ABSTRACT
Operatic composers turn verbal compression into musical fullness. Verdi, for example, asked Francesco Maria Piave, one of his librettists for 'poche parole, stile conciso'. An operatic vocabulary also characterises the letter quoted earlier in which Joseph Conrad describes the ending of Almayer's Folly as a trio followed by a lengthy solo. Conrad's work with opera resignifies the traces of his operatic kinsmen. Not only does he set up a force-field between the ironic and the operatic, he ironises opera without throwing it away; he treats it irreverently with the confidence of a believer. In the silent cinema, sets and acting tended to be less naturalistic than they were in contemporary theatre, closer to the operatic. Silence required a style of acting characterised by sweeping moves, well-suited to the body language to be found, especially, in his early fiction.
