Creative (Mis)Reading: Musical Adaptation of the Modern Novel
Chair(s): Michelle Assay (University of Toronto)
Transforming a large-scale work of literature, such as a novel, into a musical work for the stage has historically proven a perilous endeavor, as the critical receptions of Gounod’s Faust and Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin amply demonstrate. Particularly fraught with danger is an adaptation of a modern novel into music: the range of themes and imagery has expanded tremendously in novels of the past century, alongside an increased generic, structural, and narrative complexity. Yet this very complexity offers opportunity, as a parallel expansion of expressive means, compositional techniques, and performative technologies has occurred in various genres of staged music, both “classical” and “popular.” Also evolving are critical approaches to musical adaptation, as scholars move away from traditional libretto study governed by “fidelity criticism” towards a more nuanced understanding of transmedia adaptation. Much work remains to be done, however: unlike in film and literary criticism, in musicology adaptation is still an emerging area of concern.
This panel approaches the complexities of “translating” a modern novel into staged music (broadly defined) through the lens of an individual literary character. We examine three distinct types of 20th-century literature – a semi-autobiographical Holocaust memoir, a realist saga set in the American Golden Age, and a genre-bending classic of magical realism – as adapted into a variety of musical genres that all contain an element of “theatrical” stage performance: opera, ballet, vocal/instrumental “theater” designed for the concert hall, and rock song. Each paper focuses on a single character from their respective novels: “real” German diplomat Walter Kretschmer from Zofia Posmysz’s Passazerka (1962), fictional Long Island socialite Daisy Buchanan from F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), and essentially mythological Woland (aka Satan) from Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master i Margarita (1940). The panelists consider shifting historical, geopolitical, and ideological contexts alongside generic, performative, artistic, and personal factors that shaped their adaptations by musicians ranging from Mieczyslaw Weinberg to Kate Soper, Sergei Slonimsky, and Mick Jagger. By approaching these adaptations as conscious creative (mis)readings – (re)interpretations, appropriations, and/or critiques of literary narrative – this panel aims to contribute to the growing body of recent musicological scholarship on transmedia adaptation.
Presentations of the Symposium
A“Bad” German: Walter Kretschmer in Weinberg’s "The Passenger"
Nicole Steinberg
Towson University
Denazification, the American-backed post-WWII attempt to eradicate Nazi ideology from German society, was an idealistic notion, undermined by the complexities of individuals’ participation in National Socialism. The process of denazification devolved into an exercise in rigid dichotomy:“Nazis” vs “innocents,” or “bad” Germans vs “good” Germans. In her semi-autobiographical novel The Passenger, Polish Auschwitz survivor Zofia Posmysz gives voice to a “good” German in the fictional character of Walter Kretschmer, a newly minted West-German diplomat, traveling by ship to his new post in Brazil in 1959. Initially, Walter’s public persona as a “good” German, projected in a conversation with an American acquaintance aboard, matches his self-image. His sense of self is soon derailed, however, by the shattering discovery that his wife Lisa, who accompanies him to Brazil, served as an SS Overseer in Auschwitz during the war. Through the rest of the novel, much of it narrated from Walter’s point of view, he is offered an opportunity to reconsider his past, voice his moral philosophy, and redefine both himself and his relationship with Lisa, as he grapples with his new knowledge of her crimes.
Yet, a very different Walter emerges in a 1967 operatic adaptation of The Passenger by Soviet composer Mieczysław Weinberg and librettist Alexander Medvedev, and it is his dramatic transformation that is the focus of this paper. While the process of streamlining a novel into a libretto is expected to involve changes, the change in Walter is particularly drastic: a central character is reduced to a cameo. I argue that in an attempt to balance competing concerns for historical accuracy, theatrical effectiveness, and Socialist-Realist narrative with Soviet views of denazification, Weinberg and Medvedev deprived Walter of his own voice, rendering him unable to speak (or rather sing) in his own defense. As a result of their creative (mis)reading, a complex but essentially “good” German became a “bad” German: a member of the silent majority, complicit in Germany’s collective guilt. Status-conscious, amoral, and cold, this Walter is a political stereotype of the Cold-War era: a self-centered Western capitalist; a symbol of the Federal Republic of Germany he represents.
“Her Voice Is Full of Money”: Daisy Buchanan’s Siren Song in Kate Soper’s "Voices from the Killing Jar"
Jacob LaBarge
University of Maryland
In the opening chapter of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), the narrator, Nick Carraway, describes his cousin Daisy Buchanan’s voice as compelling, indicating “an excitement in her voice that men who cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered ‘Listen.’” Later in the novel, upon witnessing an interaction between Daisy and Gatsby, Nick observes her voice’s power over his neighbor, stating: “I think that voice held [Gatsby] the most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn’t be over-dreamed—that voice was a deathless song.” Although Fitzgerald never compares Daisy’s voice to a siren’s, several literary critics use the metaphor of a siren’s song to speak to her alleged power over the men in the novel.
Contemporary US-American composer Kate Soper’s 2012 monodrama for soprano and chamber ensemble, Voices from the Killing Jar, adds to this perspective. The eight-movement monodrama features literary heroines from a wide range of source texts, including modern novels such as Halldór Laxness’s Icelandic epic Independent People (1934) and Haruki Murakai’s surrealist The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994). The final movement, “Her Voice is Full of Money: Daisy Buchanan,” centers on Fitzgerald’s heroine. However, this movement is noticeably different from the others, as instead of adapting specific plot elements from The Great Gatsby, it adapts Daisy’s voice.
This paper frames Soper’s transmedia adaptation of Daisy’s voice as an appropriation of Homeric sirens—a connection mentioned only briefly in the composer’s 2011 dissertation accompanying Voices from the Killing Jar. Drawing on musical analysis, I begin by determining the ways in which Soper constructs Daisy’s sirenic persona musically. I then turn toward the movement’s text, interpreting Soper’s use of direct quotations from Fitzgerald’s novel in the context of my analysis. Ultimately, I argue that “Her Voice is Full of Money” transforms Daisy into a mythological siren, generating a musical commentary on the power dynamics between Daisy, the men in Fitzgerald’s novel, and Kate Soper’s own audience. By approaching this movement through the lens of transmedia adaptation, this paper also contributes to musicological scholarship on madness, captivity, and voicelessness in contemporary staged music.
Sympathy for the Devil: Woland as Adaptation
Olga Haldey
University of Maryland
Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita (1940), a masterpiece of magical realism and a classic of twentieth-century literature, has developed a worldwide following since its posthumous publication in the late 1960s. Creative “responses” to the novel include a dizzying array of over 200 musical adaptations: operas, ballets, musicals, original and compilation film scores, instrumental works, and numerous popular songs. The highlight of this last group is “Sympathy for the Devil” by The Rolling Stones, an icon of 1960s rock, a rare example of Mick Jagger’s solo work as a songwriter, and the very first musical adaptation of The Master and Margarita, recorded barely eighteen months after the novel’s initial release.
That Bulgakov’s Woland (aka Satan) is the source of Jagger’s Devil is part of both rock history and lore, yet the issue that The Stones’ critics and scholars habitually bypass is what it is precisely that Mick Jagger adapts. While any transmedia adaptation is a form of creative (mis)reading, how does one adapt a literary character deliberately conceived to be resistant to interpretation? Particularly a character like Woland, whose strategy of self-concealment arguably also involves adaptation, as he crafts his masks from the very philosophical, theological, cultural, literary, and artistic tropes that historically attempted to “interpret” the phenomenon that is Satan. One notable example is Woland donning a distinctly recognizable musical mask – that of the operatic Mephistopheles, complete with a century’s worth of performance traditions that iconic character generated.
In this paper I treat Bulgakov’s Woland as both a source and a subject of musical adaptation, by first tracing this character’s unique ability of being at once palpably present and completely opaque to its roots in the culture of operatic performance. I then examine the distinct approaches to adapting this “theatrical” quality of simultaneous presence and absence in two early transmedia adaptations of The Master and Margarita: a 1972 opera by Sergei Slonimsky and a 1986 film-ballet choreographed by Ekaterina Maksimova and Vladimir Vasiliev. Finally, I propose an answer to my original query: exactly which of Woland’s many masks might have elicited Mick Jagger’s sympathy for Bulgakov’s Devil.
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