Description
In The Don Carlos Enigma, the exciting young scholar Maria-Cristina Necula explores how the particular blend of history and fiction around the personage of Don Carlos inspired such artistic liberties with evolutionary outcomes. Saint-Réal advanced the nouvelle historique genre by developing the element of conspiracy. Schiller’s play began the transition from the Sturm und Drang literary movement towards Weimar Classicism. Verdi introduced new dramatic and musical elements to bring opera closer to the realism of dramatic theatre. Within each of these treatments, pivotal points of narrative, semantic, dramatic, and musical transformation shaped not only the story of Don Carlos, but the expressive forms themselves. In support of the investigation, selected scenes from the three works are explored and framed by an engagement with studies in the fields of French literature, German theatre, French and Italian opera, and Spanish history. The enigma of the Spanish prince may never be solved, but Saint-Réal, Schiller, and Verdi have offered alternatives that, in a sense, unburden history of truth that it could never bear alone. In the case of Don Carlos, history is in itself an encyclopedia of variations.
Book Information
ISBN 9781680539523
Author Maria-Cristina Necula
Format Hardback
Page Count 160
Imprint Academica Press
Publisher Academica Press