Linda e Michael Hutcheon: "Adapting His Story: Louis Riel in History, Drama, Opera, and Staging(s)"

Louis Riel (1844-1885) is one of the most problematic historical figures in Canadian history: a rebel hanged for treason to the new nation of Canada and a revolutionary leader of his Métis
(Indigenous/settler mixed-race) people. Not surprisingly, both dramatic and operatic works based on this historical personage’s life turn out to be adaptations that are politically fraught and ideologically complex. After exploring the specific theoretical issues of adapting any narrative to the operatic stage, this talk will investigate the difficulties—formal, technical, but also political and ideological—of adapting this particular historical narrative at different moments in Canadian history (1950, 1967, and 2017) for very different audiences.

Linda (University Professor Emeritus, Dept. of English, University of Toronto) and Michael
LOUIS RIEL Hutcheon (Professor of Medicine, University of Toronto) have brought their very different professional expertise together with a shared love of opera—itself, arguably, a multi-disciplinary art form. The result has been collaborative interdisciplinary work on medicine, culture, literature, and music drama. Together, they have published several books including: Opera: Desire, Disease, Death (1996); Opera: The Art of Dying; Four Last Songs: Aging and Creativity in Verdi, Strauss, Messiaen, and Britten (University of Chicago Press, 2015.