Certainly one source of the opera is the great novel by the great Spanish literary figure Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra; but more immediately (and more specifically) the source was a treatment of the novel for the stage by French playwright Jacques Le Lorrain. We’ll deal with Cervantes first.
Cervantes was born in Alcalá de Henares, Spain, outside of Madrid in 1547. His family moved about Spain quite a bit due to his father’s livelihood as an itinerant surgeon, but he did receive some important early education in Madrid which helped stimulate his literary talent. In early adulthood he spent time in Rome in the service of Cardinal Acquaviva, then joined the Spanish army embarking from Naples to join in the Battle of Lepanto against the Turks in 1571. Wounded in battle, he attempted to return to Spain in 1575 only to be captured by pirates who imprisoned him in Algiers for five years. He was ransomed from prison by the charitable monks from the order of the Trinitarians and finally returned to Spain, in their debt, in 1580. After this he spent time as a requisition official for the armada until after their defeat at the hands of the English in 1588. During this time he published his first prose work, La Galatea, a work that began to bring him notice. Theatrical work followed, as well as shorter works which were eventually gathered under the title Exemplary Works.
Don Quixote de la Mancha (El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha) was published in two parts, the first in 1605 and the second in 1615. Generally speaking it deals with the adventures of an elderly Spanish gentleman who, suffering from madness, fashions himself a ‘knight-errant’ and travels throughout the Spanish countryside seeking valor and fame through the righting of all wrongs. With his faithful sidekick, the illiterate peasant Sancho Panza, he encounters all manner of people who react in shock, dismay or with mockery as he attempts to complete his chivalrous quest.
One of the more interesting aspects of the tale of the novel is that after the publication of Part I another Spanish author issued a ‘Part II’, providing a kind of unauthorized sequel to the story. The author, Alonso Fernández de Tordesillas, was surely dismayed when Cervantes came out with his Part II which involves Quixote hearing about the pirated book at an inn, then rushing with Sancho Panza to Barcelona where they kidnap one of the pirate-authors fictional characters!
The Cervantes novel has acquired status as one of the great books of Western literature. It is filled with wonderful vignettes, beautiful characterizations and satirical commentary on the behavioral modes of the day. References to Quixote’s imagining of a common street girl as Dulcinea, a noble woman in distress, his companion Sancho Panza, and his battle against the windmills (monstrous giants in his fevered imagination) are part of everyday literary parlance. Unfortunately, these were the only remnants of the Cervantes original that remained in Le Lorrain’s 1904 theatrical version, Le Chevalier de la longue figure, which played at the Théâtre Victor Hugo.
Le Lorrain was a fascinating literary figure in his own right, a shoemaker or cobbler from the south of France who had poetic pretensions. He fought long and hard for publication and after the writing of Le Chevalier tried to get the play produced at both the Théâtre Français and the Odéon before finally achieving success at the more experimental Hugo. The playwright didn’t realize that the play was finally going into production in Paris; when he did he roused himself from his sickbed and traveled to the capitol to see his work on the stage. He was in such bad shape physically that he had to be carried into the theatre on a litter, and he died a few days after the performance. It was this same production that Raoul Gunsbourg, the general director of the Opéra de Monte Carlo, saw and stirred him to commission Massenet to create an opera based on it to perform at the Monaco-based company.
Critics over the years have attacked the libretto of Henri Cain (Massenet’s most often used librettist) for not referring more closely to the Cervantes original and relying so heavily on the Le Lorrain verse drama. The most commonly held belief is that the Quixote who is recreated in the opera is only a caricature of the fictional hero, that Dulcinea is turned into yet another operatic ‘coquette’ or stock character from the tradition of the opera-comique, and that other than the windmill incident the rest of the libretto is created from whole cloth, having no relationship to Cervantes’ creation. These are valid points. But it is the music and the presence of an outstanding singing actor in the role of Quixote that can make all the difference in this work and lift it considerably higher in artistic quality than the poor 1904 comédie-heroïque upon which it is based.