Inspired by

CYRANO DE BERGERAC

Edmond Rostand’s beloved tragicomic character has inspired other works almost from the moment he appeared on the Paris stage for the first time in 1897.

MUSIC

Cyrano de Bergerac has been transliterated into many musical forms—from Dutch composer JohanWagenaar’s fourteen-minute Overture to Cyrano de Bergerac, Opus 23 (1905), to Estonian composer Eino Tamberg’s opera (1974) called, not surprisingly, Cyrano de Bergerac. In fact, in 1899, just two years after Rostand’s play opened in France, Victor Herbert’s comic operetta Cyrano de Bergerac premiered on Broadway. The three-act work, with a book by Stuart Reed, portrays the nasally endowed hero as particularly boastful, playing up Cyrano’s roosterly theatricality.

American composer Walter Damrosch wrote an opera, Cyrano, in 1913, and Italian composer Franco Alfano also brought the story into the opera house, with his 1936 Cyrano de Bergerac, in which the soft, spare, intricate music is reminiscent of Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy, and in which Cyrano, a tenor, proffers a memorable, whispered serenade to his cousin Roxane in a balcony scene.

In 1971 Anthony Burgess, author of the novel A Clockwork Orange (1962), translated Cyrano into book and lyrics, composed incidental music, and created a wholly original musical. This acclaimed production led to a Broadway version starring Christopher Plummer, with new music composed by Michael J. Lewis. Cyrano de Bergerac, in two acts, opened on Broadway on May 13, 1973, and lasted for forty-nine performances.

FILM

Cyrano has been filmed a number of times. The screen versions include a silent production in 1925 starring Pierre Magnier and Michael Gordon’s 1950 version starring José Ferrer, for which the latter received an Oscar. (Orson Wells was apparently interested in making a version of it but abandoned the project in 1947.) But it was 1987’s Roxanne, starring Steve Martin, that brought Cyrano to life for contemporary audiences. Directed by Fred Schepisi (Six Degrees of Separation) and adapted by Martin, Roxanne is a latter-day retelling of Cyrano that sparkles with all of Rostand’s rapier wit and florid romance while remaining faithful to the core of Rostand’s play.

Hot on the heels of audiences’ love for Roxanne, the French reclaimed a national treasure with Cyrano de Bergerac (1990), starring Gerard Depardieu. Directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau, Cyrano de Bergerac is a lavish seventeenth-century costume epic and one of the most expensive productions in the history of French cinema. The script as adapted by Rappeneau and Jean-Claude Carriére strives to maintain Rostand’s original verse, and the international version is subtitled with Anthony Burgess’s droll rhymes.