"To Paris there are no bounds," wrote Victor Hugo. "Paris does more than make the law, she makes the fashion; and, more than the fashion, she makes the event." What was obvious to the great writer a hundred years ago seems as obvious today: The musical event of the 1980s may well prove to be a new work by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg based on Hugo's epic vision of his beloved city.
Les Miserables began life as a recording, selling hundreds of thousands of copies by the time it was brought to the stage by Robert Hossein at the Palais des Sports in Paris. The musical was then translated and produced by Cameron Mackintosh and the Royal Shakespeare Company, directed by Trevor Nunn and John Caird, and presented in London, where it is still playing to sold-out houses. It has now been coproduced by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., and opens at the Broadway Theatre in New York City this month after a spectacularly successful American premiere at the Kennedy Center Opera House. There are productions scheduled for Tokyo, Athens, Sofia, Tel Aviv, Budapest, Barcelona, Sydney, Munich, Oslo, Frankfurt, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Warsaw, Toronto, Reykjavik, and a return to Paris.
Subject Dictates Style
"It is not a rock opera," says Schonberg about his composition. "Hugo's subject was so powerful that I had to write the only music possible for it, respecting the nineteenth century musically, with the kind of Romanticism we associate with that century. Besides, so much of musical creation is spontaneous, never decided far in advance. We are less clever than you might think: The subject dictates the music.
"And besides, so much of the novel Les Miserables is operatic - and by opera, I mean Italian opera," continues Alain Boublil. The creative team is fond of finishing each other's sentences. "It is a whole, it is organic in structure. The musical demanded a structure like that of the book, with a beginning, middle, and logical end. Its artistic demands were very much like those of an opera. Perhaps a better comparison is to say that Hugo's novel is like a river, like the Seine itself, which has a source, grows and builds and flows to its full magnificence in Paris, then flows away to its final destiny after traversing the great city. We could never treat Victor Hugo as one would the usual musical subject, with actors breaking into song here and there. We have no pretension that this is an opera, but rather that we took this form we both very much adore, opera, and tried to mix the most harmonious mix possible with another form we adore, theater."
Yet, to what degree can any theatrical piece hope to encompass Hugo's monumental masterpiece? Even Giuseppe Verdi was criticized for his Hugo adaptations in Rigoletto and Ernani, and the Italian composer worked from stage plays. Les Miserables, which runs over 1,800 pages in the Pleiade edition, depends very much on sheer length and insistence on details for its devastating impact on readers. Schonberg and Boublil, whose previous success was an epic rock opera called La Revolution Francaise, remained faithful to the structure of Hugo's novel. The novel is divided into five books: "Fantine," "Cosette," "Marius," "The Idyll in the Rue Plumet and the Epic of the Rue St. Denis," and "Jean Valjean." After a prologue that depicts Jean Valjean's release from jail and his lessons in both hatred and love, the musical follows Fantine's story from
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