Thaïs: Adaptation, Degeneration, and Intermediality

Abstract

This article examines several forms of intermedial adaptation arising from the creative and reception processes of the opera Thaïs, premièred at the Paris Opéra in March 1894. With a libretto by Louis Gallet and a score by Jules Massenet, the opera was based on the 1890 novel by Anatole France. Written in an age of Symbolist and post-Wagnerian aesthetics, the opera used innovative orchestral interludes to capture the philosophical tenets of the novel, and, in a social and medical climate preoccupied with decadence and degeneration, it depicted Thaïs as a mystical hysteric. Press reception of the opera in caricatural and parodical forms treated these and other reception issues via temporal and geographical re-contextualizations of the opera’s story, producing complex intertextual discourses and meta-discourses. Within these intermedial processes, each version of the Thaïs story used and adapted the conventions of the previous genre to fit the new, thereby creating a network of narratives in an exploration and understanding of communication and meaning, convention and genre.