A new English libretto, and design/direction of fully staged performances of 'Bataclan' - one act opera by Jacques Offenbach
- Submitting institution
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Oxford Brookes University
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 185016648
- Type
- I - Performance
- Venue(s)
- West Green House
- Open access status
- -
- Month of first performance
- July
- Year of first performance
- 2018
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
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- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This output is Morag Joss’ creative response to Jacques Offenbach’s one-act operetta Ba-ta-clan, first performed at the Théâtre des Bouffes Parisiens, Paris, in 1855. Substantively rejecting both Ludovic Halevy’s original libretto and Michael Kaye’s nineteenth-century English translation, Joss created a new libretto which dispenses with Offenbach’s plot and characterisation while respecting the score’s existing melodic and metrical features, and its comic satirical intent. Joss also designed and directed her new Ba-ta-clan for four sell-out performances at West Green House Opera (WGHO) from 25 -28 July 2018. WGHO presents two full-length operas in the Green Theatre and, in its Pavilion chamber space, one newly commissioned work which aims to attract new audiences.
Joss’s research reworks, for a modern audience, Offenbach’s satire of Grand Opera. Offenbach’s target had been the five-act grand opera performed by the Paris Opéra, specifically Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots (1836). Offenbach and his librettist parodied Grand Opera’s habit of setting inventive but meaningless gibberish to wonderful melodies. Joss’s work discards Offenbach’s Orientalist setting and recasts the characters as four young singers who arrive at a notional West Green to perform an opera whose plot has been mislaid. The lampooning of Grand Opera is further developed by the removal of the fourth wall (Appendix 1); and a plot twist echoing the Théâtre des Bouffes Parisiens’ reputation as the impertinent ‘low’ cousin of ‘high’ Paris Opéra, in which two characters discover they were contracted to sing in Madama Butterfly and Candide, the two ‘big’ operas of WGHO’s 2018 season (Appendix 2). When the singers sing Offenbach’s direct musical quotation from Les Huguenots, the music is interrupted by text messages from WGHO’s neighbouring opera venue, the more established Grange Park (Appendix 3). In these ways, Joss’ Ba-ta-clan offers an original, significant and rigorously researched creative response to an existing work of art.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
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- English abstract
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