‘I Heard Music’: Mansfield Park, an Opera by Jonathan Dove and Alasdair Middleton

When composer Jonathan Dove first read Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park, he immediately saw its operatic potential. In a newspaper interview, he is quoted as saying that the novel ‘haunted me for years’. He was particularly affected by Fanny Price and her predicament. When the opportunity came to write the opera, Dove worked with librettist Alasdair Middleton to create an operatic work that builds on and reinterprets Austen’s novel. It is a chamber opera, originally scored for piano duet, and although Dove later made an arrangement for a chamber ensemble, he retained the piano, identifying it as a sound world with which Austen was intimately familiar. In this paper, I track the transition from the printed page via the score and the libretto to the opera, and analyse the means by which Dove and Middleton create this popular adaptation, including telescoping the plot, using and adapting Austen’s own language, incorporating music inspired by eighteenth-century glees, and using characters as a chorus, with music that enhances the impact and translates the powerful emotions on Austen’s page into raw and urgent feelings.