D'Urfey and Don Quixote: Plot Fragmentation and the Idea of ‘Opera’

Cervantes's Don Quixote provided English readers and writers with a plot that made visible the madness inherent in artistic endeavour. In late seventeenth-century England, oversensitive to the pursuit of Quixotic political goals, this suspicion of artificiality was morally inflected. Thomas D'Urfey's operatic adaptation of this work in the mid-1690s, with music by Henry Purcell and other leading English stage composers, reconstituted Don Quixote as an operatic trilogy, using operatic conventions to fragment the narrative in a manner that drew attention not only to the artificiality, but also to the potential immorality, of through-written musical performance. The essay argues that the morally dubious operatic artificiality of D'Urfey's Don Quixote adaptations contributed to the subsequent reworking of this material as a satiric ballad opera by Henry Fielding.