Romeo and Juliet

A Rose By Any otheR nAMe

Amid countless Romeo and Juliet adaptations, gounod's opera still holds its bloom

you may be surprised to learn it, but Charles gounod's Romeo and Juliet, based on Shakespeare's famous play, is a rare thing in opera. Over the centuries Romeo and Juliet has inspired composers of all kinds of music. There are pop songs, symphonic poems, and Broadway musicals—the latter's best known example being West Side Story by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, which in turn, spawned its own countless "covers" of hit tunes. Even the films inspired by Shakespeare's tragedy have spawned musical hits, the most memorable being the love theme "A Time For us" from Franco Zeffirelli's cinematic version.

So what makes gounod's opera a rare bird? It's not just that it's based on Shakespeare's tragedy, but that it was an incredibly successful adaptation! There are hundreds of Shakespeare operas—and a couple of dozen based on Romeo and Juliet—but, astonishingly, of those hundreds only a few still merit inclusion in the repertory, and of the many, only one true hit. gounod’s music comes closer to capturing the pathos of Shakespeare than other operatic adaptations, outside the works of Verdi.

When Charles gounod turned his attention to Romeo and Juliet in 1867, he'd already had a big hit with another adaptation—an opera based on goethe's Faust—and he chose to collaborate with the same librettists, Jules Barbier and Michel Carré. They stuck fairly close to the original play—the first eight lines of the prologue, Mercutio’s Queen Mab monologue, the Holy Palmers' kiss conversation, the balcony scene, and Juliet’s poison monologue are all translated into French nearly verbatim. But due to the longer dramatic pacing of an opera and the addition of music, Barbier and Carré cut a few scenes that didn't deal directly with the two lovers, but they found time to add a character, the page boy Stephano, a trouser-role sung by a mezzosoprano. Barbier and Carré also tweaked the ending. In the play, when Juliet finally awakens in the tomb, Romeo is already dead. In the opera, when she wakes up, Romeo still has a few flickers of life, enough to sing together before Juliet then stabs herself. The passionate duet far exceeds the lovers’ supposed state of health—as a near-dead Romeo would have been neither willing nor able to sing out a high C!

Like the play, the opera takes place in Renaissance Verona. It begins with a prologue, during which the chorus foreshadows the action to come. They sing about the feud between the Montagues and the Capulets and the love between Romeo and Juliet. Since Shakespeare's initial Act I fight is excluded, there is less escalation of tension between the houses of Montague and Capulet in the opera. While some of these departures may seem too great to a Shakespeare purist, the opera’s strength lies in how loyal the librettists were to Shakespeare’s immortal words. They tailored the libretto to include the play’s most poignant moments while compressing the dramatic action to mitigate the typically slower pace of the operatic genre. The result is an adaptation that does incredible justice to the world’s most famous love story. Critics and scholars have often called the opera a love duet with occasional interruptions! It achieves a delicate and effortlessly lyrical quality that is typical of gounod, a man who might have been writing about his own operas when he said: “France is essentially the country of precision, neatness and taste, that is to say the opposite of excess, pretentiousness, disproportion and long-windedness.” •

June 21 | June 28 | July 6 | July 11 7:30pm June 23 | July 14 2:00pm

Jason Slayden romeo Sara gartland JuLieT

des moines metro opera’s upcoming production has special significance as it reunites two of the company’s finest apprentice artists. in 2008 tenor Jason Slayden and soprano Sara gartland had tremendous success with the final scene of Romeo and Juliet in a concert series, and both went on to gain prominent attention as rapidly rising professional artists.

gartland quickly became an adler Fellow at the prestigious San Francisco opera where she has appeared as micaëla in Carmen and in several other roles. "To have the opportunity to portray a character like Juliet, who simply feels the purest, most passionate, and mind blowing kind of love, is exhilarating," gartland says of the role. "Juliet marries the love of her life and dies for him. They defy the rules of their own world to be together.”

Slayden made several important debuts with the wolf Trap opera, Vancouver opera and the Santa Fe opera where he stepped in as rodolfo in La Bohème at the last minute to replace an ailing colleague. Says Slayden, “i am thrilled to return to des moines metro opera this summer as romeo. not only will it be my debut in the role, but i look forward to continuing the work i began with Sara. it's also exciting to return to the place where i took my first steps as a professional singer!"

The two will be joined by stage director Linda ade Brand, who worked with them both on the final scene in 2008, and debut conductor Kostis protopapas of the Tulsa opera. •

complete cast and production information at desmoinesmetroopera.org

gartland and Slayden in the 2008 apprentice artist performance of the final scene from Romeo and Juliet

Speaking of adaptations...

All told, there have been at least 41 cinematic Romeo and Juliets, some nearly as old as the cinema itself. The most famous of these movies is the forementioned Franco Zeffirelli production from 1968 starring Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey (pictured above) as the titular two. Douglas Booth and Hailee Steinfeld will play Romeo and Juliet in a film version directed by Carlo Carlei to be released later this year. Leslie Howard and norma Shearer, Laurence Harvey and Susan Shentall, and Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes are some other celebrity portrayers of the pair on screen. The story is also the basis of a movie called Romeo.Juliet from 1990 that used feral cats as the actors and dubbed their voices with the likes of Vanessa Redgrave, Ben kingsley and Dame Maggie Smith. There’s also the 1969 film, The Secret Sex Lives of Romeo and Juliet, which used Shakespeare’s story mainly as an excuse to show excessive nudity. It was distributed with the tagline “Winner of Best Erotic Film at the Cannes Erotic Film Festival”—a competition that doesn’t exist!

Other adaptations include a Japanese anime television show; a Singaporean film called Chicken Rice War (2000) about forbidden romance between rival rice shops; a martial arts variation called Romeo Must Die (2000); Romie-0 and Julie-8 (1979) about robots made by combating companies; Rome and Jewel (2006) a hip-hop version of the story; and last year’s Gnomeo and Juliet, a love story among lawn gnomes.

Since the last time the company produced the piece in 1986, there have been 9 movies for theaters and television directly based on the tale and no fewer than 50 adaptations and reworkings. Des Moines Metro Opera is pleased to add its vision to that rich tapestry. •