Miceli, Sergio
(ed. and transl. by Marco Alunno)

I remind the reader that the four parts of this essay are the result of a drastic selection meant to address the most representative characteristics of each genre (in this sense, radio is not an exception). This is mainly due to lack of space, but also to allow the reader to keep memory of what he/she reads and to focus on the most important facts. With regard to Les Misérables on radio, our survey starts in 1925 with a BBC production, the first one of which I have clear traces. Following productions are a little bit less than ten, all by BBC (1939, 1944, 1976 and 2001; I will come back on the latter at the end of this chapter). Thus, Great Britain seems to have the lead, as the musical productions by Cameron Mackintosh (see Part IV) in 1985 demonstrates. Also France does not fall too much behind, but its radio productions are as diverse as to even include a sort of conference. In fact, in 1953, André Maurois dedicated 10 programs to Hugo and the characters of his book. Claude Santelli’s version from 1961 to 1968 follows. It featured such actors as Michel Galabru, Victor Lanoux and Claude Rich interpreting the parts of the novel dedicated to Cosette, Gavroche and Jean Valjean. Another French radio version is Jean Bellorini’s adaptation of Book IV performed in 2013 by the acting company Air de Lune. In 2010, though, the same playwright, along with Camille De la Guillonière, had already made an adaptation for seven actors and two musicians of the part of the novel titled Tempête sous un crâne. France, as will be explained further on, occupies the first place as to the quality of its radio productions.

In order to prove what I have just said and despite what historical data maintain (that there are many radio editions of Hugo’s novel), I will deal here mainly with the Orson Welles’s version of 1937. This work marks Welles’s transition from the Campbell Playhouse to The Mercury Theater on the Air broadcasted by the U.S. MBS (Mutual Broadcasting System). Despite being recent history, the vicissitudes behind this production are not completely clear. In fact, many U.S. sources do not ascribe the adaptation of Les Misérables to a specific company, which is quite odd. Moreover, the CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System) seems involved in the production since the very beginning (pictures of the setting confirm it), but some sources reports the presence of the MBS. At the end of my research I could assess that reality was somewhat different. Les Misérables, that MBS wanted to produce, was such a big success that the repertoire of the recently born The Mercury Theater on the Air was quickly spread throughout the United States. At the same time, CBS commissioned Welles to prepare several radio shows of increasing magnitude.²⁵ These objective data could explain, at least to some extent, the coexistence of MBS and CBS in the same production: the latter joined and, during the preparatory stage of the radio drama, eventually replaced the former.

A version by the Lux Radio Theater is quite peculiar, especially if one ‘looks’ at it without taking into account when it was produced. It was broadcasted from 1934 to 1955 by the New York NBC (later on, the Lux Radio Theater would work for CBS and, eventually, again for NBC). The Lux Radio Theater specialized in radio adaptations of movies. Hence, in 1952, Earl Eby directed for the radio Robert Newton (Javert) and Debra Paget (Cosette) interpreting the same roles already featured in the film Les Misérables directed by Lewis Milestone (see following chapters) the same year. After other radio adaptations in 1982, 2001 (probably the longest, with twenty-five episodes) and 2002, one of the last I know of is a French version in fourteen episodes broadcasted by France Culture Radio in 2012.

It has already been mentioned in the Sources, but it is worth to recommend once more visiting the Internet Archive website, a non-profit library with millions of free books, movies, software, music and more. Although mainly focused on North-American culture (including Canada), this library includes many other very important collections (for example, the Library of Congress in Washington). The Internet Archive possesses several pages of particular interest for those who conduct research overseas, i.e. the pages dedicated to the Old Time Radio that contain many rare radio programs. One of these is, of course, Welles’s adaptation of Les Misérables.²⁶ Other pages in the Television Archive section are also very important for delving into the video productions of both Western and Eastern Europe (including Russia).²⁷

The famous program The War of the Worlds by Orson Welles, sponsored by Campbell’s Soup – featured also in a recent episode of The Simpsons Cartoon – was broadcasted on October 30, 1938. It had two main effects: making Welles famous all over the world and putting many U.S. citizens’ nerves through the mill. It also generated a large amount of bibliographical material that demonstrates how relevant that event was. In fact, I agree with who says that The War of the Worlds, to which I pay my tribute, marked the entrance of media in the adult age. But let us go back to Les Misérables. Welles chose Hugo’s work to start a new series of theater On the Air. The whole program lasted 2 hours and 28 minutes and was divided into 7 half-an-hour parts – in fact thirty minutes was believed to be the longest span of time a listener could keep his attention focused on the same program. Among Welles’s works with The Mercury Theater, Les Misérables was the only subject that got divided into several episodes. It is not clear to me whether this was an isolated experiment meant to be repeated, or whether the overall plan was to reduce every program to one episode – as it actually happened – and grant Hugo’s work a special treatment, partly justified by the extent of the novel.

Just to grasp the technological context of the time, which is fundamental to understand certain aesthetic choices, one should recall the amount of devices created in order to induce the audience to a kind of literary experience that would be new and different than the classical reading of a book. This implied first to create a bridge between literature and theater, and then build another one between literature and radio, that is, a union between literature and technology whose development and consequences are still within us nowadays.

However, the texts available for consultation at that time did not concern that bridge. Despite being of high interest for any radio enthusiast, information was reduced to mere technical explanations, some of which are still valid at present. Other sources were only useful to gather the necessary documentation for the writing of a manual about history of technologies. Nevertheless, I am convinced that a radio amateur should go first of all through a simple textbook in electrical engineering.²⁸ Then, he/she should move to the physical principles behind a transmitter and a receiver (those same principles that linguistics first, and information theory and semiotics later, frequently employed for analytical reasons). In addition to the waveform – band, frequency and wavelength – that the receiver picks up from the transmitter,²⁹ it would also be mandatory to study the oscillator, the modulator, the amplifier and the antenna of a transmitter as well as the homodyne, the heterodyne and the super-heterodyne of the receiver. Thanks to the Multiplex System, such a technology eventually evolved into stereophony (from 1977). Television also used the same bandwidth as radio – from short to long waves – and quickly became the most pervasive communication medium.

The reader must be reminded that for a complete, overall understanding of how a radio works it suffices to know the basic principles of a transmitter (the receiver just operates in the opposite way). If one is not much versed in technical matters, he/she can think of a popular device present in every house connected to internet: the modem. Its name derives from the contraction of two words: the modulator and the demodulator, that is, two opposite, mirror-like operations that concerns also cinema and soundtracks. Radio still works in a similar way.³⁰

The present technological framework offers a good platform both for work and leisure. However, I will not talk here about digital broadcasting, that is, the radio of the near future. As already partially mentioned, in Apple iTunes (and now also in Apple Music) one can purchase single tracks, full collections (something like CDs) or even films, but without the DVDs’ options that allows to quickly change language or add subtitles. One can also download books, video-books, audio-books³¹ and applications for iPad and iPhone, and can subscribe to podcast or iTunes U (higher education courses released by universities from every corner of the world in collaboration with Apple). All of them – except Apple Music in Apple Store – without any fee.

In short, everything that is not commercial is free. Other computer industries followed Apple’s example. Even Microsoft, ‘caught out’ by its main competitor, after having announced measures meant to bridge the initial gap, seems now vying against Apple (see the OS 10 and Surface 4 Pro). Meanwhile, other options contend the market, probably because they are cheaper, i.e.: video-books and audio-books for the Kindle tablets (Amazon), freely convertible to Apple readers. In sum, the only real alternative to Apple is Google-Amazon that can offer a large number of applications, books, video- and audio-books for Android smartphones and tablets through Google Play.

In an iTunes U, I serendipitously found a seminar dedicated to Le mélodrame, Centre national de documentations pédagogique³² with an interesting lecture by the French historian and writer Bernard Chambaz titled Lecture des Misérables de Victor Hugo³³ (October 1, 2013: 8 minutes and 58 seconds of engaged and honest reflections on Hugo’s novel).³⁴

What I said so far is meant to point out that all the technology we have and will have in an ever increasing quantity does not and will not represent a ‘revolution’ unless mankind instills some of its own vitality in it. In fact, any kind of feeling as it can be found in any tale – anguish or calm, ferocity or serenity, sensual disinhibition or serene chastity, sincerity or deceit, fervent faith or cautious agnosticism, positive and collective outlook on life or bitter individualism – nowadays must share its space with technology.

This is why radio is a medium of particular importance, the first of its kind. With its technical-conceptual simplicity radio does not alter the relationship between transmitter and receiver and does not interfere with the message (or, at least, it does so to a lesser extent than other media). Human voice’s vibes and speaker’s sounds captivate the radio listener in such an intense way that other ‘more complete’ media can only dream of. In fact, a message transmitted with other media does not convey very often its essence as radio does. Radio involves only one sense: the hearing. Heart and brain catch signals from one sole source. Also for this reason I speak about the radio experience as ‘purity’ and ‘essence.’ What we hear daily as ‘normal’ sounds augments its presence through radio reception and words eventually catch our attention. It is as though the voice coming out of the speaker is able to drag us to the source of what it is saying. However, it is not just a matter of loudness. In fact, we can ecstatically listen to a music we know very well and we already possess on CD or LP because it sounds somehow ‘different.’ This happens also when we listen to a well-known interpretation: that music seems to be as precious as an unexpected present that we are gifted enough to appreciate.

To say radio means highly enhancing human sensitivity. Indeed, by stimulating only the sense of hearing the whole body can get involved in the experience. A sentimental breath becomes the sentimental breath through which we can also hear the broken panting that often goes with it. Likewise, a slum becomes the slum, that is, the quintessence of an act of predetermined or sudden violence whose short, almost anechoic sound may leave a long resonance within the listener. Moreover, radio did not pass through a period of individual consumption as cinema did before becoming a collective experience (when the first cinema theaters were open to the public at the beginning of the XX century). Radio has always been one and the same throughout its history.³⁵

Cinema underwent many more substantial changes than radio. I have already mentioned above about the passage from individual to collective consumption. After having become a collective show, the ‘silent art’ turned into a ‘sound art’ that many artists and intellectuals disesteemed (e.g. Charlie Chaplin, René Clair, Béla Balázs, Rudolph Arnheim, etc.). However, the new situation was not an ‘abstract’ problem, just food for intellectuals – or for solitary intellectuals³⁶ – in fact many cinema actors committed suicide because they could not afford acting for an audience with their own voice. The change from black-and-white to color was not received so tragically but, still, did not please everybody: several cinema masters, from Ingmar Bergman to David Lynch, kept using black-and-white. Cinemascope, anamorphic lenses, 70mm (instead of the ‘classical’ 35mm), the consequent change from the 4:3 screen format to the other more ‘spectacular’ sizes (16:9, 1.85:1, 2.40:1, etc.), Dolby System, Dolby Digital 5+1 and DTS norms, all measures suitable for placing the viewer in an immersive, mobile acoustic dimension similar to the one produced by the images, frequently changed the essence of cinema both for the director (e.g. the help offered by computer graphics) and the spectator (let us not even speak, for the sake of cinema, about the unfortunate return of 3D). Instead, radio highly benefitted from technical improvements (again, the implementation of frequency modulation and stereophony) that did not alter its essence, since, in any case, there is always someone speaking and someone listening. The former can either alternate his/her voice with a voice at the telephone³⁷ or be the only voice speaking. In both ways the essence of radio does not change, and for this same reason radio has always been true to itself.

History had at least two ‘prophets’ of the radio’s potential: Walter Ruttmann who recorded and edited Weekend (Berlin, 1930), a phonofilm that, as far as I know, still needs to be thoroughly studied; and Rudolph Arnheim who, six years later, published Rundfunk als Hörkunst, a collection of essays on the artistic potential of radio listening.³⁸

Now it is time for some personal confessions. Since I was a boy up to my late adolescence, I took pleasure in listening to radio theater and lyric operas. In both, but especially in the former, vocal vibes widened my inner self and filled the space around me: a gradual increase in the tone of the voice had an effect similar to the passage from a long shot to a close-up in cinema. Also, an unintelligible murmuring could become important because of its signifier. This would apply to non-vocal sounds as well: an approaching tapper, the wind hissing, a window slamming, the irregular ticking of raindrops… All of them were interesting sound events that yielded concrete emotions: fear, excitement, tension… Everything was as ‘authentic’ as it were heard from the real source. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne (Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, 1870), Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (1883), Mother Courage by Bertolt Brecht (Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder, 1939, interpreted around thirty years after it was written by Lina Volonghi featuring Anna Fierling under the direction of Luigi Squarzina), and La fidanzata del bersagliere by Edoardo Anton³⁹ (1963)⁴⁰ were among my favorite friends for at least fifteen years between 1954 and 1969.

In Welles’s adaptation of Les Misérables I found all the emotions I mentioned above. But there is more.⁴¹

With regard to the music, after having dreamed for years about prestigious collaborations between Welles and the composer (the pictures from the 1940s in my possession seemed to confirm my illusions), I have to say that whoever he was his musical commentary is not particularly original. I do not even know for sure, despite my thorough investigation, who he was. Perhaps, the orchestra conductor Frank de Vol, but it could also be one of those minor musicians who were and did nothing to be anything but anonymous, mostly in the case of a radio drama. In Welles’s Les Misérables there are between two and four original pieces for each episode – or for an important passage – all of them in the symphonic style of the XIX century. A more precise stylistic definition would refer to the early Hollywood ‘school’ that was still influenced by silent films’ music: Ërno Rapée, John S. Zamecnik, Samuel L. Rothapfel, Carl Breil, Louis F. Gottschalk, Hugo Riesenfeld, David Mendoza, William Axt and many others. These were the models who enriched radio and cinema stories with an average but well-crafted music.

Welles also dared to bravely neutralize one of radio’s principles by using silence, which is in radio what a long black screen would be in cinema; and he did it much earlier than cinema itself (see, for example, the way Lars von Trier ‘breaks through’ the images in Dancing in the Dark, 2000).⁴⁵ Therefore, I will let John McDonough present some remarks that I completely agree with. They were extracted from a series of observations published in The Wall Street Journal in 1998:

The author’s opinions are so sharp and refined that it would be worth to copy and positively comment upon his article as a whole. Unfortunately, there is no enough space to do so. As customary, I wrote the web address in the note, so that the reader who urges to learn more about it knows how to do it.

A more recent review by an anonymous author said instead that because of the duration of each part Welles’s adaptation is “perfectly suited for listening during a commute.” It’s really true: to each his own deserved listening.⁴⁷

Orson Welles, The Ultimate Collection, 2010. It contains 70 radio programs from the Campbell Playhouse and The Mercury Theater. In Apple iTunes, online edition. No other data. Here is the list of the seven parts of Welles’s Les Misérables:

The radio version by Orson Welles can be easily found online in many recorded editions (both on CD or MP3), but most of them are just a reduction of Hugo’s novel.
Source: Archive S. M., Florence.
Internet Archive (several accesses in 2013-2015).
YouTube (several accesses in 2013-2015).

Les Misérables, produced and directed by Orson Welles - Mutual Network, 1937 (2011). It contains the seven parts of the radio adaptation. The duration of each part is slightly different than the ones listed above, but the text is the same. In Apple iTunes, online edition. No other data.
Source: Archive S. M., Florence.

I decided to compare Welles’s with other two very recent versions: the BBC’s version that was produced in 2001, that is, after sixty-five years of media evolution, and a 2012 French adaptation.

Besides the interpretive excellence of the English cast – considering that a BBC program is usually a guarantee of good quality – a few lines are sufficient to understand that this version sounds more like a film without images than a radio drama. Music is not ‘XIX-century-like,’ but rather contemporary film music enriched by a large amount of sound effects. Note that I am not talking about literal contemporary music, but light or pop music with no other historical identity of its own except being vaguely contemporary. Voices’ goal is not just to be understood, but rather to provide an actual filmic interpretation. The intimacy/depth that are typical of a radio drama are rarely conveyed, so many are the effects and background voices that mix with those of the main characters. The mistake – if it can be called such – consists in mimicking a soundtrack,⁴⁸ whereas, according to me, it would have been much better to stay close to the essence of radio, which originates in intimacy.

Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. A BBC Full-cast Dramatization. First Broadcasting BBC Radio 4, between December 31, 2001 and February 1, 2002. Produced by Jerry Mortimer and Sally Avens. Direction [?], Cast and Credits (only some of them here): Victor Hugo, Joss Ackland; Jean Valjean, Roger Allam; Javert, David Schofield; and Monsieur Gillenormand, Leslie Phillips. The names of eighteen characters and interpreters plus five names of actors without corresponding characters follow. Five CDs, running time: 6 hours and 15 mins. Box set with a four-page booklet, no date, no other data. From Amazon.co.uk
Source: Archive S. M., Florence.⁴⁹

Let us move, then, to the French adaptation by Hélène Bleskine produced in 2012 and repeated in 2014 (direction by François Christophe;⁵⁰ literary advising by Caroline Ouazana).

Thus, Bleskine commented each part:

Indeed, the beautiful voice of the Narrator (Hugo himself) is often present for long stretches. There is more. In my experience as a radio listener I have never heard the voice of a character reading a letter being joined and, eventually, replaced by the Narrator’s voice reading the same text: a slow audio lap-dissolve that only Welles might have used before Bleskine.

Another choice that marks the difference between this and the BBC production even greatly consists in always keeping agitated voices in the background. The result is a very animated backdrop with the narrator’s voice describing the scene through Hugo’s unique words on top. In other terms, here are two opposite components sharing the same acoustic space: on the one hand the ‘realistic’ background made of noise and voices that efficiently but superficially impacts the listener, on the other hand the ‘abstractness’ of the words that the Narrator/Hugo uses to get the ‘reader’ involved in the story.

Even the voices of the actors are as one would image them to be, which means that they have been carefully and wisely selected. The most remarkable are: the voice of Monseigneur Myriel that the narrator lets speak during the crucial meeting with Napoleon; the dark and deep voice of Jean Valjean that, possibly intentionally, recalls the tone of Harry Baur in the 1934 Raymond Bernard’s and Arthur Honegger’s masterwork (see Chap. 3.1); and the unforgettably quiet voice of Marius. Actually, all the actors seem to be very good. The program was on air in 2012, that is, two years before Tom Hooper’s musical film (see Part IV) came out. Since both adaptations made a similar selection of the episodes from the novel, one could wonder who inspired who. It is likely, though, that as they were created nearly at the same time, no reciprocal influence could occur. Yet, one feels that Hooper already knew the French radio version.

All to the good for Hélène Bleskine’s and François Christophe Les Misérables whose above mentioned unusual blend of characteristics revives the intimacy and purity of the radio dramas of the 1960s and represents, in my opinion, one of the few adaptations that really can compete with Orson Welles’s.