While I think there is a place for editions that make older works more accessible to modern readers, they do need to be clearly marked and annotated when major changes are made. Personally, I prefer editions that footnote obscure terms or usages that have changed over time to ones that sub in modern language. I'm willing to leave that as a personal preference as long as the options are clear and available.
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Originally Posted by AlexBell
For example, I walked out of a production of Tosca some years ago because the stage director had Scarpia do a simulated sexual assault on Tosca in the scene where she kills him. The threat of violence is certainly heard in the music, but the actual violence was not in the libretto or in the opera that Verdi saw.
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I think this helps to prove the opposite of Alex's point and is precisely why some people may be outraged by what he's done. Alex, you were not happy that the opera was altered from what the composer and librettist originally set out. You seem to feel if Verdi had intended to overtly portray the assault, he would have written it that way, and the director should not change that in the staging. Similarly, others here seem to feel that if Collins had wanted to use "light-hearted" instead of "gay," he would have.
Personally, I think there is more latitude in the staging of a play or opera than there is in editing a novel. Various productions, for example, modernize Shakespeare; Branagh's
Hamlet modernizes the settings and is brilliant, IMO.
But if you want to do the same with a novel, I think it requires more than bringing the punctuation and some vocabulary up to date. I think it needs to be a transformed work that is wholly made modern, credited to the new author as a "modern retelling" of so-and-so's earlier work.
Just my 2 cents. I'm not bashing on anyone else's. But the bulk of opinion seems to be against altering.