Film Adaptations of Operas as Reservoirs of Musical Memory
In ‘Semiosphere’ (1984), the foundational text of the ‘semiotics of cultures’, the eminent Russian semiotician Jurij M. Lotman (2001 and 2004) defines culture as a dynamic and dissonant space, interwoven with flows of texts that generate dialogues, intersections, and waves. The intertextual dialogue inherent in the production of any text is even constitutive of the genre of adaptation. This is a process within the semiosphere that consists of generating new metatexts from a source text.
For a long time, art criticism approached the phenomenon of adaptation in a pejorative way. A multitude of nouns (e.g., remake, reduction, transfer, etc.) and verbal syntagmas (e.g., drawn out, derived from, extracted from, etc.) have over time been assigned to products and practices whose critical analysis has remained polarised by rigid dichotomies such as authentic versus inauthentic, original versus derivative, faithful versus unfaithful. More recent interpretations (e.g., Hutcheon 2006, Mücke 2008, and Rajewski 2002) have tended to view adaptation processes and their products as the remediation of a source text into a new and autonomous cultural artefact. Building on the most recent theoretical approaches to the subject, this paper aims to examine a phenomenon typical of the twentieth century, namely the film adaptation of operas.
From DeMille’s ‘Carmen’ (1918) to Capellani’s ‘La vie de Bohème’ (1916) and from Wiene’s ‘Rosenkavalier’ (1926) to Berger’s ‘Der Meister von Nürnberg’, the cinematic remediation of opera emerged during the silent era as a means of conferring artistic legitimacy on the burgeoning cinematic medium. Over time, this gave rise to a variety of strategies for reinterpreting, reconfiguring and reinventing the operatic tradition, sometimes in the service of historiographical operations with overt political implications. This is certainly the case with Fascist cinematography and its glorification of the Italian operatic tradition through adaptations of operas (e.g. Gallone’s ‘E lucean le stelle’ (1934), ‘Amami, Alfredo!’ (1940) and ‘Manon Lescaut’ (1940)) and composer biopics (e.g. ‘Casta diva’ (1935) and ‘Divine armonie’ (1938), again by Gallone).
After an initial period of competition (see Gutman 1930), the Seventh Art also demonstrated its potential as a valuable means of documenting operatic music. The advent of film adaptations of operas and operatic interludes in feature films soon attracted the attention of critics and specialists who recognised the potential of preserving for documentary purposes the interpretive art of the greatest singers and conductors of the past. Film adaptations were also regarded by some as a manifestation of the progressive ideal of a ‘Volksoper’, a popular theatre accessible to all social classes. Finally, film adaptations of opera gave rise to a plethora of genres, including film opera, parallel opera and opera in prose, which continue to serve as a rich reservoir of musical memory.
Keywords: theory of adaptation, intertextuality/intermediality, opera on screen
Biography
Francesco Finocchiaro (Ph. D.) is a Full Professor of music history at the ‘G. Rossini’ Conservatoire of Pesaro and habilitated Privatdozent at the University of Innsbruck. Research Scientist at the Universities of Vienna and Milan, he also taught and conducted research at the Universities of Bologna, Padua, Pescara, and at the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna, at the Freie Universität of Berlin, at the University of Bayreuth, and at NYU Steinhardt. His research interests cover the areas of composition, theory, and aesthetics in 20th-century music. He edited the Italian edition of Schönberg’s treatise Der musikalische Gedanke (Astrolabio, 2011) and has published several essays on the Viennese School. He has also published extensively on film music, with a special focus on the relationship between musical Modernism and German cinema (Palgrave, 2017). In twenty years of professional activity, he has published over 60 essays in three languages and given over 100 conferences in various countries. His latest monograph – Durch einen Gazeschleier (et+k, 2025) – deals with the film music criticism during the silent era.
‘G. Rossini’ Conservatoire of Music, Italy – f.finocchiaro@conservatoriorossini.it