A planned production of Adapting Don Quixote is being billed as the world’s first “supercut-opera,” as it will take previous adaptations — from theater, opera, films and song — and build a new work.
In a narrative driven by Orson Welles’ attempt to bring Don Quixote to the screen, the audience will experience three completely different operatic versions, each with a unique musical and visual signature, all purporting to be Welles’ next attempt to shoot it, said creator Dominic Robertson aka Ergo Phizmiz-Mittelhammer from his residence on the Isle of Wight.
Robertson, who was part of the team that created Mozart vs Machine and the Cleveland Orchestra’s Ariadne auf Naxos (a New York Times Critics Pick), told Wellesnet he shares Welles’ approach in adapting literary works, believing a “literary work should be reinvigorated and reimagined by adaptation.”
“Adapting Don Quixote has been on the boil for years,” he said. “I’m interested in the idea of the errant individual existing contrary to state control, accepted social norms, and so on, but my initial interest in making an opera came some time ago upon reading an entry in a dictionary of opera about adaptations of the book — there were a lot of derivative works, but none really canonical or often performed. So I thought it would be interesting to make a piece that used elements of all of these versions, plus other, non-operatic works adapted from Quixote, to create a sort of uber-Quixote, trying to draw lines through history to connect these things.”
The opera, which he hopes to see staged in early 2021, is divided into three acts:
- Act I is a lush, romantic adaptation, driven by Quixote’s romantic fixation with his half-imaginary love Dulcinea del Toboso, recounting episodes from the story with a focus on the chivalric, the romantic ideal and the joy of fantasy.
- Act II imagines Quixote as a Western, and is a piece about little men in large landscapes, focusing on the violence in the novel and taking cues visually from the work of John Ford and Jodoworsky’s El Topo. “A blood-and-sand version of Quixote.”
- Act III imagines a sequence of his adaptation that Welles never shot, in which, finally resigned to the mundanity of the world, Quixote and Sancho go to the moon. This third act takes the narrative of Quixote “down the rabbit hole,” and becomes, in the style of Welles’ later work, a multimedia essay about the piece itself.
The three adaptations of Don Quixote end without resolution, as unfinished pieces of work. Adapting Don Quixote ends with Welles shouting “Action!” and starting Don Quixote again.
“I suppose the other thing that attracted me is the scale of Don Quixote, and that a lot of the joy of reading it is watching the characters develop with time, and age with Cervantes. This kind of development in a literary work is very difficult to capture in, say, two hours, so the person making the adaptation has to take this into account — how do you capture the essence, flavor, atmosphere of something with that level of richness,” Robertson said. “Wouldn’t it be nice to know how Orson would have done it?”
(For more information on the production, visit https://adaptingdonquixote.hotglue.me/)
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