Manuel de Falla’s Master Peter’s Puppet Show: intertextuality as a narrative dialogue

Abstract

The present work intends to show the intersemiotic narrative dialogue between Manuel de Falla’s Master Peter’s Puppet Show and Cervantes’ Don Quixote from an intertextual, transmedial and historically determined perspective. Falla’s opera is a lyrical-scenic adaptation of an episode from Don Quixote. Just like we find in Don Quixote different quotations and allusions to other literary works, we also find in Falla’s opera quotations from the Spanish musical tradition of Don Quixote’s time, together with quotations from earlier times. These quotations accomplish different functions. Among them, we consider particularly interesting the composer’s intent to adapt not only the content of Cervantes’ story, but also his writing style, his literary strategies. In that respect, Falla’s opera proves to be a privileged object of study of narrative rewriting and adaptation across media.