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Here are two brief articles I wrote just before the opening of the Canadian Opera Company's 1992 performance of Mario and the Magician . One was a Preface by the Librettist and the other an article about the adaptation process, Mario and the Medium -- Necessary Liberties.
Before any of these stages, of course, comes the overwhelming debt to Thomas Mann, whose prophetic novella formed the basis for this opera/drama. Mann wrote his novella on a Baltic beach -- probably in the summer of 1928, but remembering a holiday he had spent with his family in Viareggio on the Ligurian Sea (perhaps during the summer of 1927). According to Mann's letters the magic show really did take place, though not with the tragic consequences of the fictional account. Mann's daughter (somewhat older than our opera's Klara) apparently commented the next day that she wouldn't have been surprised had the victim shot the magician. Mann took the idea, wove it into the fabric of his deep concerns about fascism and came up with Mario and the Magician -- displaced a little southwards to the Tyrrhenian Sea. It captured that same brooding quality that Death in Venice had more than a decade earlier. Indeed, if Death in Venice was darkened by the approaching shadows of the First World War so was Mario and the Magician, and even more prophetically, by those of the Second. Interesting that both took place on Italian coasts -- and both inspired operas. .
The next literary debt is owed to Harry Somers, who had been thinking about an opera on Mario and the Magician for some years. Harry had made a set of very extensive notes as to how the opera might be laid out scene by scene. Inevitably a librettist brings a few other ideas to the table. Which of Mann's many brief references to his fictional family's happenings are to be turned into full-fledged scenes? Which are to be dropped in the interests of economy? We wrestled with these questions over a two-year period. In the article on "Mario and the Medium" I describe some of the problems in converting a written medium (novella) into a performance medium (opera). The opera is divided into three acts. The first act covers the contretemps that occur on Stefan's holiday -- and consists of eight scenes out of the dozen or more incidents alluded to in the novella. The second and third acts are the magic show. There are no real divisions in these latter acts and the grouping into "scenes" is more just for convenience to help readers, singers, and rehearsal schedulers find their place. .
I have occasionally added descriptions (that are not strictly necessary in a libretto) to help any interested reader draw connections to the Mann novella. Thus the description of the Taxi Driver as a rebellious young man with a "Nubian coiffure" is a reference to Mann's labelling of a particular character in the novella. Who knows what the actual hair style will be in the opera! Also I have included quantities of stage directions because I found it hard to write a scene without imagining the physical movements. But no doubt Robert Carsen and Michael Levine will have different, and better, conceptions. .
Now that there is nothing more for the librettist to do (apart from cleaning up a few typos before packaging this libretto for audience use) and everyone else is hard at work (the composer polishing orchestration, singers and musicians learning their parts, the conductor studying scores and rehearsal schedules, the director and designer completing their own visions of how the work will be presented) it is nice to return to the simple role of spectator -- or for opera perhaps also 'auditor' -- a profession I have had some training in. And I am looking forward to doing a lot more listening (and looking) in two more months when Mario and the Magician opens. .
....................................................................Copyright (c) 1992 Rod Anderson
But my subject here is the taking of quite another set of liberties, those taken by a translator. I don't mean language translator--the novella was translated into English by Lowe-Porter in 1931--but a medium translator. Traduttore, traditore ("a translator is a traitor"). Inevitably, as librettist for this new opera based on "Mario and the Magician", I have taken some liberties converting Mann's prophetic message from novella to opera. The medium may not be the message, but it surely influences it. The same literal message would have come out differently (and more seriously impaired) had it been simply transported from book to stage. To preserve the spirit, one must depart from the letter. I will give four examples. Partly one discovers these by trial and error. Partly, in my case, one profits from the good advice of composer and director. But I must tell you that Harry Somers, who had long targeted Mario as an opera he wanted to compose, has one serious fault: he is so unfailingly courteous that a novice like myself might easily miss the lesson. Robert Carsen, who will direct this production, was more insistent. Between them they rescued me, thankfully, from numerous mistakes. A few no doubt remain--but I am counting on Harry's music and Robert's staging to make the final, and most important, rescue. .
The first example of these liberties-in-the-interest-of-fidelity is the general treatment of the narrative voice. In the novella, the unnamed narrator is both story-teller and participant. In the libretto I have given this narrator a name (Stefan) and an identity (Munich novelist--like Mann). Some of Stefan's ponderings are crucial to the atmosphere and content of the piece but not all such ponderings would be appropriate in the mouth of the participant at the time. Some have obviously been thought about after the event. For that reason I have retained the 'narrator' role at least some of the time--that is, I've had Stefan step out of the action from time to time to address the audience. And to give this narrator aspect a venue, I have inserted a Prologue and made it the beginning of a public lecture Stefan is giving in Munich in the spring of 1929. As the libretto is written in English, this lecture device sets up the conceit that English equals German, and that the opera audience is, in fact, a 1929 German audience listening to a lecture given in German. Later the audience will become the 1928 European tourist audience in Cipolla's magic show in Torre, while at the same time remaining the 1929 lecture audience for Stefan's asides and conclusion. At least, that is how I ended up. Along the way, and before Robert and Harry explained to me that it wouldn't work, there was a draft where Stefan was on a lecture tour in the United States (as Mann had often been) and another where he was in Loew's Yonge Street (the present Elgin Theatre) just before its 1928 conversion to a cinema. .
The second example is the particular treatment of this narrator's voice--his tone and style of speaking. A novelist makes up not only the story, but also (even when in the first person) the fictional narrator who tells it. And the narrator Mann has created in this case has an erudite, slightly pompous voice--far from a model of good-guy humility. He talks about the ugliness of middle-class humanity and about nationalism as an illness the Italians are going through. Inevitably such arrogance distances us from the narrator and I believe that was all part of Mann's intentional, ironic detachment. Without such detachment, one gets swept away in the very excesses of idealism and hero worship that lead to Sra. Angiolieri's susceptibility to Cipollian seduction--that lead, in short, to fascism. The detachment is part of the lesson we are to learn as we read. So in my first draft I worked diligently to maintain Mann's tone. Where dialogue had to be created, I tried hard to give Stefan's words the same slightly stuffy arrogance found in the novella. It didn't work. As Robert said, I was bleeding out the warmth too much. Non-heroes are tricky protagonists on stage. Far more annoying than on the pages of a book. So I started over--not with a complete rebirth of personality but with at least a softening. .
A third problem is that we in 1992 know the progress of fascism throughout the 30s and 40s, which Mann did not at the time of his novella. Furthermore, fairly or unfairly, the subject of fascism, despite its historical and etymological origins, suggests Nazism to a contemporary (English-speaking?) audience. Indeed, it might seem strange on the modern stage to focus on the incipient horrors of Mussolini when, in hindsight, the example of Hitler is at hand. To meet this problem head on, I have made Stefan someone who has been speaking out, as Mann did, against German fascism but for this lecture picks on the earlier (and at that time further advanced) Italian variety to get his point across to an audience of his fellow citizens. I have made the date of his lecture the spring of 1929 to stay close to the viewpoint of the novella. We have not yet come, therefore, to the crash of October 1929, which will plunge the world into depression and Hitler's party on the path to power. In an early draft I went further and had mysterious agents ransacking Stefan's lecture notes following the Prologue and appearing with the carabinieri at the final gun-shot at the end of the opera. I was thinking of Mann's flight from home just after Hitler seized power. But this would have been too heavy-handed--as Robert was quick to point out. Enough is enough. He was right. .
The fourth and central problem might be called that of the disappearing protagonist. Mann's novella is hinged in the middle--the first half (our Act I) covering the narrator's contretemps, the second half (our Acts II and III) covering Cipolla's magic show. The narrator is front and centre as both participant and commentator in Act I. If he merely subsides into the audience in Acts II and III the staged work becomes unbalanced. This does not happen in the novella because the strong narrative voice continues to engage our minds even as we read about Cipolla. The two forces remain in conflict: Cipolla representing a totalitarian attack on free will and the narrative voice criticizing, analyzing, commenting, exhorting. How to retain these two conflicting voices at the same time in the opera? Simple: put them on the stage together (even if this departs literally from the novella). Harry and Robert agreed. To lead up to this confrontation, then, and to make Stefan's occasional asides not seem merely gratuitous, I have had Cipolla attack him where it hurts: his children. The first attack is during the card tricks (a minor embroidering upon the novella plot). The stronger attack occurs during the hypnotized dance sequence. The novella merely has the children laughing and jumping for joy at the antics of the dancers. I have extended this involvement to the point of Cipolla actually inviting the children down on stage and then forcing them to do the fascist march (Giovinezza Giovinezza). Stefan rushes down to the stage and confronts Cipolla. The confrontation ends in a stalemate. Stefan resists Cipolla's order to dance but the price of his resistance is separation from his family. Ironically, in the end he sits and does nothing--the shame of the bystander (foreshadowed in his Prologue speech: "we sit around and do nothing"). This is clearly the most significant libretto departure from the novella--but I think in the end it is faithful to the spirit of Mann's novella. .
Dozens of other examples could be cited: giving the crier who announces the Cipolla show a demonic, pied-piper role in subborning the Torre children into little squadristi; creating the drawing room scene with the Duse gramophone at the Casa Eleonora; giving the Municipio Official a short speech of Mussolini's; and so on. .
Of course, writers have this bias: they think the words matter. Composers know that too many words just get in the way of the music. And directors know that too much of either merely slows down the action on stage. And designers? Well, they know that none of this has any impact without the right design. So in opera none of us is entirely free. Yet who would agree with Cipolla that "freedom of the will does not exist"? Individual freedom within cooperative constraints is better than no freedom. And taking some liberties for the sake of the whole is particularly apt for a work whose whole theme is the preservation of liberty.
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