters) is the signal for Juliet’s entry, which is repeated to the same words close to the finale. Finale I that concludes the first Act contains another crucial moment, i.e., when Juliet finds out that Romeo is the son of the great enemy of her house. Watson’s art Journal continues by noting that “the orchestra points that out with sombre monotony and reiterates the same

17 passage, concluding with a slow and expressive orchestral symphony, subsequently repeated in Act IV” (1867, 245).

Act II contains the secret conversation between Romeo and Juliet, Romeo’s soliloquy, and the Balcony Scene. In Shakespeare, the Nurse plays an important role as a messenger between Romeo and Juliet. Overall, she supports the romance between the protagonists and is the only one besides Friar Laurence who knows about their marriage. Gounod named the nurse Gertrude, which is an interesting choice, given the associations this name brings along from Shakespeare’s Hamlet; however, she plays a minor role in Gounod’s opera but one essential enough not to be omitted. In the opera, too, she remains Juliet’s confidant and adviser.

Since Act II contains several scenes with conversation between Romeo and Juliet, love duets and long dialogues between them are to be expected. Gounod also highlights Romeo’s soliloquy “Ah! Lève-toi, soleil!” (Ah! Arise, o sun!) as one of the main points of the act. The duet between the lovers where they exchange vows is, according to the author of the article “Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet”, “the superabundance of measured recitative, and the reiteration of certain phrases which, melodious and touching, as they are, might have told their tale in a single delivery /…/” (1867, 245). The music of Act II does repeat themes from the previous act; however, by repeating a number of musical themes throughout the opera, Gounod achieves a certain logical symmetry.

In Act III, the librettists omitted Shakespeare’s text preceding the scene introducing the ceremony where Friar Laurence marries Romeo and Juliet. Langford (2011, 164) describes the closure of the wedding introducing a quartet “O pur Bonheur!” (O, happiness unalloyed!) which includes Romeo, Juliet, her nurse and Friar Laurence. Act III then culminates in a large choral finale that includes the duet between Mercutio and Tybalt. The chorus of the rival scene is full of energy and lively stage action; it is repeated twice and is, according to reviews, considered the most successful in the musical sense. Later, Romeo kills Tybalt and is banished from Verona. Tybalt and Mercutio’s characters are hot-tempered, and their readiness for battle for their loved ones is constant. Tybalt hates the Montagues and, with the desire to arrange marriage between Juliet and Paris, he reveals himself as a furious aristocrat. Gounod’s Tybalt is

18 more fleshed out, especially at the beginning of the play, when conversing to Paris about Juliet being suitable for him.

Gounod moves Shakespeare’s Scene V of Act III to Act IV. The scene in Juliet’s chamber after the marriage ceremony focuses on the conversation between the spouses regarding Romeo’s banishment. It brings a love duet, the third in the opera. Langford notes that “Being commenced in 9/8 meter is the only piece in this meter in the opera” (2011, 166). As in Shakespeare, Juliet refuses to believe this is not the lark they hear but a nightingale, which according to Langford (2011, 166) symbolizes a confidant of love. After Romeo leaves, Juliet’s father announces his plan for his daughter’s wedding to Count Paris. Juliet’s agony in Act IV is accompanied by an orchestral passage, which by repeating musical themes from Act I, where Juliet realizes that Romeo is a Montague, makes an allusion to Act I. In pain, she seeks help from Friar Laurence, who gives her the magical sleeping death potion (which in Shakespeare lasts two and forty hours and in Gounod one day), and just when the prince wants to place the wedding ring on Juliet’s finger, the potion begins to take effect. The author of the article “Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet” (1867, 246) notes that the musical theme of this part is repeated in the last act of the opera, when Juliet lies asleep in the tomb: “Le Sommiel de Juliette” (Juliet’s sleep).

The fact that librettists overstep Shakespeare at this point and have Juliet succumb to Friar Lawrence, is a result of what Huebner (1992, 163) calls a “quest for theatrical effect”. There is no wedding ceremony in Shakespeare, but Gounod implements a wedding march into the act’s choral finale. Act IV closes with Juliet fainting; such an ending is “disconcertingly abrupt, especially in view of the amount of time allotted to pure divertissement in this tableau” (Huebner 1992, 163).

In the opera, Friar Lawrence’s final act is to go off searching for Romeo and has no importance in the opera’s finale. Besides Romeo, Juliet, Friar Laurence, Nurse, Tybalt and Mercutio, there are other character changes to fill in plot gaps. To better adapt the play to music, Gounod omitted Montague, Lady Montague Lady Capulet and renamed the Prince, replacing him with the Duke (responsible for banishing Romeo from Verona). Gounod’s librettists also decreased the importance of the friendship btween Mercutio and Romeo and lessened the prominence of the mother-daughter relationship

19 between Juliet and the Nurse (Gertrude). Huebner (1992, 156) notes that the result of a one-sided approach to the literary source is that the Prince, Tybalt and Benvolio, as well as the Nurse become minor roles in the opera.

Act V or the tomb scene, which, as Langford (2011, 166) points out, is used for “musical depiction of the dramatic finale”, Gounod decided to set to instrumental music. He begins with a section which represents Romeo’s arrival to the tomb, escalates through Romeo’s grief enhanced by the act of drinking the potion he has brought with him, and finally to his sudden joy when he sees his Juliet awake. However, this sequence is not completely congruent with Shakespeare. Langford (166, 167) demonstrates how Gounod adapts it for the opera’s finale, which could hardly be imaginable without a final duet. In Shakespeare, Romeo arrives into the tomb, sees Juliet dead, drinks the poison and dies. After his death, she awakens, realizes her husband has killed himself, grabs a dagger and commits suicide by stabbing herself. Langford demonstrates that “the un-Shakespearean moment, which Gounod inserted in his play, gives us final pathos and allows lovers to share final moments alive” (2011, 167). Musically, it offered an opportunity to write another duet to serve as a grand finale. Huebner (1992, 162) indicates that this part is an emotional and musical recapitulation of crucial moments in the play. Romeo begins with “Ô ma femme!” (Oh, my wife) and mourns Juliet’s death. Huebner (1922, 165) proves that orchestral background and vocal melodies cross and recreate lyrical sections from the earlier from the opera. Huebner further notes that one can recognize the end of the Prologue and the beginning of the bedroom love duet, and that the tomb scene sthus unites the hatred with the Prologue and endless love in Act IV. Another theme that reappears in the tomb scene is the “sacrifice” theme. Langford observes that this theme can be heard in the moment when Romeo agrees to put his own life in danger for Juliet. In the tomb scene, it appears when Romeo takes the poison and joins Juliet in death. Specific melodic elements serve to blend dramatic moments and the meaning of death. Langford (2011, 167) further points out that the movement is repeated again at the climax of the final duet, emphasizing the sacrifice theme as one of the most important in the opera. It is followed by a theme of ecstasy, borrowed from the wedding quartet from Act III, which originally appeared in the Act I madrigal for two voices.

Langford (2011, 166-169) concludes that when Juliet awakens from sleep and finds Romeo, she experiences ecstasy, but this only lasts a moment before they discover her husband has taken poison. In the final repetition Juliet stabs herself. “Romeo and Juliet somehow share joy when being released in a shared death that saves them from world, full of hatred” (Langford 2011, 169).

In the last act, the theme reference from the overture is seen, by which Gounod intens to express Romeo’s endless love for Juliet and his images from the past. The author of the article “Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet” notes that the passage is written in various keys, has no definite form and is “highly dramatic, melodious, and expressive” (1867, 246). The tomb scene elaborated musical allusions to other moments in the play. Langford (2011, 169) notes that as they die together, we recall their first love, the passion of marriage and their sacrifice. Langford concludes that Gounod united themes of joy, death, and sacrifice in a tortured moment in the opera finale, which is closed with strong fortissimo, illustrating lovers’ tragic deaths. Hutcheon and Hutcheon (2003, 8) clarify that it was not socially acceptable to represent death on the stage, and the seventeenth and eighteenth-century operatic convention of the happy ending put the emphasis on the joyful reunion of the lovers, even in tragedies.

Most of the protagonists are given moving arias either meditating on death or lamenting the loss of life. In opera, Villains were allowed to die; reunited lovers were not, even when this necessitated plot alteration to well-known story lines. Only at the beginning of the nineteenth century did the traditional tragic ending take over the operatic stage. (Hutcheon and Hutcheon 2003, 11)

Huebner (1992, 161) recapitulates the opera with the composer’s own words: “[H]e [Gounod] expressed satisfaction that the first act finished in ʻbrilliantʼ fashion, the second ʻtender and dream-likeʼ, and the third ʻanimated and grandʼ, the fourth ʻdramaticʼ, and the fifth ʻtragicʼ.”

This short macrostructural analysis shows the obvious decrease in the amount of text of Romeo and Juliet. Certain parts of Shakespeare’s plot are compressed. In this process, corresponding characters are omitted, too. In the process of adapting, Gounod not only left out some characters (for example, Lady Capulet, the Apothecary), or

21 made them a nonentity (Nurse, the Capulet servant, the Prince of Verona, Benvolio and Gregory a nonentity), he also introduced new ones (for example, page Stephano). The page boy sings a song alluding to the forbidden love of the lovers, and in this way Gounod included a character to highlight the love theme even more, and omitted those characters who have no firm connection to it (for example, Lady Capulet belonged more into quarrel between the families than in the love relationship between Romeo and Juliet). So, Gounod expanded the love theme and made the themes of sacrifice, hatred and rivalry less noticeable, or even eliminated them completely.

3 Microstructural analysis

In the central section of my Master’s thesis, three parts of Shakespeare’s and Gounod’s works were analysed: the Prologue, Juliette’s aria “Je Veux Vivre” (I want to live), and the Balcony Scene. The Prologue was chosen because it is written in the form of a sonnet and foreshadows the denouement at this early stage of the plot. Apart from this, it also appears parallelly in both works and thus allows a close contrastive comparison. “Je Veux Vivre” was selected because it is not part of Shakespeare’s play; Gounod’s libretto expands at this point. So, the analysis focuses on how Gounod captures Juliette’s character through a selection of newly introduced figures of speech. Finally, in the Balcony scene, the research focuses on the famous Shakespearean meter and rhyme. Along with the analysis of salient Shakespearean rhetorical devices and Gounod’s parallel sections, this research focuses on Romeo and Juliet’s duets, which strengthen the love theme of both works. It is shown whether and to what extent the librettists introduced changes to the plot or the aria and soliloquies.

According to Hutcheon (2013), symbols and metaphors are difficult to visualize in performance media. This is why the text containing these has to be translated in such a way as to preserve the equivalents, which can pose a considerable challenge. Tomaž Onič (2013, 8-10) in “Germont’s Aria from La Traviata: Between the Original and the Slovene Translation” addresses some basics issues in libretto translation. The trend to stage operas in their original language compels the producers to find an expedient way of projecting surtitles on a screen above the stage (projected screen size can be limiting in terms of the length of translation) and, by the same time token, to certain literary guidelines. The primary purpose of surtitles is capturing the content of the utterance.

In opera libretto translations intended for vocal use, the translator faces restrictions that go far beyond merely transferring the content of a certain part of the libretto. Such libretto translations have much in common with poetry translation, since rhythm, line length and rhyme need to be observed consistently. (Onič 2013, 8-10)

The audience should understand the gist of what is being said, so sensible paraphrasing with shortening the text is welcome. The translation, however, should not become the

23 main focus of the audience’s attention. Onič (2013, 8) demonstrates that the most challenging parts to translate in operas are those parts of the libretto that form relatively closed units, such as the arias and duets. In general, Huebner (1992, 155) claims that the “Barbier-Carée libretto adheres closely to the play, borrowing from it right down to individual expressions: most of the scenes with direct parallels to the [Shakespeare’s] tragedy contain many metaphors drawn directly from it”. As Sandra Corse (1987, 13) distinguishes between language as literature, which is “metaphorical and slippery”, and language as communication, which is “functional and stable”, she notes that the operatic genre tends to favour the latter over the former and states that operatic language is not about poetry, symmetry, phonics or images, but rather about objects and subjects and about what will or will not happen. She further explains (Corse 1987, 14) that libretti are a kind of “stripped-bare” literature that exists on the edges of literary language and accents the communicative rather than aesthetic functions of language. She therefore maintains that the aesthetic strength of the opera lies less in the libretto than in its connection to music, and even more in its various intersections with staging and audience perceptions (Corse 1987, 15). The generally subordinate status of the libretto towards the music can also be noted in the case of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette. The analysis shows that the text serves more as a tool for communication rather than as a poetic enrichment of the text, which comes as no surprise since Gounod is a classical composer following closely the conventions of operatic traditions in other aspects of his work. At this point, it must again be underlined that this observation – and consequently the claim – is based on the analysis of the English translation of the original libretto.

3.1 The Prologue

Roméo et Juliette begins with a pragmatic overture that stages the street battle, taken from Act I of Shakespeare’s play. At first, the operatic prologue was supposed to be sung in the wings with lowered curtains, but Huebner (1992, 155) reports that at one of the last rehearsals, Gounod was persuaded to raise the curtain and add the soloist to the Prologue. Langford (2011, 158) explains that since Barbier and Careé were limited

24 by several specific operatic traditions, one of which suggests that an opera should always begin with a chorus, they decided to omit the opening scenes from the play and to begin the opera differently to gain some space for later scenes that were more important. The scene with the street fight between two families is thus omitted from the libretto, so Act I starts with the Capulet’s party. A set of famous lines at the very opening of the opera is adopted from Shakespeare’s prologue; they describe the setting and foreshadow the opera’s plot. In this way, they skip two dramatic moments from the beginning: Lady Capulet and Juliet’s conversation, which is later noticed in “Je Veux Vivre”, and the “Queen Mab” speech, which is also relocated to a later point in the opera. Huebner illustrates the importance of this opening:

In the opera, the masque occupies far more time in proportion to the whole and serves as the setting for the entire act and the essential elements exposed in scenes ii, iii, and iv of the Shakespeare. Not only it is reflection to Gounod’s sentimental programme - from that perspective the masque is one of the capitals scenes in the play because it gives rise to the impossible love. (Huebner 1992, 161)

Shakespeare’s prologue (see Excerpt 1 below) is in the form of a sonnet, a traditional lyrical poem comprising 14 lines of iambic pentameter with a particular rhyme scheme, which in the English tradition slightly differs from its Italian origin. Baldrick (2001, 239) clarifies that Shakespearean sonnet comprises three quatrains and a final rhyming couplet abab cdcd efef gg, which distinguishes it from the Petrarchan version following the pattern of abba abba in the first two quatrains and a variety of possibilities in the following two tercets, the most common being cdc dcd.

In both the play and the opera, the Prologue is performed by the chorus, which in the latter retains its particular status of a connecting element between the world of the play/the opera and the audience. In this aspect of his dramatic excellence – as in many others – Shakespeare leans on Aristotle, who in his Poetics (1922, 30-52) defines the chorus as an essential part of a Greek play. The chorus consoles, advises, and restrains the main characters in crucial moments and is considered by Aristotle to be one of the actors. It provides commentary on the action and sings of death and fate. As Aristotle asserts, the chorus is usually a group of actors that comment on and interpret the main

25 action of the play for the audience. The Poetics declares that earlier, this role was reduced to a single actor who would deliver a prologue and epilogue to a play. The presence of a chorus at the beginning of the play establishes a connection between the audience and the actors on stage and commands them to pay attention to the story. About the importance of the plot in a play, Aristotle says that “the change of fortune should not be from bad to good, but the reverse, and that it should come about as a result not of vice, but by some error or fatality in a character” (1922, 35), e.g. Juliet and Romeo. The chorus in Shakespeare’s play corresponds to Gounod’s choir, i.e., a group of singers. Its connecting function between the audience and the plot remains structural and contributes to the dramatic effect. Considering the differences between the genres, it is natural to expect that the music strengthens its role by adding a certain amount of force to multiple voices singing simultaneously, thus bringing added value to the operatic experience.

A salient function of the Prologue of the play that is relevant for our analysis is to introduce the main families and their turbulent history (“Two households, both alike in dignity /…/ From forth the fatal loins of these two foes”), set the place and time (“In fair Verona, where we lay our scene”) and communicate the main features of the plot in 14 lines. The Chorus in Shakespeare’s Prologue offers a plot summary, and – surprisingly –gives away the ending: two lovers mending the conflict between the families by dying (“A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life /…/ The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love”). The audience thus knows what the fate of the protagonists will be; they wait for the prophecy announced in the Prologue to be fulfilled.

Prologue Prologue (Shakespeare) (Gounod)

Two households, both alike in dignity, Verona, of old, saw two rival families, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, the Montagues and Capulets, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, in their endless feudings, fatal to them both, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. staining with blood the thresholds of their palaces. From forth the fatal loins of these two foes Like a rosy ray gleaming in a stormy sky, A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life; Juliet appeared, and Romeo loved her! Whose misadventur'd piteous overthrows And both of them, forgetting the name that Doth, with their death, bury their parents’ strife. outraged them, The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love, were fired by a selfsame love! And the continuance of their parents’ rage, Fatal destiny! Blind passions! Which, but their children's end, naught could remove, These star-crossed lovers paid with their lives now the two hours’ traffic of our stage; for the ending of the century-old hatreds The which if you with patient ears attend, that witnessed the birth of their love! What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

Excerpt 1: The Prologues to Shakespeare’s play and Gounod’s opera

The Prologues in Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette and in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet are included in the two texts in a similar manner, starting with a similar introduction. The operatic opening follows Shakespeare closely: it defines Verona as the setting of the main plot, and introduces the two rival households (“Verona, of old, saw two rival families, the Montagues and Capulets”). Similarly to Shakespeare, the librettists reveal the ending in the third line of the Prologue, and through short exclamatory sentences (“Fatal destiny!”; “Blind passion!”; “Juliet appeared, and Romeo loved her!”) summarize Romeo and Juliet’s destiny. Furthermore, Gounod’s prologue pictures Romeo and Juliet’s eternal love (“Like a rosy ray gleaming in a stormy sky, Juliet appeared, and Romeo loved her.”) and, finally, establishes that it was the hatred of the families that was fatal for the two youngsters (“These star-crossed lovers paid with their lives for the ending of the century-old hatreds that witnessed the birth of their love!”). The last two of Shakespeare lines containing an apostrophe to the audience are omitted in Gounod.

Although the operatic Prologue is a word-for-word translation of its parallel spot in the play, it captures Shakespeare’s plot and keeps a recognisable similarity with the play, even a few recognizable phrases. The famous expression “star-crossed lovers”, for example, has been analysed by a variety of critics, who have found significant interpretative possibilities in this single phrase from the Prologue. Since it represents Romeo and Juliet’s relationship, it is meaningful and significant enough not to be omitted from the opera libretto. Gounod wanted to keep some unique elements of Shakespeare’s language; apart from star-crossed lovers, “O Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” Draper (1939) believes that “star-crossed lovers” are the puppets of the stars and planets. He even attributes the tragic fall of Romeo and Juliet’s relationship to astrology and explains the course of events in 'fortune' and 'misfortune' with Romeo and Juliet 'crossing' (being against) the stars and this way sealing their own faith (Draper 1939, 16-25). Similarly, Evans (1966, 30) claims “star-crossed” concerns the conjunction of Mars and Venus, which are the Roman gods of war and love. In the article “Shakespeare’s Sexual Language and Metaphor”, Oncins-Martinez notes that “The union of Mars and Venus begets a group of finely-wrought Shakespearean metaphors: his martial and sexual language feeds on them” (quoted in Ravassat and Culpeper 2011, 238). By preserving this recognisable line, Gounod kept some “original Shakespeare,” together with the effectiveness of his phrase.

From the musical aspect, the Prologue opens the scene tempestuously and maintains a severe atmosphere created by Shakespeare. Huebner claims that “it provides conventional operatic introduction containing static mood-setting choruses and small set pieces for soloists” (1992, 161). Low and decisive notes of brass (see Figure 1) and percussion illustrate the dramatic introduction to the opera. The Andante tempo confidently announces the storyline and opens the performance grandly with the chorus and rich orchestration. Langford (2011, 159) concludes that an overture that musically depicts the storyline only through instruments and their music is an important dramatic element in the plot.

Figure 1: Choral recitative (Langford 2011, 159)

Langford (2011, 159) finds that the unique feature of this prologue is its setting as a choral recitative,6 which we rarely hear in opera (Figure 1). Huebner adds that “Shakespeare's prologue suggests an interesting operatic experiment to enhance the traditional instrumental prelude: a summary of the plot by all the principals before the action proper begins” (1992, 155).

Considering length and content, the Prologue in Roméo et Juliette exhibits the most parallels to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Although Shakespeare’s text was in parts omitted or changed, Gounod compensates the tense atmosphere and melancholy with music in the D minor key, which is known to be one of the “saddest”. The dramatic effect is enhanced by the pompous overture and low notes throughout the Prologue.

3.2 Je Veux Vivre

Langford (2011, 161) clarifies that shortening and repositioning the scenes from the beginning of the play gave Gounod the opportunity to expand the musical inserts. Act I of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette is mostly known for the aria “Je Veux Vivre” or “I want to live”, which Langford (2011, 161) calls a “show stopper”. Juliet delivers it in order to say no to marriage. Langford notes that it is difficult to make an extended aria from Shakespeare’s short passage, so librettists had to come up with an extensive text, where Juliet refuses to marry Paris, because she “wants to live in her intoxicating dream”. Langford (2011, 162) adds that, even though Gounod’s Juliet is not in keeping with Shakespeare’s, this aria is among the most famous ones ever, with the especially

6 An adaptation of the usual speech-like solo recitative of opera to multiple choral voices (Langford 2011, 159).

29 memorable title phrase “I want to live” (see Excerpt 2). Repeated several times, this phrase conjures up Juliet’s reluctance to marry Prince Paris, and it acquires the role of a refrain, repeated for emotional effect. With the analysis of rhetorical devices in “Je Veux Vivre”, Juliet’s youthful and boisterous qualities can be perceived in this aria and are strongly supported by this salient refrain. It appears in exactly the same form throughout the aria, thus strongly suggesting several outstanding features of Juliet’s character. Regmi (2014, 79) maintains that this refrain has multiple distinctive effects; it is appealing, catches attention and serves as motivating language. It also creates a memorable phrase and reveals a defining feature of her character (2014, 79).

(Gounod) I Want to Live

Ah! – I want to live in this intoxicating dream! This day still, gentle flame, I keep you in my heart like a treasure! I want to live, etc. This intoxication of youth alas! lasts but a day! Then comes the time when one weeps, the heart surrenders to love and happiness flies off forever! Ah! – I want to live, etc. Far from sullen winter let me slumber and breathe the rose, breathe the rose before despoiling it. Ah! – Ah! – Ah! – Gentle flame,

stay in my heart like a sweet treasure for a long while yet. Ah! – like a treasure for a long while yet!

Excerpt 2: Juliet’s aria

Here are some examples of most frequent devices, found in Juliet’s aria.

Crystal (2008, 76-78) states that even though exclamations are rarely found in Shakespeare’s plays and are missing even in places where the exclamatory function of the language is undeniable, we can find twelve exclamation points in the aria “Je Veux Vivre”, six of which are repeated exclamatory utterances or sighs (Ah!). They express Juliet’s giddiness and sadness (“Ah!”; “I want to live in this intoxicating dream!”; “This intoxication of youth alas! lasts but a day!”). These exclamatory points draw greater attention to the idea of Juliet’s character. In Think on my Words, Crystal (2008, 76-78) maintains that today exclamations are used for interjections, greetings, peremptory command, expressions of surprises, and loud speeches. It is important to know that exclamations marks for most of Shakespeare’s play were added by modern editors (“Friar: Hark, how they knock! – Who’s there? – Romeo, arise. Thou wilt be taken. – Stay a while! – Stand up.”).

Repetition and interjection, are frequent figures in Juliet’s aria. Culpeper suggests that “interjections, onomatopoetic sounds, hesitation phenomena, and discourse markers are more than twice more common in female dialogue and that this signals the emotional distress and pity” (2011, 68-69). In the play, Juliet’s emotional distress can be seen through her worry about the forced marriage to Count Paris and not being able to live in her intoxicating dream.

Apart from their stylistic function, repetitions possibly contribute to better understanding of the sung text, since the listeners are able to hear them more than once. Double recurrence “gentle flame”, triple recurrences “I want to live” and “sweet treasure” and the interjection “Ah!”, which is repeated six times, are sections which comply with Juliet’s character at the beginning of the opera. Her youth, excitement, nervousness and insecurity are easily seen through these. A noticeable effect also

31 comes from alliteration, i.e., the repeated initial consonants of stressed words, like in when one weeps. In the technical sense, alliteration can be seen as a type of repetition – not of whole words but sounds – and is thus a relevant aspect to consider in the case of the English translation of Gounod’s libretto, since Crystal (2008, 111-112) highlights that alliteration is an important feature in English poetry, because English is not a naturally alliterated language, so when someone uses a sequence of identical sounds, we notice it. He also notes (2008, 112) that alliteration “sounds nice” and makes the sentence memorable.

The librettist approached Shakespeare not only by using rhetorical devices, but also by capturing Shakespeare’s idea of Juliet’s emotional development. Crystal (2008, 169) remarks that even though “Je Veux Vivre” is not Shakespeare’s, we can sense the librettists’ approach to Shakespeare’s successions of Juliet’s emotional personal characteristics. As the aria evolves, the listener can first observe Juliet’s reverie (“I want to live in this intoxicating dream!”; “This day still, gentle flame, I keep you in my heart like a treasure!”), which then evolves into a touch of reality when she remembers that she is promised to Count Paris (“Then comes the time when one weeps, the heart surrenders to love, and happiness flies off forever!”), and eventually it escalates into the expression of her final hope that she not be despoiled of youth (“Far from sullen winter let me slumber and breathe the rose, breathe the rose before despoiling it”).

Acting in support of Juliet’s playful character, “Je Veux Vivre” is a waltz tune, played in the animato mode (see Figure 2). This indicates a passionate and spirited demeanour in Juliet’s character. The multi-sectional ensemble festively opens with the “Let me live in my dream” aria for soloist and chorus. In 4 minutes, which is its approximate length, it conjures up Juliet’s insecurity and nervousness regarding her arranged marriage; this can be seen in “wavering” and fragmented parts, separated by crochet rests as seen below. Piano dynamics are added to emphasize high spirits and mischievousness. Grace notes create a feeling of youth and restlessness. This aria serves as a portrayal of Juliet.

Figure 2: “Je Veux Vivre”

Being composed for string cast, violin, viola, cello and double bass set the ground for a soloist and keep the ¾ tempo flowing by playing only the upbeats, while harp and triangle help the soprano voice pitch all the high notes. “Je Veux Vivre” can be heard in various versions, but the coloraturas of sopranos always feature a bright and playful aria.

After Juliet’s aria “Je Veux Vivre”, Romeo and Juliet meet for the first time. Langford notes (2011, 161) that Romeo holds Juliet’s hand and they have a conversation based on religious imagery like conversation. Even though the lovers have not become a couple yet, they are provoking each other in the first of several duets in the play. The duet gives us religious metaphors and is one of the most symbolic parts of the opera. Langford (2011, 162) notes that Gounod titled this section “madrigal for two voices”, which is a solo song sung by two voices in alternation, and not a duet, implying it is more of an aria. Gounod’s choice of name implies the growing intensity of their relationship, which is about to evolve into eternal love. Thus Juliet’s solo piece “Je Veux Vivre”, in which she expresses her longing for true love, develops into a love duet with Romeo and later into a grandiose choral finale.

3.3 The Balcony Scene

3.3.1 Meter and rhyme

An important feature of Shakespeare’s writing is his recognizable verse. In Romeo and Juliet, like as most of his plays in verse, Shakespeare uses blank verse, which consists of iambic pentameter with unrhymed (blank in sense of “absent” or “lacking”) lines (Baldrick 2001, 28). Iambic pentameter is the most common regular meter in English literature. It consists of ten syllables, which are organized in five feet. The first syllable in each foot is weak ( ᵕ ), the second stronger ( - ), for example:

ᵕ - ᵕ - ᵕ - ᵕ - ᵕ - Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon.

An example of blank verse shows unrhyming iambic pentameter:

But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the East, and Juliet is the sun! Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon, Who is already sick and pale with grief.

In contrast to the play, the meter in the libretto of Roméo et Juliette is not regular in the sense of following a particular metrical scheme. In fact, it has no consistent pattern concerning meter or rhyme. In Literary Terms, Baldrick (2001, 218) reports that in the sixteenth century, rhyme as a technique in poetic drama began to die out slowly. It was replaced by blank verse, which Gounod does not use. In fact, he does not preserve Shakespeare’s meter or rhyme, the reason being that a musical phrase with an uneven number of stresses as part of a stanza or a larger unit is hardly appropriate for setting to music. However, according to Crystal (2008), rhyme in Romeo and Juliet does not disappear completely; it is a prominent feature in the love dialogues between the lovers. Closed rhyming couplets are also used to signal the end of a scene, when the audience is helped to notice the closure as in the following example (Crystal 2008, 119):

For neuer was a Storie of more Wo, Than this of Iuliet, and her Romeo.

In “No Reason without Rhyme: Rhetorical Negotiation in Shakespeare”, Cheryl Hogue Smith (2009, 95) provides some statistics: Romeo and Juliet has 3013 lines, of which only 493 rhyme. Of the total number of rhyming words, 90% end in perfect rhyme and 10% in slant rhyme. Smith writes that when Romeo and Juliet are uniting, rhyme is absent, and when they are facing challenges, a unifying rhyme is present. She proves that rhyme creates tension for the audience:

From the first scene, which describes the fate of the star-crossed lovers by using perfect rhyme, to subsequent scenes that attempt to unite the lovers without the use of any rhyme, tension intensifies within us to guarantee we never lose sight of the fact that Romeo and Juliet’s love can never endure. (Smith 2009, 97)

Shakespeare shows mastery not only through meter and rhyme, but also through rhetorical devices. These have already been analysed in “Je veux vivre” and are further discussed in the following passage.

3.3.2 Rhetorical devices

In the course of this research, it has become clear that Gounod preserves only a few of Shakespeare’s rhetorical devices. Owing to the plot compression, he supplemented the loss of Shakespeare’s language with musical features. This passages highlights the most obvious rhetorical features of Shakespeare’s balcony scene and demonstrates how Gounod successfully merged words and music.

The scene opening brings Romeo’s soliloquy about Juliet (“But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?”). It is highly unlikely that the librettists would miss the dramatic potential of this speech and transformed it to Romeo’s cavatina instead. According to Latham, a cavatina is a “short solo song, simple in style and lacking the da capo, often consisting of the short instrumental introduction to a single sentence or statement set to music” (2004, 32). Gounod’s choice of instrument, which in this case is solo harp, seems highly appropriate for the textual and musical context, since the long connected strings of tones are frequently interpreted as representing positive

35 feelings and characteristics. Here the harp is easily associated with purity, which marries well with the Adagio tempo used for the love confession.

ROMEO ROMEO He jests at scars that never felt a wound. Love! Love! But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? Ay, its intensity has disturbed my very being! It is the East, and Juliet is the sun! (A light comes on in Juliet’s window.) Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon, But what sudden light Who is already sick and pale with grief through yonder window breaks? That thou her maid art far more fair than she. ’Tis there that by night her beauty shines! Be not her maid, since she is envious. Ah, arise, o sun! Turn pale the stars Her vestal livery is but sick and green, that, unveiled in the azure, And none but fools do wear it. Cast it off. do sparkle in the firmament. It is my lady; O, it is my love! Ah, arise! Ah, arise! Appear! Appear, O that she knew she were! thou pure and enchanting star! She speaks, yet she says nothing. What of that? She is dreaming, she loosens Her eye discourses; I will answer it. a lock of hair I am too bold; 'tis not to me she speaks. which falls to caress her cheek. Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven, Love! Love, carry my vows to her! Having some business, do entreat her eyes She speaks! How beautiful she is! To twinkle in their spheres till they return. Ah, I heard nothing. What if her eyes were there, they in her head? But her eyes speak for her The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars and my heart has answered! As daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven Ah, arise, o sun! turn pale the stars, etc. Would through the airy region stream so bright ...come thou, appear. (Gounod) That birds would sing and think it were not night. See how she leans her cheek upon her hand! O that I were a glove upon that hand, That I might touch that cheek! (Shakespeare)

Excerpt 3: Shakespeare’s scene II Capulet’s orchard, Gounod’s Cavatina no. 7

The Balcony scene in both works opens with a visual motif; it shows the contrast between light and dark. In both the play and the opera, night plays an important role. Secret meetings and the love scene occur in the night-time. The night in Shakespeare does not express evil, but serves as protection of the lovers and is often referred to as “blessed”. “The cloak of night” safeguards Romeo and Juliet and gives them shelter

36 from day-light quarrels. This mysteriousness of the night is musically supported by a slow adagio tempo.

Even though the librettists use the same apostrophes as Shakespeare (“Arise, (fair) sun”), they do not stress sensory contrast (day, night) as much, but focus more on praising Juliet’s beauty. They use the verbs arise and appear several times, usually in collocation with the noun star. The music in this part contains chromatic descends, which may represent falling stars. This is a good example of how Gounod creates the atmosphere and sets up the scenery with the subtle use of music. The chromatic passages could be interpreted to represent emotional experience, which would otherwise be lost in the process of adaptation.

Shakespeare uses a metaphor, where Romeo makes a direct comparison of Juliet to the sun. She is radiant, warm and drives away the darkness. Michel and Carée do not preserve this metaphor in the exact words but use an exclamation instead (‘Tis there that by night her beauty shines!). Apart from the metaphors, Shakespeare uses a number of other figures of speech which are also not included in the libretto. Here are a few examples. A rhetorical question “But what sudden light through yonder widow breaks?” is the only case of this figure being preserved in the libretto in Romeo’s cavatina at the beginning of this scene. For personification “Her eye discourses,” the librettists used “Her eyes speak” and manage to retain the figure (she speaks, yet her lips are not moving). The following personification, where the moon is capable of human envy, “Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon” is not preserved. Otherwise, the Cavatina has lost some of Shakespeare’s vocabulary; adjectives such as envious, sick, green, fair and significant nouns grief, heaven, maid, vestal livery, spheres are omitted. Cavatina also lost Shakespeare’s allusion to Diana, Greek goddess of the moon, and “vestal livery”, which is the outfit worn by virgins who serve Diana.7 In this part both Shakespeare and the librettists enumerate Juliet’s body parts (cheeks, skin, eyes). Besides the erotic connotation of these body parts, they correspond suitably

7 “The "sick and green" to which Romeo refers is the green sickness, or virgin sickness. It was believed in Shakespeare's time that a girl going through puberty suffered from anaemia and could only be cured of this disease if they were relieved of their virginity. Here Romeo chastises Diana's virgin outfit and thus makes an argument against Juliet's virginity” (King 2004)

37 to the theme of love that is the focus of both works. Furthermore, to show how glorious Juliet is to him, Romeo uses a simile with day/light imagery: “The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars/As daylight doth a lamp.” Again, this is not preserved in the libretto. In this part, Gounod, uses solo passages of wind instruments, especially clarinet and flute, to accompany the firm tenor aria. In this way, he potentially compensates for a decrease in the number of figures of speech.

The gist of this scene is Juliet’s dramatic speech “O Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” Beginning with an apostrophe, Juliet soliloquizes and wonders about Romeo’s whereabouts. Dramatic speech is supposedly uttered by a solitary speaker. Crystal (2008, 122) notes that Gounod’s libretto preserved these lines in exactly the same form, which is obvious because of the convenient meter pattern: iambic pentameter (O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?). Juliet ironically claims that names are superficial and unimportant (the surname is unimportant to Juliet, but not to her family), and she implies that Romeo could shed his name. In the libretto, interestingly, Romeo is the one who suggests the relinquishing of his name. Here, we can see how Shakespeare focuses more on the moral question defining two people, whereas Gounod pays more attention to their relationship.

(Shakespeare) (Gounod) JULIET JULIET Deny thy father and refuse thy name! /…/ 'Tis Refuse that fatal name which divides us but thy name that is my enemy. or I’ll refuse mine./…/ Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. ROMEO What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot, No! I’ll no longer be he Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part if this detested name keeps us apart! Belonging to a man. O, be some other name! That I may love you, let me be born again What's in a name? That which we call a rose. in some other self than mine! By any other name would smell as sweet. So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd, Retain that dear perfection which he owes Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name.

Excerpt 4: Shakespeare’s scene II Capulet’s orchard, Gounod’s scene no. 8 and choruses

By listing Romeo’s body parts (Excerpt 4), Juliet performs a reverse-blazon which she uses to praise Romeo and not to point out his troublesome name. This poetic trope is not preserved in the libretto.

(Shakespeare) (Gounod) ROMEO ROMEO O blessed, blessed night! I am afeard, O divine night, I implore you! Being in night, all this is but a dream, Leave my heart to its enchanted dream! Too flattering-sweet to be substantial. I fear to awaken and still dare not believe in its reality! JULIET Thou knowest the mask of night is on my face; JULIET (reappearing in the doorway of her Else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek apartment, in an undertone) For that which thou hast heard me speak to-night. Romeo! Fain would I dwell on form, fain, fain deny ROMEO (turning) What I have spoke; but farewell complement! Sweet love! Dost thou love me? I know thou wilt say ‘Ay’; And I will take thy word. Yet, if thou swear'st, JULIET Thou mayst prove false. At lovers’ perjuries, (stopping him with a gesture, and remaining in the They say Jove laughs. O gentle Romeo, doorway) If thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully. One word only...then farewell! Or if thou thinkest I am too quickly won, Tomorrow someone will come to find you! I'll frown, and be perverse, and say thee nay, (solemnly) So thou wilt woo; but else, not for the world. Upon your soul. In truth, fair Montague, I am too fond, if you want me as your wife And therefore thou mayst think my haviour light; send word to me what day, at what hour, in what But trust me, gentleman, I'll prove more true place Than those that have more cunning to be strange. our union may be blessed in the sight of God! I should have been more strange, I must confess, Then, o my lord, be my sole law! But that thou overheard'st, ere I was ware, To you will I yield up my whole life, My true love's passion. Therefore pardon me, and I’ll renounce And not impute this yielding to light love, all that is not you! Which the dark night hath so discovered. But...if all your love intends is to trifle with me... ah, then I beg you by this hour of rapturous delight, see me no more, see me no more

and leave me to the grief which will fill my days.

ROMEO (on his knees before Juliet) Ah, I have told you I adore you! Dispel my night! Be the dawn, to which my heart and eyes turn! Queenlike, dispose of my life, pour into my unsatisfied soul all the light of the heavens!

Excerpt 5: Shakespeare’s scene II Capulet’s orchard, Gounod’s duet no. 9

Apostrophe and repetition of the same two adjectives are important figures of speech in this excerpt (O blessed, blessed night!). They support the motif of the night. In the opera, too, the librettists emphasize the greatness of the night by using the adjective divine. The concept is also supported with music: the scene is played in the andante tempo and the uplifting C major key.

Another feature significant for this analysis involves the archaisms that can be found in Shakespeare’s works. Crystal (2008, 159) claims that when studying Shakespeare’s language, we can recognize many archaisms, but from the contemporary perspective, it is difficult to develop an intuition about archaisms and neologisms of the past. On the other hand, Shakespeare “invented” a number of neologisms, which enriched the English language of the 16th century.8

In the Balcony Scene, Juliet is shown as pure and innocent. While Romeo flatters her, she uses the metaphor “bepaint my cheek” which implies that she shall not use her make-up to blush her cheeks, but they will blush themselves in his presence. In her speech, she even refers to Jove, another name for Jupiter, the king of the Roman Gods fashioned after the Greek god Zeus. This allusion is omitted in Gounod. There are many more figures of speech in this part, which are not preserved in the libretto, for example: alliteration (“Fain would I dwell on form, fain, fain deny”), rhetorical

8 Elliott and Valenza (in Ravassat and Culpeper 2011, 47) point out that Shakespeare coined new word.

40 question (“Dost thou love me?”), archaisms (doth, thou, knowest, swear’st, mayst, thee, nay …) and apostrophes (fair Montague, gentle Romeo, gentleman).9 In the libretto, Romeo and Juliet summarize Shakespeare’s plot and praise each other through dialogue with apostrophes, metaphors and epithets (Sweet love, I adore you, the dawn, queenlike, the light of heavens). However, these omissions do not affect the flow of Gounod’s opera, because its strength lies in the love duets, which through music compensate for the loss Shakespeare’s language.

Juliet’s catchy line "a thousand times goodnight" combined with a salient hyperbole can be found in both texts. The lovers bid each other farewell at least ten times in both works. Their inability to part shows their excitement. The fact that it is retained in the opera suggests that the phrase corresponds to musical standards and represents an important feature of Juliet’s character. Another allusion, not preserved in the libretto, is Juliet’s reference to Echo from Greek mythology, who fell in love with Narcissus, a man who was capable of loving only himself (Jankovič 2004, 102). With this allusion, she shows her devotion to Romeo. Another rhetorical device that Shakespeare used here is simile (“Love goes toward love as schoolboys from their books.”), where he compares his love to a boy’s desire to avoid school books. This may show that they didn’t part in a romantic atmosphere. We get an impression that Juliet here has upper hand on Romeo. This can be proved by her expression tassel-gentle. Evans (1966) also maintains that Juliet retains her rationality and control during the Balcony Scene.

In the Balcony Scene, she asked him not to swear his fidelity, the usual way of pledging troth. Now she reminds him that precious language has nothing to do with their love, though there is no sign that she has any innate prejudice against verbal ornament. In fact, she is very good at it herself. But in this moment of truth there is no need for Romeo to

9 The examples of rhetorical questions and apostrophes in these scenes are, borderline cases; on the one hand, they could be considered regular questions or addresses, since the person spoken to is present (Romeo and Juliet are engaged in a conversation). On the other hand, interpretations in which these phrases are considered figurative are equally possible if one presumes that each is in his or her own world, since they are both enchanted by love. The text allows for both interpretations; the interpretative decision is directorial.

tell her to sweeten the air with her breath in a love song. He is still playing the game of courtship; Juliet is beyond him. (Evans 1966, 53)

In the libretto, Juliet’s intense rationality and common sense are left in the shade of constant praising of their love.

In Shakespeare’s works, puns10 are a common feature for creating a clear dramatic impact. However, puns are not preserved in the libretto. Crystal (2008, 227) underscores that several of the individual words might mean little to us, but the cumulative effect produces the meaning. One of the salient puns in Romeo and Juliet is Mercutio’s saying “Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man.” Grave means serious, but it also alludes to death. Khatir (2015, 1481) expounds that Shakespeare uses comic relief to lighten the tragedy. We can also find a pun in the following lines in a conversation between Romeo and Juliet, where by using the word unsatisfied.

ROMEO O, wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?

JULIET What satisfaction canst thou have tonight?

ROMEO Th' exchange of thy love's faithful vow for mine. (Shakespeare, Scene II Capulet’s orchard)

Romeo implies sexual enjoyment. Huebner highlights this matter in the following words:

The delicate modesty of Juliette is played off against the heated lyricism of Roméo in the scène at duo of the subsequent balcony scene. In one of the finest characterizations of the opera she does suddenly break out of restrained declamation to confess her eternal fidelity, but just as unexpectedly reverts back to soft-spoken delivery with static

10 “Also known as paronomasia. An expression that achieves emphasis or humour by contriving an ambiguity, two distinct meanings being suggested either by the same word or by two similar-sounding words” (Baldrick 2001, 209).

accompaniment when, with real feminine pudeur, she warns him not to misinterpret the forthrightness of her declaration as evidence of shallow emotion. (Huebner 1992, 158)

Juliet makes it clear to Romeo that her intention is solely marriage, and sensual attraction becomes “fino amore” (Evans 1966, 98). As mentioned before, Shakespeare uses sexual metaphors frequently. Oncins-Martinez (in Ravassat and Culpeper 2011, 238) portrays the “sex is war” conceptual metaphor in Shakespeare’s plays. For example, in Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare used “the archery metaphor”, given the repeated references to Cupid in the play; “the battling metaphor” to convince his friend that Juliet is a maid, and many more. Sexual metaphors are not present in the libretto. This proves that Gounod focused on spiritual love. Shakespeare’s Romeo sometimes uses puns that allow obscene interpretations, while Gounod’s Romeo never alludes to physical love.

(Shakespeare) (Gounod) JULIET GERTRUDE (outside) Three words, dear Romeo, and good night Juliet! indeed. If that thy bent of love be honourable, JULIET Thy purpose marriage, send me word to- Someone calls me! morrow, By one that I'll procure to come to thee, ROMEO Where and what time thou wilt perform the rite; (rising to his feet and seizing Juliet’s hand) And all my fortunes at thy foot I'll lay Ah, already! And follow thee my lord throughout the world. JULIET JULIET Begone! I am terrified By-and-by, I come.— that someone may see us together! To cease thy suit and leave me to my grief. To-morrow will I send. /…/ GERTRUDE (spoken) Juliet! JULIET A thousand times good night! JULIET Exit. I’m coming... ROMEO Listen to me!

ROMEO A thousand times the worse, to want thy light! JULIET Love goes toward love as schoolboys from their Softer! books; But love from love, towards school with heavy ROMEO looks. (drawing Juliet to him and leading her forward) JULIET ...No, no, no-one calls you! Hist! Romeo, hist! O for a falconer's voice To lure this tassel-gentle back again! JULIET Bondage is hoarse and may not speak aloud; Softer! Softer! Speak softer! Else would I tear the cave where Echo lies,(170) And make her airy tongue more hoarse than ROMEO mine Ah, do not go yet! With repetition of my Romeo's name. Let my hand forget itself in yours! Romeo! JULIET JULIET Ah, someone might surprise us! What o'clock to-morrow Let my hand slip from yours! Goodnight! Shall I send to thee? ROMEO Goodnight!

JULIET Goodnight!

Excerpt 6: Scene II Capulet’s orchard, Gounod’s duet no. 9

Another important lexical motif included in the text of both works is the motif of birds. Gounod captures Shakespeare’s motif of birds as a symbol of modesty, fidelity and innocence. This motif appears throughout the plot to accentuate the beauty and fragility of Romeo and Juliet's love. Librettists even broaden it and use words from related semantic fields (bird, fly, wing away, sky, go free) as shown in the following example:

(Shakespeare) (Gounod) JULIET JULIET 'Tis almost morning. I would have thee gone But why did I recall thee? O, my folly! And yet no farther than a wanton’s bird,(190) For hardly art thou return’d That lets it hop a little from her hand, than my heart forgets it wholly! Like a poor prisoner in his twisted gyves, I would, thou wert gone! Yet not too far away, And with a silk thread plucks it back again, but like a captive bird So loving-jealous of his liberty. by childish hand confined, held by a silken thread restraining, that scarce begins to fly, and would wing away, the sky regaining, than the child draws him down joyfully so loving jealous he, the captive may’nt go free!

Excerpt 7: Shakespeare’s scene II Capulet’s orchard, Gounod’s duet no. 9

A contrast in the amount of spoken text between Romeo and Juliet in the Balcony Scene shows certain differences in their style of speaking. It can be noticed in the varying tempo of the dialogue. In his article “Contrast of Tempo in the Balcony Scene”, Draper (1947) shows how the speed of delivery and the amount of words differ between the two lovers. Romeo’s speech is presumably slower and potentially takes more speaking time. In Shakespeare’s text, Juliet utters almost 110 lines, Romeo about 80 (Draper 1947, 130-131). The librettists keep the balance between the number of words uttered by the protagonists, which can be concluded from a close reading of the libretto, which shows that Juliet’s character has more lines than Romeo’s. Shakespeare uses Romeo as a mere foil11 (Draper 1947, 132) to Juliet, and by exposing the contrast of his monotonous and heavier tempo to Juliet’s vividness, he dramatically builds up the scene. He “sacrifices” Romeo for a lyrical climax (Draper 1947, 132).

JULIET ROMEO, JULIET Sweet, so would I. Goodnight! Yet I should kill thee with much cherishing. Parting is such sweet sorrow Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet that I would say goodnight till it be

11 A character whose qualities or actions serve to emphasize those of the protagonist by providing a strong contrast with them (Baldrick 2001, 98).

sorrow, tomorrow! That I shall say good night till it be morrow. (Shakespeare) (Gounod)

Excerpt 8: Shakespeare’s scene II Capulet’s orchard, Gounod’s duet no. 9

For the act closure, Shakespeare uses an antithesis that encompasses Romeo and Juliet’s relationship, which is a combination of both a sweet tale of love and inevitable sorrow. Sweet and sorrow are opposites; they highlight the conflict in the plot. Musically, these conflicts are seen in alternating orchestral melodies, played by different instruments.

The fact that the librettists shorten or change the text in some way suggests that the opera libretto has a less salient function in comparison to the music. Overall, we can see that Michel and Carée preserve the main event in the Balcony Scene by highlighting Juliet’s beauty and Romeo’s compliments framed by metaphors, imagery and epithets, but we can see that they focus primarily on the plot and not so much on the preservation of the rhetorical devices. This does not mean that the interpretative potential of the opera is in any way diminished, since there is the addition of music that compensates for the changes.

3.3.3 Duets

While Shakespeare used a number of devices (for example, metaphor, hyperbole, apostrophe, etc.) to depict the emotions in the love relationship between Romeo and Juliet, Gounod created duets to achieve a similar development of his protagonists and their relationship. To create love duets, the librettists used some of Romeo and Juliet’s conversations from the play and transformed them. Since the operatic singers de facto do not listen to each other, owing to their overlapping passages or the dominating orchestral music, the standard operatic convention of stylized dialogue suggests that

46 duets’ salient function is to replace conversation, in this case between Romeo and Juliet, and make the lovers noticeable through music.

Gounod's opera is sustained almost entirely by the sentimental strain of Shakespeare's tragedy. The encounters between Roméo and Juliette consume far more time in relation to the whole in the opera than they do in the play. There are no less than four duets for them in the opera and in terms of overall dramatic momentum and scope that may be at least one too many. (Huebner 1992, 156).

Huebner’s (1992, 156) claim that Romeo and Juliet’s interaction occupies a lot of time in the opera, in fact much more than in the play, supports the hypothesis that Gounod makes the theme of love more prominent in the opera. Huebner further speculates that the duets, i.e., the potential of Shakespeare’s text that allows their inclusion, seem to be the main reason why Gounod chose to adapt Shakespeare in the first place:

In short, the duets in Roméo et Juliette, along with certain numbers in Faust, are as close to greatness as Gounod comes as a composer. /…/ The prospect of writing a string of intimate duets may well have been a factor in Gounod’s decision to turn to the Shakespeare play as a subject in the first place. (Huebner 1992, 160˗161)

The opera contains 10 duets in total, 8 of which are sung by Romeo and Juliet. Moreover, these eight enclose a prominent love theme. For example, close listening to the love duet “O nuit divine” (O blessed night) is very passionate, owing to many parts that are marked as molto ritenuto (held back) and contain a fermata (lengthening of the note). The instruments that distinguish themselves in these passages are the clarinet and harp, both symbolizing Romeo. The melody is simple and harmonic. With its adagio tempo and strings as score, this love theme becomes noticeable. Gounod represents youthful love using pizzicato mode, but at the same time the harmony grows solemn with the use of tremolo and trills to gain dramatic effect. Their confession of love is momentarily interrupted by the comic interlude, in which Gregory and other servants run through the setting in search of a pageboy and later by the nurse’s interference. The nurse’s interruption is a “cruel reminder of reality”, suggests Huebner (1992, 158), and occurs “in the wake of Romeo’s most fervent avowal of love”. Musically, it is seen as a distinct intervention that destroys the flow of Romeo’s

47 declaration of love. Ascending chords later in the musical score represent the rising sun and give an impression of hope, while evolving into a grandiose love duet finale.

Langford notes (2011, 168-169) that, besides the Balcony scene, a grand duet can also be heard in the final scene. Various themes heard throughout the opera are unified in this scene and serve as supporting elements for creating the impression of the final ecstasy, achieved through the lovers’ sacrifice. Langford (2011, 168) clarifies that by uniting themes of joy, sacrifice and death in moments of torture at the end of a grand duet, Gounod recaptured the common Romantic understanding of the ecstasy of death through sacrifice. The tomb scene also elaborated musical allusions to other moments in the opera.

Gounod emphasizes the lovers’ affection with music, which is, in general, an effective way of expressing emotions. Since the theme of love is proverbially suitable for musical genres, Gounod focused on the scenes from Shakespeare’s play in which a conversation between Romeo and Juliet are displayed and transformed these into love duets. In this way, he compensated for a decrease in quantity of the text.

4 Conclusion

The story of Romeo and Juliet, particularly Shakespeare’s play, stands as an ideal vehicle for adaptation into various genres. Just as the Shakespearean canon has provided a prominent standard for academics, this same canon also offers infinite transformative possibilities for the widest array of artists. Roméo et Juliette perfectly corresponds to Kennedy and Gadpaille’s claim that “opera is a genre which marks the moment when music and dance come together with words” (2013, ix-xi). By evoking emotions through themes of love, death, joy, and sacrifice, this opera stands as literary and musical masterpiece.

The theoretical part of this thesis examined the theory of adaptation. Like other dramatic or literary works that undergo an operatic adaptation, Shakespeare’s plays present composers with numerous issues in making the transition from spoken to sung words. Opera stages the plot mainly through music, so when setting the libretto to music, the latter contributes the lion’s share in involving the audience emotionally. Fewer words are needed in opera; therefore, the librettists have to study the source text thoroughly to decide how to adapt the play in such a way that, on the one hand, the plot is preserved and that the length of the new piece complies with the standards of stage length, on the other. A long libretto would inevitably result in an unendurably long opera, simply because a text once set to music takes longer than the same amount of spoken textual material. To comply with the acceptable standards of opera duration (Gounod’s opera is shortened to approximately one half of Shakespeare’s text), the librettist of Roméo et Juliette had to not only slightly change the plot but also omit some characters in the play. Since the theme of love is suitable for operatic adaptation, Gounod made it more prominent. To achieve this, he focused on the conversations between Romeo and Juliet and thus compensated for the loss of certain scenes from Shakespeare’s plot.

The analytical section of this thesis examined two parts of Shakespeare’s play and the equivalent parts from Gounod’s opera (The Prologue and The Balcony Scene), and Gounod’s aria “Je Veux Vivre”. Macrostructural analysis showed that the librettists preserved Shakespeare’s prologue and only changed it slightly. Since a salient function

49 of both prologues is to introduce the setting and to reveal the ending of the plot, it was expected for the librettists to include this section. The Prologue also introduces the Chorus, which is there to narrate the story.

Musically, the Prologue’s rich orchestration grandly opens the setting and supports the atmosphere of the street battle, which is taken from Shakespeare’s Act I. Low notes foreshadow the tragic epilogue that is revealed at the beginning. Although the librettists did not preserve many exact Shakespearean figures of speech, the tension is compensated for with some musical features (minor key and brass section).

An extensive addition that the librettists provided for the protagonist’s solo piece was Juliet’s aria “Je Veux Vivre”. Although a corresponding section does not exist in Shakespeare, Gounod and the librettists managed to capture Shakespeare’s Juliet’s exuberance and youthful charm in the coloratura passages and grace notes. Juliet’s aria is written to a waltz tune and in a cheerful major key, which corresponds to Juliet’s youthful character. Exclamation marks, repetition, memorable collocations, and alliteration along with the passionate animato mode, help create a memorable aria and demonstrate how music and words complement one another. This aria contributes to the characterization of Shakespeare’s Juliet not only through figures of speech, but also through musical features, such as ornaments and runs in the vocal line.

A considerable portion of the protagonists’ characterization happens in the balcony scene. Shakespeare and Gounod both present Juliet as excited, nervous and insecure at first, and later as a strong confident woman, who clearly expresses her intention of marriage. On the other hand, Gounod presents Romeo as a man who is willing to do anything for Juliet and not so much as a lovesick boy who wanders around to find his love. He even does not introduce his character until the Capulet’s ball. Later, Gounod develops Romeo into a man filled with hatred and desire for revenge, when, in Act III, he faces the death of Mercutio.

Microstructural analysis has shown that much of Shakespeare’s vocabulary was not preserved in the libretto or adequately paraphrased. Furthermore, Gounod does not use Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter or blank verse. Because the text used in the analytical process was a translation, many rhetorical devices, such as alliterations,

50 archaisms, apostrophes, rhetorical questions, allusions and puns, were also omitted. For further research, it would be advisable to analyse the French original.

Nevertheless, a close reading of the opera libretto reveals that Gounod perpetuates the balance between quantity in Juliet’s and Romeo’s lines. Gounod managed to set Shakespeare’s Balcony Scene to music through a series of passionate duets. The theatre guide Minnesota Opera Romeo and Juliet (2008, 46) playfully describes this Gounod masterpiece as a duet with an opera around it. Much of the text from Shakespeare has been lost in the opera libretto, but the music provides poignant emotional association that no spoken play can offer. This proves that the libretto has a minor role in this opera, and that music is still the superior feature. In the ecstatic duets, Gounod emphasizes the passion between Romeo and Juliet and strengthens the love theme.

The love theme was in the spotlight in Gounod’s work, while Shakespeare’s themes such as hatred, death, sacrifice and ecstasy, were secondary. This shows that Shakespeare remains strongly in the tragic Renaissance circumstances (the struggle between the families and the punishment of Romeo), whereas Gounod is more interested in presenting the power of love. Shakespeare developed his characters and plot through soliloquies and dialogue, while Gounod wrote almost solely for primary characters and presented almost exclusively the love story, by placing less impact on the motifs of revenge and hatred. As a whole, the operatic story focuses more on the two lovers than on Shakespeare's action and rivalry between the families.

The French repertoire offers a plethora of operatic works, and it would be interesting to expand this research to other works from Gounod’s musical opus addressing the act of adaptation in various operas. The potential for further comparative analysis also arises in the field of Shakespeare’s motifs and themes for Romeo and Juliet and how Gounod set them to music. This could prompt an intriguing hypothesis, to address the question to what extent Gounod preserved Shakespeare’s motifs/themes and which musical instruments and features he used to “rewrite” Shakespeare as he deserves.

With a view to the play, music in the opera creates added value to the piece and strengthens a selection of dramatically effective elements from the play. It evokes

51 emotion and creates a distinct experience for the audience. Opera can merge love, hatred and death in a single set of musical harmonies, repeating the themes that appear in other parts of the opera. It is not surprising that opera is frequently considered the supreme musical genre, and that this is another case of musical and verbal artistry, where – if we paraphrase and reverse Simon Robinson’s (2013, 2) memorable thought – there are many things that music can express that words cannot.

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