Keeping Up Appearances: Fidelity and Performance Issues in the Operatic Adaptation of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park

In this dissertation, I investigate the context and emergence of Jane Austen’s novels as operatic source material, with a particular focus on the transformation of her third novel for Jonathan Dove and Alasdair Middleton’s Mansfield Park opera. I consider the mutable concept of fidelity both as it relates to historically informed staging, costuming, and deportment and to the transfer of an original work to a new medium. I have assembled passages from etiquette and conduct manuals from the Regency period in order to assist current performers and directors in infusing greater believability into their performances through an understanding of the social nuances and distinct physicality that characterized the British gentry class of the early nineteenth century. Reflections by composers Rachel DeVore Fogarty (Persuasion), John Morrison (The History of England), Daniel Nelson (Pride and Prejudice), and Aferdian Stephens (Sense and Sensibility); by librettists Marella Martin Koch (Sense and Sensibility) and Douglas Murray (Persuasion); and by composer/librettist Kirke Mechem (Pride and Prejudice) offer further insight into the adaptation process and into what makes Austen’s works rich terrain for creators of new opera