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 Comedie humaine to Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, by way of (among others) Dumas pere's Le Comte de Monte-Cristo and Leroux's Le Fantome de l'Opera. Attentive to textual and musical detail alike in the works, the study also delves...
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 c...