Opera in the Novel from Balzac to Proust [Hardcover]

Newark studies the development of a key device in French fiction of the nineteenth century: the soir?e ? l'Op?ra.Stendhal, Balzac, Dumas p?re, Flaubert, Maupassant, Verne, Leroux and Proust, among many other French novelists, all wrote fiction set partly at the opera. Cormac Newark examines the development of this tradition in a rich study that will appeal to scholars of music, literature and cultural history alike.Stendhal, Balzac, Dumas p?re, Flaubert, Maupassant, Verne, Leroux and Proust, among many other French novelists, all wrote fiction set partly at the opera. Cormac Newark examines the development of this tradition in a rich study that will appeal to scholars of music, literature and cultural history alike.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 Com?die humaine to Proust's ? la recherche du temps perdu, by way of (among others) Dumas p?re's Le Comte de Monte-Cristo and Leroux's Le Fant?me de l'Op?ra. 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 op?ra 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 Op?ra; 6. Proust and the soir?e ? l'Op?ra chez soi; Envoi; Bibliography.'With an obvious and informed enthusiasm for the subjel³"