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Faust, Nested Reception and La Castafiore

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 June 2013

CORMAC NEWARK
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Abstract

This article examines an example of what might be called ‘nested’ reception – the representation of one work of art within another – in the shape of Gounod's Faust, performances of which were depicted in media ranging from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels to the long-running comic strip Les Aventures de Tintin. In particular, it considers the reception issues raised by the last of these, in which the opera's persistence in the surrounding culture is represented by repeated (and often unexpected) performances of the ‘Jewel Song’ by the diva La Castafiore. Part repository of opera cliché and part creative commentary on Faust's place in a shrinking and stagnating repertory, the passages featuring Castafiore may also pose questions for musicologists: not just about the materials we use to recuperate and represent historical echoes, in the broadest sense, of opera, but also about the historical and critical models we use to interpret them.

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Articles
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , July 2013 , pp. 165 - 184
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

1 Charles Gounod's Faust (libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré after the latter's play Faust et Marguerite, in turn based on Goethe) was first performed at the Théâtre-Lyrique in Paris in 1859.

2 The work transferred to the Académie Impériale de Musique (i.e. the Opéra) in 1869 and was given a further new production in 1875, immediately following that institution's move from the Salle Peletier to its present home at the Palais Garnier; performances in Germany, Italy and elsewhere in Europe soon followed, as well as in the United States (see note 6), Buenos Aires, Sydney and elsewhere. See Huebner, Steven, The Operas of Charles Gounod (Oxford, 1990), esp. 54–7Google Scholar; also my ‘“Vous qui faites l'endormie”: The Phantom and the Buried Voices of the Paris Opéra’, 19th-Century Music, 33 (2009), 62–78.

3 de Maupassant, Guy, Fort comme la mort (Paris, 1889)Google Scholar; Leroux, Gaston, Le Fantôme de l'Opéra (Paris, 1910)Google Scholar; Wharton, Edith, The Age of Innocence (New York, 1920)Google Scholar. See my Opera in the Novel from Balzac to Proust (Cambridge, 2011).

4 George Bernard Shaw, ‘Gounod's Music’, The World (22 February 1893), reprinted in Shaw's Music: The Complete Musical Criticism, 3 vols. (London, 1981), II, 812–18, at 814.

5 Newark, Opera in the Novel, 200.

6 The Academy of Music presented operatic seasons from its inauguration in 1854 until 1886 before ceding its place in New York high society, like the old-money Knickerbockers who patronised it, to the new Metropolitan Opera. Christine Nilsson, the singer in the scene described by Wharton, actually sang in Faust both at the Academy of Music (from 1870) and at the Met (famously, beginning with the first ever performance there in 1883). See Solie, Ruth A., ‘Fictions of the Opera Box’, in The Work of Opera: Genre, Nationhood, and Sexual Difference, ed. Dellamora, Richard and Fischlin, Daniel (New York, 1997), 185–208Google Scholar, reprinted in her Music in Other Words: Victorian Conversations (Berkeley, 2004), 187–218, at 192–3, esp. notes 13 and 16.

7 Apart from the record-breaking West End and Broadway show (The Phantom of the Opera), there have been ballets, plays and further novels, as well as dozens of television and film versions, such as (to name only a few) those to come out of Hollywood in 1925, 1943 and 1962, and from various parts of China in 1937, 1962, 1985 and 1995, respectively.

8 Lev Nicolayevich [Leo] Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (Moscow, 1878) has also been made into musicals, operas, ballets, stage and radio plays, and (so far) around twenty films.

9 The standard French term bande dessinée, or BD, has none of the childish connotations of the English word ‘comic’. The medium – often referred to as le neuvième art (the ninth art), and, at least from the 1960s onwards, the object of considerable critical and scholarly attention – is taken much more seriously in Francophone culture generally.

10 All the Tintin adventures were first published in serialised form, initially in the Le Petit Vingtième (the children's supplement to the Brussels Catholic newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle), subsequently in Le Soir (from 1940) and finally in a dedicated Tintin magazine (from 1946; Kuifje in its parallel Flemish edition). In every case except that of the first, Tintin au pays des Soviets (1929–30), there followed a meticulously re-drawn colour album; from the Second World War onwards, these albums tended to appear no more than a year or so after the end of the serialised strip. For a table listing this information for all twenty-four Tintin albums (including the unfinished Tintin et l'Alph-Art), see the Appendix at the end of this article, which is derived from that in Thompson, Harry, Tintin: Hergé and his Creation (London, 1992), 217–18Google Scholar. There are differences between the visual composition of the strips and that of the albums, but for the sake of simplicity, references below will be to the dates of the strips' first publication in album form, whether black and white or colour. As hinted at in the captions accompanying my examples, there are also divergences between the sense of the original French dialogue and that of the English translations (all by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner, and all first published, in London, as colour albums – Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and Tintin and Alph-Art by Sundancer and all the others by Methuen). The latter are now so well known in their own right, however, that I have used them without any tampering; the reader may follow the references and examples in the translated editions using the same page numbers.

11 At Covent Garden, Faust was heard every season for almost its first fifty years (1863–1911); more than 700 performances have been given at the Met. At the Opéra, 500 performances were clocked up in less than thirty years and 2,000 in less than a century. To set these figures in some sort of context: Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots, previously one of the hardiest warhorses of the repertory, had only managed around half that number by its centenary in 1936; see Gerhard, Anselm, The Urbanization of Opera: Music Theater in Paris in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Whittall, Mary (Chicago, 1998), 403Google Scholar. Faust, unlike some of the other most-performed works in the current repertory, is also irresistible to amateur companies.

12 Apostolidès, Jean-Marie, The Metamorphoses of Tintin, or, Tintin for Adults, trans. Hoy, Jocelyn (Stanford, 2010), 1Google Scholar. The popularity of Tintin shows no signs of abating: whereas Matthew Screech estimates sales figures of seventy million, not counting the thirty-three translated editions, at Remi's death and Thompson calculates 100 million, in forty languages, by 1991, other sources claim a figure of 230 million or more, in 100 different languages. See Screech, Matthew, Masters of the Ninth Art: Bandes dessinées and Franco-Belgian Identity (Liverpool, 2005), 74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thompson, Tintin, 214; and the Brussels tourist website, visitbrussels.be/bitc/BE_en/minisite_tintin/brussels-the-cradle-of-herge.do (accessed 17 December 2012).

13 A phonetic reversal of Remi's initials, Hergé was his nom de plume from 1924.

14 Her first appearance was in Le Sceptre d'Ottokar (1939). She went on to appear in person in Les 7 Boules de cristal (1948), L'Affaire Tournesol (1956), Coke en stock (1958), Les Bijoux de la Castafiore (1963), and Tintin et les Picaros (1976). She was also to have featured prominently in Tintin et l'Alph-Art (published posthumously in 1986, revised edition with additional material 2004).

15 There are numerous other recurring characters, notably the bungling detectives Dupond and Dupont (Thomson and Thompson in the translations), but Castafiore's importance is such that she is the only one to have a story named after her.

16 See Tintin et les Picaros (1976), 13 and 61.

17 Thompson, Tintin, 167, 182–5, 191, 198 and elsewhere.

18 This was based on the Fernand Legros/Elmyr de Hory case in the 1950s and 1960s. See also Screech, Masters of the Ninth Art, 34–5 and 47, and Miller, Ann, Reading bande dessinée: Critical Approaches to French-Language Comic Strip (Bristol, 2007), 214Google Scholar.

19 Only one other work is mentioned by name in the series, when Castafiore takes her leave of the other characters to return to Milan to perform in La gazza ladra. Like that of Rossini's opera, the plot hinges on a kleptomaniac magpie; see Les Bijoux de la Castafiore (1963), 55 and 57.

20 Difficult though it is to compare pre-recording-era singers with those of today, let alone with singers who are fictional, it seems clear that neither Marie Caroline Miolan-Carvalho, who created the role of Marguerite at the Théâtre-Lyrique, nor any of the notable interpreters of the role at La Scala, Castafiore's supposed ‘home’, during Hergé's lifetime (Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Renata Scotto, Mirella Freni) left evidence, recorded or otherwise, of an interpretation approaching the forcefulness of Castafiore's.

21 Le Sceptre d'Ottokar, 28.

22 L'Affaire Tournesol, 3–12. See also McCarthy, Tom, Tintin and the Secret of Literature (London, 2006), 101–2Google Scholar.

23 Widely reported, but denied by Caruso's widow: see Caruso, Dorothy, Enrico Caruso: His Life and Death (New York, 1945)Google Scholar. Irrespective of the identity of the first singer to demonstrate the phenomenon, the glass-shattering singer has exerted a peculiar fascination in popular culture at least since the early twentieth century; see, for example, www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fact-or-fiction-opera-singer-can-shatter-glass, www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theoneshow/onepassions/2008/11/the-smashing-soprano.html and also, for a rare instance involving a male (and, surely no coincidence, non-operatic) singer, www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZD8ffPwXRo (all accessed 17 December 2012). Steven Spielberg's film The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (USA, 2011) has the villains plotting to gain access to a bullet-proof glass case that they are certain will be broken by Castafiore's voice during a recital, but, in an unforgivable departure from orthodox Tintinology, the piece in question turns out to be ‘Je veux vivre’ from Gounod's Roméo et Juliette (even more outrageously, the orchestral introduction is from Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia).

24 That is, just over 220 lb or just under 16 stone. The English translation gallantly reduces the figure to 14 stone (196 lb or 89 kg); see Les Bijoux de la Castafiore, 42.

25 Clément, Catherine, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Wing, Betsy (Minneapolis, 1988), 25–6Google Scholar.

26 Coke en stock, 40.

27 The first time we ‘hear’ Castafiore (Le Sceptre d'Ottokar, 28) the sound scatters wild animals for some distance around; it also threatens to blow over the microphone in her subsequent broadcast performance (29). Her music-hall turn (Les 7 Boules de cristal, 12) is disrupted when Milou starts howling uncontrollably.

28 In Tintin au pays de l'or noir, 42, the sound of Castafiore's singing on the radio is the last in a series of outbursts interrupting the narrative.

29 Le Sceptre d'Ottokar, 29 and 38.

30 L'Affaire Tournesol, 52–5.

31 Ibid., esp. 52; Milou is muzzled as a precaution.

32 For instance, it is the villainous Marquis di Gorgonzola (see Fig. 3b) who has invited Castafiore to the fancy-dress party on the yacht (Coke en stock, 36–41). Confirmation of Colonel Sponsz's genuine liking for Castafiore's performance (L'Affaire Tournesol, 52–5) comes when he arrives at his office the next morning, humming the ‘Jewel Song’ to himself, and his secretary remarks that he seems to be in a particularly good mood (56). See also the fascist-sympathiser police officer listening to Castafiore on the radio in Le Sceptre d'Ottokar, 29.

33 Les Bijoux de la Castafiore, 13.

34 Les 7 Boules de cristal, 11.

35 Tintin au Tibet, 16–17; see also Tintin et les Picaros, 2, where Castafiore startles the Captain from within the TV set.

36 Tintin et les Picaros, 21–2.

37 Les 7 Boules de cristal, 11.

38 In full, Barbier and Carré's text is ‘Ah! je ris de me voir / Si belle en ce miroir!/ Est-ce toi, Marguerite? / Réponds-moi, réponds vite! / Non! non! ce n'est plus toi! / Ce n'est plus ton visage! / C'est la fille d'un roi, / Qu'on salue au passage! … / Ah! s'il était ici! … / S'il me voyait ainsi! / Comme une demoiselle / Il me trouverait belle! …’ [‘Ah! I laugh to see myself so beautiful in this mirror! Is it you, Marguerite? Answer, answer quickly! No! No! it is no longer you! It is no longer your face! It is the daughter of a king, that one greets as she passes! … Ah! If he were here! … If he could see me like this! like a lady, he would think me beautiful! …’], but Castafiore never gets beyond the first few lines, rendered by Lonsdale-Cooper and Turner as ‘Ah, my beauty past compare, these jewels bright I wear! Was I ever Margarita? Is it I? Come reply! Mirror, mirror tell me truly!’

39 As many commentators have remarked, Tintin continued to wear the same 1930s clothes (and to bring to justice the same 1930s villains) right up until the last completed adventure in the 1970s; see Thompson, Tintin, 11.

40 Les Bijoux de la Castafiore, 27.

41 Tintin et les Picaros, 47–8.

42 Ferrari, Silvio, ‘Les Bijoux de la Castafiore: De métaphores en métaplasmes la langue en “marche”’, in Tintin, Hergé et la ‘Belgité’, ed. Fratta, Anna Soncini (Bologna, 1994), 203–17Google Scholar.

43 Objectif Lune, 29, and Les Bijoux de la Castafiore, 5.

44 Les Bijoux de la Castafiore, 9 and 14.

45 Other dream sequences are depicted in Le Crabe aux pinces d'or, 32, and L'Étoile mystérieuse (1942), 9.

46 In addition to McCarthy, Tintin and the Secret of Literature, see Tisseron, Serge, Tintin et les secrets de famille: Secrets de famille, troubles mentaux et création (Paris, 1990)Google Scholar, and Peeters, Benoît, Les Bijoux ravis: Une lecture moderne de Tintin (Brussels, 1984)Google Scholar. The debate is summarised in Miller, Reading bande dessinée, 201–27.

47 See Thompson, Tintin, 11–12.

48 ‘Bianca’ and ‘casta’ are of course feminine adjectives in Italian, but ‘fiore’ is a masculine noun.

49 See my Opera in the Novel, esp. chapter 5.

50 See, among others, Peeters, Benoît, Hergé, Son of Tintin, trans. Kover, Tina (Baltimore, 2012)Google Scholar; Soumois, Frédéric, Dossier Tintin: Sources, versions, thèmes, structures (Brussels, 1987), 194Google Scholar; and McCarthy, Tintin and the Secret of Literature, 9.

51 For a caution against this, see Dahlhaus, Carl, Foundations of Music History, trans. Robinson, J. Bradford (Cambridge, 1983), esp. 154–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, 25–6.

53 In particular, Tisseron, Tintin et les secrets de famille, to which many subsequent studies refer.

54 See, for example, McCarthy, Tintin and the Secret of Literature, which traces the concerns embodied in Hergé's recurring themes back through his intriguing family history (following Tisseron, Tintin et les secrets de famille) to much broader questions about the nature and function of literature.

55 Thompson, Tintin, 146.

56 Perhaps surprisingly, Hergé seemed to underestimate the length of the opera: in the captions to the performance represented in L'Affaire Tournesol, 52–3, it seems he had a total of just two hours in mind.

57 See, for example, Soumois, Dossier Tintin, 272n1 and 278–9.

58 Thompson, Tintin, 178, apropos of Tintin et le mystère de la ‘Toison d'or’ (dir. Jean-Jacques Vierne, France/Belgium, 1961). The story is retold in Tom McCarthy's review of the Spielberg film, only there it takes the form of Hergé asking a little boy coming out of the cinema after seeing the earlier adaptation; see www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/oct/28/adventures-tintin-secret-unicorn-spielberg, accessed 17 December 2012. The ‘wrong voice’ affliction was literally true of Castafiore in the TV animated series (France/Belgium, 1957–64), as it happened, for playing her was Maureen Forrester, a contralto associated with a number of mezzo-soprano roles – her Fach ranged from Orphée (Orphée et Eurydice) to the Countess (Pikovaya Dama [The Queen of Spades]), the Witch (Hänsel und Gretel), Ulrica (Un ballo in maschera) and Erda (The Ring) – yet hardly a soprano.