Michael Berkeley and David Malouf’s Rewriting of Jane Eyre: An Operatic and Literary Palimpsest

Abstract

English composer Michael Berkeley (born 1948) is the son of Lennox Berkeley (1903–1989), himself a composer of instrumental music and operas including, for instance, A Dinner Engagement (1955) and Ruth (1955–56). To this day, Michael Berkeley has written three operas and is currently working on a new operatic project based on Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement (2001). For his first two operas (Baa Baa Black Sheep, 1993, and Jane Eyre, 2000), he collaborated with acclaimed Australian novelist David Malouf (born 1934). This chapter addresses Berkeley’s second opera, Jane Eyre, a chamber opera¹ premiered at the Cheltenham Music Festival on June 30, 2000. The opera by David Malouf and Michael Berkeley appears to be an operatic and literary palimpsest in which Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is compressed and distorted into a concentrated operatic drama of little more than 70 minutes.² Five characters form the cast, and the storyline focuses exclusively on the events at Thornfield. In this intertextual³ and intermedial⁴ analysis of Berkeley and Malouf’s operatic adaptation of Jane Eyre , a study of the text and the music reveals whether the librettist and the composer focalized or not on particular elements and episodes of the original novel. The artists at times amended, distorted, or retained elements of the novel, allowing their new work to interpret Charlotte Brontë’s novel’s psychologically developed characters and its gothic atmosphere. Finally, the opera and its libretto function metadramatically.

The analyses on the musical possibilities offered by an operatic adaptation of the novel, on the Gothic atmosphere and on Mrs. Rochester’s lunacy are partly borrowed from a previously published article in French: Jean-Philippe Heberlé, “Jane Eyre de Michael Berkeley et de David Malouf: La transposition opératique d’un grand classique de la littérature anglaise” [Re-Writing Jane Eyre], in Revue LISA/LISA e-journal (PUR, CLEO, EHESS, CNRS) 4, no. 4 (2006): 144–57. http://lisa.revues.org/1956. Accessed November 2012.