From Novella to Opera: Dominick Argento’s The Aspern Papers by Nelly Valtat-Comet I am particularly indebted to Philippe Brunelle, conductor and artistic director of the Plymouth Music Series, Minneapolis, for introducing me to the works of Dominick Argento, and to Dominick Argento himself, who in tireless e-mail exchanges graciously consented to answer my most naïve interrogations. The purpose of this paper is to bring to European attention Dominick Argento’s 1988 operatic version of Henry James’s The Aspern Papers, which was commissioned by the Dallas Opera to commemorate the centennial of the story’s first publication in book form, and at the same time to address the question of adaptation in the light of the various choices made by the librettist- composer. As a matter of fact the presence in the same volume of this study and that of Pr. Hubert Teyssandier on Britten’s The Turn of the Screw is no coincidence, since James himself coupled “The Turn of the Screw” and “The Aspern Papers” in the final edition of his works. To a large extent, Dominick Argento had to contend with much the same type of obstacles as Britten and Piper, and he declared he would be proud to see his work related to theirs. A further link between the two operas was established by Argento’s casting of soprano Elisabeth Söderström as Juliana. She sang the role of the governess in the 1959 Stockholm production of The Turn of the Screw. Though it was widely acclaimed in the United States (where the premiere was broadcast nationally on the PBS series Great Performances) and subsequently performed in several European countries, The Aspern Papers by Argento remains largely unknown on this side of the Atlantic. I have therefore appended to this paper the main facts of the composer’s biography and a synoptic description of the opera and its performance history. It is not my ambition to write here as a music specialist, but as a reader of Henry James who is particularly receptive to musical readings of literary works. For this reason, the attention I devote to the libretto might seem out of proportion to its status in the opera as a whole, yet I feel encouraged in this direction by the recent interest kindled by librettistics, a subject for which we owe much to our German and Italian colleagues.1 The operatic worthiness of James’s “The Aspern Papers”. I will not dwell on James’ paradoxical attitude and professed indifference towards concerts and the opera. Actually, his enjoyment of them might not have been musical, but rather prompted —as his letters and autobiographical writings suggest— by a combination of other things: his fascination for the acclamation of divas, his keen awareness of possibilities for novelistic exploration (James allegedly regretted he had not turned soprano Christine Nilsson into the main character of a story), and his sensitivity to visual effects (he had the opera box function as showcase or frame for several of his heroines, not the least of whom, of course, is Isabel Archer). James’s enjoyment was nonetheless real and tangible in his fiction.2 Adaptation to the stage, on the other hand, was a field of artistic exploration not alien to his preoccupations and practice. As to working for the opera, Leon Edel recalls that James was once approached by a composer-friend of his who suggested he write a libretto. He replied he was “unlyrical, unmusical, unrhythmical” and, he added “unmanageable.”3 If James undeniably 1. Cf. “Le Monde germanique et l’opéra, le livret en question,” a French and German conference held at École Normale Supérieure, Paris, March 18-19-20, 2004. Or “Interculturalités, intertextualité : les livrets d’opéra, fin XIXème, début XXème siècles,” a conference held at the University of Nantes, May 3-4, 2002. 2. For more details on James and opera, see Benjamin Ivry, or Michael Halliwell. 3. Quoted by Leon Edel in “Henry James and the Performing Arts,” (106). Valtat-Comet, Nelly. “From Novella to Opera: Dominick Argento’s The Aspern Papers”. EREA 2.2 (automne 50 2004): 50-66. <www.e-rea.org> had the opera in mind, it was primarily as a source of inspiration for fiction, and it turns out that the inspiration has at various occasions proved to be mutual.4 At first sight, like indeed almost any of James’s stories, “The Aspern Papers” might deter any attempt at adaptation to the operatic stage. With its intimately reminiscent narrative mode, its intense dramatization of silence and darkness (or attenuated light), its ambiguities and its reliance on the unsaid, it is no likely source for an art-form which, more often than not, belongs, as Schmidgall puts it, to “a world of high relief, magnification, escalation”, a world which thrives on action, movement, exhibition, and “eloquently passionate characters” (10; 20). Yet when one re-reads the story while wondering what might, to a contemporary composer, have seemed potentially “operatic” in it, one comes up with a few tenuous but interesting stabs at an answer. Some of the required operatic heights might be detected at the thematic level of the story. After all, “The Aspern Papers” is a story about the deification of people and about devastating passion. In the narrator-critic’s rhetoric, Aspern is “a god,” his papers, “sacred relics,” and his biographers, “appointed ministers of the Aspern temple.” His old muse is called “the divine Juliana” and “there hovered about her name a perfume of impenitent passion (500).” This stirs the narrator’s imagination into “hatching” “a little romance of [his] own:” “by what passions had she been ravaged, by what adventures and sufferings had she been blanched (499)”? The Bordereau ladies inhabit a palace repeatedly deemed “fine,” “grand,” “great,” “noble,” “magnificent” and “prodigious”, in a city which is not less so. Venice is a decor declared fit for “drama,” “romance” and “glory,” and it is drama indeed, that Mrs. Prest is expecting from the development of her friend’s relationship with the Bordereau ladies (494). Miss Tina’s conversation reminds the narrator of “the old rococo Venice of Goldoni and Casanova” (508). He himself borrows from a range of theatrical references to position his different protagonists, imagining a comic doubling of his own proceedings in the shape of a love story between his man Pascuale and Miss Bordereau’s maid (495), or interpreting Juliana’s green shade as “a mask” (483) and her quarters as “the dressing-room of an old actress” (538). The very structure of the work, nine sections retracing one by one, through narration and reported dialogue, each of the climactic series of encounters between the three main characters, lends itself beautifully to dramatic rendering, as testified again recently by Jean Pavans’s successful stage adaptation in French.5 Music appears first through its logical association with poetry. Aspern is a modern “Orpheus(472),” the “singer” of Juliana’s beauty (500), and I have had the opportunity elsewhere to suggest that the nine sections of the tale might well symbolize the nine strings of Orpheus’ original lyre.6 Not only has the Orpheus legend provided the main subject of the first operas, those by Peri, Caccini or Monteverdi, it has also persisted over the centuries to become, as Peter Kivy puts it, “an operatic mainstay.” (65) Strikingly, the very first mention of Aspern in James’s novella consists of an allusion to his imagined voice: “Jeffrey Aspern had never been in [the Bordereau palace] that I knew of, but some note of his voice seemed to abide there by a roundabout implication and in a ‘dying fall’(470).” And two pages further on, the narrator 4. Cf. Britten’s The Turn of the Screw and Owen Wingrave, Douglas Moore’s The Wings of the Dove, or Thomas Pasatieri’s Washington Square. 5. “Les Papiers d’Aspern”, d’après Henry James, mise en scène de Jacques Lassalle, adaptation de Jean Pavans. L’avant- scène théâtre N°1126, 15 décembre 2002. 6. “Passages sans issue dans 'The Aspern Papers' de Henry James” Polysèmes, arts et littératures, centre de recherche intertextualités littéraires et artistiques, vol. 6 (Passages). Valtat-Comet, Nelly. “From Novella to Opera: Dominick Argento’s The Aspern Papers”. EREA 2.2 (automne 51 2004): 50-66. <www.e-rea.org> makes it clear that he has not been referring to poetic voice only, but also to the corporeal voice of a handsome man: “That voice, by every testimony, was one of the most charming ever heard” (472). Significantly, the narrator is always careful to comment in detail on the spoken voices within his hearing range. Miss Tina is thus a “high tremulous spinster (481)” who had “acquired by contact the trick of the familiar soft-sounding almost infantile prattle of the place (508).” Juliana’s voice “was very thin and weak, but it had an agreeable, cultivated murmur(484).” Numerous notations in the form of didascalia come to modulate voices and “tone” in accordance with each specific situation, particularly in the biographer’s paroxysms of emotion. For example, this is how he comments on Tina’s first admission that Aspern was once a good friend of her aunt’s: Miss Tina gave me this information flatly, without expression; her tone might have made it a piece of trivial gossip. But it stirred me deeply as she dropped the words into the summer night; their sound might have been the light rustle of an old unfolded love-letter (510). Juliana’s voice is endowed with paramount importance (on an equal footing with her gaze which is the object of so much ado) in the break-in scene, when the critic is caught in the act of trying to put his hands on the papers: … for the first, the last, the only time I beheld her extraordinary eyes.