Gustave Charpentier’s opera Louise (1900) strikes an unlikely but successful compromise between a Wagnerian aesthetic and a Naturalist one. The opera’s very musical language adopts Wagnerian leitmotivic technique, but eschews the Wagnerian tendency toward the autonomy of the artwork, and instead references both other compositions and the external world. This tension is exploited in Abel Gance’s 1939 film adaptation of Louise. Gance’s Louise conflates Charpentier’s male protagonist with Charpentier himself, and reenacts the opera’s plot and the opera’s genesis at the same time. It is, therefore, a hybrid between two types of early opera film, the “prose opera” and the “parallel opera.” Musically, Charpentier’s score is disassembled and reassigned to the various components of the film’s soundtrack: underscoring, diegetic music, “artless” singing, sound effects. The opera’s music, then, becomes the material through which Gance builds a work that is thoroughly conceived for the new medium. And in the context of the new medium, the tension between Wagnerism and Naturalism is replaced by a tension between a photographic mode (the relatively unmediated depiction of reality) and an auratic mode (reality as filtered through the imagination of the character-composer).

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