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COPYRIGHT AND USE OF THIS THESIS This thesis must be used in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. Reproduction of material protected by copyright may be an infringement of copyright and copyright owners may be entitled to take legal action against persons who infringe their copyright. Section 51 (2) of the Copyright Act permits an authorized officer of a university library or archives to provide a copy (by communication or otherwise) of an unpublished thesis kept in the library or archives, to a person who satisfies the authorized officer that he or she requires the reproduction for the purposes of research or study. The Copyright Act grants the creator of a work a number of moral rights, specifically the right of attribution, the right against false attribution and the right of integrity. You may infringe the author’s moral rights if you: - fail to acknowledge the author of this thesis if you quote sections from the work - attribute this thesis to another author - subject this thesis to derogatory treatment which may prejudice the author’s reputation For further information contact the University’s Director of Copyright Services sydney.edu.au/copyright Adaptation and Twentieth-Century Opera Carolyn Claire Isabelle Burns A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences University of Sydney 2014 i Abstract Combining critical theory and dramaturgical analysis, this thesis considers twentieth-century English- language opera adaptations from a structural and cultural perspective, with particular focus on the increasing complexity of relationships between different types of literary text and the position of contemporary opera within national literary cultures. Employing the strategies of new musicology, particularly the examination of the ways the experience and interpretation of music is shaped by gender and sexuality, this argument forms a rebuttal of conventional opera analysis which frames theoretical consideration of the genre as primarily a negotiation of the comparative representative power of the libretto and the score. This thesis consists of three parts: the first develops a theoretical framework for the consideration of adaptation, combining analysis of adaptation theory, opera studies and a thematic reading of the prominence of psychological narratives in twentieth-century drama. The second part suggests a framework for narrative analysis of opera, beginning with a discussion of how several critics have approached the thematic and structural expression of femininity in opera and a discussion of the representative function played by the sung voice in narrative music, identifying non-naturalistic dramaturgical analogues to opera, and considering the aesthetic implications of extravagant stage artifice. The final part outlines the changing cultural position of opera in contemporary society through discussion of the position of the genre in relation to broader stage and literary culture in the United States and Australia, with particular focus on the impact of broadcast and recording technology on opera production, closing with a consideration of how the complex relationship between technology and live acoustic performance might come to shape the composition of new work. This thesis concludes with the contention that while the specific conventions and cultural status of opera make it an ideal media for atypical interpretations of canonical texts, the intricacy of the relationship between adapted operas and their source material is a reflection of the expansive creative and critical potential of all textual adaptations, rather than an exception based on the particular stylistic specifications of opera. ii iii Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements v Introduction 1 Part A Chapter 1: Adaptation Theory, from Film to Stage 11 Chapter 2: Reception, Aesthetic Response and Authorship 30 Chapter 3: Visual Narratives in Opera, the Graphic Novel and Film 45 Chapter 4: Style, Theme and Twentieth-Century Opera 57 Part B Chapter 5: Aesthetic Principles of Opera 75 Chapter 6: Models for an Operatic Dramaturgy 95 Chapter 7: The Politics of Stage Spectacle 128 Part C Chapter 8: Opera and Musical Theatre in the United States 148 Chapter 9: American Vernacular Adaptation 165 Chapter 10: Opera, Media Technology and American Drama 190 Chapter 11: Developing a National Contemporary Opera Culture 208 Chapter 12: Broadcast Performance and New Opera in a Media Age 227 Conclusion 244 Works Cited 248 iv Acknowledgements Sections of this thesis have been presented at conferences and in publication elsewhere during my candidature: parts of Chapter Four appeared in the paper ‘The Representation of Reason and Desire in Adaptations of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice’ presented at the 2012 Australian Modernist Studies Network Symposium: ‘Modernism, Intimacy and Emotion’ as part of the panel ‘Modernism and Performance;’ comments on The Habit of Art, Alan Bennett’s imagined history of W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten collaborating on composing Death in Venice in Chapter Two, were presented at the 2011 Australasian Universities Literature and Languages Association conference at the University of Auckland and published as ‘The Audience Will Expect Me to Leave the Stage: Literary Biography in Recent British Drama’ in the associations’ journal AUMLA; parts of Chapter Three suggesting puppetry as a dramaturgical model for opera were presented during a lecture in Advanced Performance History for postgraduate students in directing and writing for performance at the National Institute of Dramatic Art on February 25, 2013; and comments relating to the distinction between the narrative use of time in opera and musical theatre in Chapter Eight appeared in the article ‘Lyric Time and the Imprisoned Woman: Sweeney Todd and Il Barbiere di Siviglia,’ published in Philament 18, ‘Time.’ I would like to acknowledge the support of the staff and students at the University of Sydney: with particular thanks to Professor Vanessa Smith and Dr Melissa Hardie, who supervised postgraduate research seminars where sections of this thesis were first presented; members of the Queer Theory Doctoral Reading Group, for their help in contextualising Queer musicology; members of the Modern and Contemporary Literature and Culture research cluster’s ModCon poetics reading group; my fellow postgraduate research students for their valuable feedback and suggestions; and my supervisor, Dr Mark Byron, for his inexhaustible enthusiasm, patience and encouragement. I am also indebted to Dr Olga Taxidou and Dr Roger Savage for the assistance they provided during the early stages of formulating my thesis topic while I was a student in the MSc program in Literature and Modernity at the University of Edinburgh in 2008-9, and also to Dr Simon Malpas who supervised my dissertation on John Adams’ Doctor Atomic, also at the University of Edinburgh. v I would like to sincerely thank the archives and performance companies that have assisted my research: the staff at the Britten-Pears Foundation, particularly Thomas Barnes; the staff of the Performing Arts Reading Room at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; and Opera Australia and Pinchgut Opera for generously allowing me to attend several closed production rehearsals. During the second year of my PhD candidature I was a member of the Australian Theatre for Young People’s young artist program for emerging playwrights, and I owe a great deal of thanks to everyone at the ATYP, particularly Dan Pritchard and Fraser Corfield, for giving me the opportunity to discuss playwriting, dramaturgy and stage direction with many eminent Australian and international theatre makers. I received a great deal of support and encouragement from friends while I was writing this thesis and would like to specifically thank Mia Pinjuh, Rachel Yuen-Collingridge, Lindsay Terrell, Muireann Crowley, Kassie Maldonado, Ruth Hallinan, Jane Healey, Ursula Burger, Drew Webster, Aaron Dewitt, Brian Gray, Amy Ireland, Robin Dixon, Liz Shek-Noble, Yarran Hominh, Lydia Alexander, Alice Cooper, Emrys Quin, Georgia Symons, Nathan Dunne, Cressida Green, Yuan Zhang, Wang Yi, Lydia Nicholson, Alex Cullen, Laura Kotevska, Alana Fraser, Jenna Martin, Emily Pratt, and all the chess players in the Postgraduate Arts Research Centre. I would like to also acknowledge my three examiners, whose incisive feedback enabled me to improve the present thesis and identify productive avenues for further research. With fondest thanks to my family. vi vii Adaptation and Twentieth-Century Opera Opera occupies a precarious position within contemporary performance and literary culture: it is considered, by virtue of audience demographics and the high level of institutional support it receives, to represent a level of national cultural accomplishment and refinement; but is equally often framed as an outdated, inaccessible, and semantically unsophisticated art form. A similarly uneasy relationship exists between the stylistic particularities of the form and opera’s representative aims: the relationship between words and music is frequently conceived of as a structural expression of the broader division in aesthetic theory between narrative expression and the representation of the world, and as an illustration of the differences between the Aristotelian poetic modes of diegesis and mimesis. This representative tension is also echoed at many levels within the analysis of opera: in the relationship between the structural elements