Lear à l’opéra

Abstract

William Shakespeare’s plays are one of the main sources of inspiration for the international opera scene. Over the centuries, some 350 opera composers have adapted one of his plays. Yet few of these works have been successful enough to enter the world repertoire of the most performed scores. King Lear is one of Shakespeare’s longest and most complex plays. Significantly, Aribert Reimann’s version, created in 1978, is the only one, out of the twenty other operas adapted from King Lear and composed between 1817 and 2000, to have entered the aforementioned world repertoire. The aim of this article is to find out how Reimann and his librettist Claus H. Henneberg managed to do it and, more generally, what this opera says about operatic adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. We will thus pay particular attention to the way Reimann and Henneberg tackled four major structuring issues. The first concerns the total length of the work and the cuts to be made in the original text. Then, we will look at the way the German pair dealt with the complex and polymorphous nature of Shakespeare’s characters, before tackling the question of enunciation on the operatic stage and its specificities in terms of action. Last, since opera is a global art form, we will wonder whether a libretto is a drama set to music or a drama written for music, and see how Reimann and Henneberg answered this question.