Opera in the Novel from Balzac to Proust

Newark studies the development of a key device in French fiction of the nineteenth century: the soirée à l'Opéra.

Cormac Newark (Author)

9780521118903, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 31 March 2011

298 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.61 kg

'With an obvious and informed enthusiasm for the subject, Newark balances literary and musicological considerations with quite and persuasive authority … casts revealing light on a significant period in the development of opera.' Opera

The turning point of Madame Bovary, which Flaubert memorably set at the opera, is only the most famous example of a surprisingly long tradition, one common to a range of French literary styles and sub-genres. In the first book-length study of that tradition to appear in English, Cormac Newark examines representations of operatic performance from Balzac's La Comédie humaine to Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, by way of (among others) Dumas père's Le Comte de Monte-Cristo and Leroux's Le Fantôme de l'Opéra. Attentive to textual and musical detail alike in the works, the study also delves deep into their reception contexts. The result is a compelling cultural-historical account: of changing ways of making sense of operatic experience from the 1820s to the 1920s, and of a perennial writerly fascination with the recording of that experience.

Introduction
1. Balzac, Meyerbeer and science
2. 'Tout entier?': scenes from grand opéra in Dumas and Balzac
3. The novel in opera: residues of reading in Flaubert
4. Knowing what happens next: opera in Verne
5. 'Vous qui faites l'endormie': the Phantom and the buried voices of the Paris Opéra
6. Proust and the soirée à l'Opéra chez soi
Envoi
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Literary theory [DSA], Opera [AVGC9]