Book to Stage: Adaptations of Literature to Opera

The course explores the relationship between two worlds—that of opera and that of literature, both prose and plays. The two have been very tightly connected and there are hundreds of operas that are based on great literature. In the course we also examine some examples of three-way relationships involving another genre—film or musical theater. Many opera composers, like Giuseppe Verdi and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, for example, have based their work on high literature, including William Shakespeare, Augustin de Beaumarchais, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, and Amy Tan. In the course, we first closely study the literary model (play or story), discuss its features and suitability to being adapted as an opera, including potential obstacles. We then discuss the changes needed for the creation of a viable libretto for an opera and what music supplies that replaces or transcends words. Ultimately, we examine the opera in question and unpack the different impacts, functions, and emotional and dramatic content of the written versus sung works with an eye to the different audiences and societies of each. In the case of play to opera we also compare the theatrical acting, for example of a Shakespearean company, to the movement on an operatic stage. Works examined include Othello (Giraldi Cinzio to Shakespeare to Verdi), The Marriage of Figaro (Beaumarchais to Mozart), The Bonesetter's Daughter (Tan to Stewart Wallace), and The Ring of the Nibelung/Rheingold (an anonymous twelfth-century author to Richard Wagner).