After reading an actual translation of the play, and making a revision of her paper which no doubt cut into her Christmas break, she received an A for the course. She had read an early English "translation" from the university's library. Now, of course, the Hugo play ends (minus a death aria that strains credibility given the soprano's sucking chest wound) just as disastrously. When I read the paper I was bemused by her most startling discovery: That for no reason she could discern, Verdi had transformed the happy ending of the original play into a horrifying and grim denouement in which the heroine dies in a sack. When I was teaching a college course in the history of 19thc music at an excellent liberal arts school, one of my students wrote a term paper in which a comparison with respect to plot and characterization of Verdi's opera Rigoletto and Le Roi s'amuse, the Victor Hugo play on which it is based, figured prominently. They look cheapolicious! Ah, but one must be very careful of so-called "translations" from this era, as some of them contain a good deal of rewriting. I've never read Les Miserables (or anything else by Hugo), but as the site's cheapskate, I feel compelled to mention that Isabel Florence Hapgood's 1862 translation is available for free at Feedbooks (as is her 1831 Hunchback).
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