Heck no! 18 c. opera goers loved a good reboot. Only they didn’t want to hear the same old music, that’s lame, they wanted to hear the same old poetry set to new music. So you’ll see libretti with familiar storylines set to new music time and time again. Occasionally you will see an actual “revival” of an opera (before the settling in of the “opera canon” in the second half of the 19 c.), which was when they’d redo the same libretto with the same music, but those are less common. Opera goers thrived on novelty, and a resetting of a familiar story with new music provided a nice mixture of comfort and novelty (and a decent cost-savings over commissioning a new libretto) that opera goers and producers really went for.
Let’s take Metastasio’s Artaserse, a libretto that somehow pressed those baroque buttons so hard that it has a total of 90 (!!) different known settings, some of which got revivals. It’s very first setting by Leonardo Vinci in 1730 got a revival in 1760. This opera gets a lot of focus by musicologists, and not unduly because it’s a rather perfectly archetypal baroque opera. And I don’t think any movie can beat 90 reboots!
So why did people love this libretto so much? Let’s unpack as the Lit majors say.
The plot, okay, it’s kinda soapy: King Xerxes’ chief officer Artabanus wants the throne, so he sneaks into the palace at night and kills him. Then, he doesn’t feel like killing the princes Artaxerxes and Darius himself I guess, so he pits them against one another so Artaxerxes kills Darius because he believes Darius killed their father. Some handwaving, in the end Artabanus’ treason is exposed, Artaxerxes is king.
Now this is all pretty straight forward, but if you cram in a couple of love plotlines you’ve essentially got all the great human emotions that make an opera an opera in this story: death, love, family, duty, betrayal, etc. So Metastasio added Arbace: who is Artaserse’s buddy (and the leading man!), Semira: who is Arbace’s sister and in love with Artaserse, Artabano, who is their dad, Mandane who is Artaserse’s sister and (naturally!) in love with Arbace, and finally Megabise who is THE FOIL and in love with Semira, so you’ve got yourself a nice double pairing of lovers (classic opera thing), best friends marrying each other’s sisters, plus a love triangle going. Xerxes and Darius don’t even get on stage actually. Too dead I guess.
But this is a pretty appealing story that has plot elements that lend themselves comfortably to a variety of music: love arias, love duets, angry arias, places for insertable arias, and the requisite happy ending chorus. It also has 6 characters, a very good number for doing opera, 2 lead men Arbace and Artaserse (who would be cast as soprano castrato most usually), 2 women (who could be cast as women singers or castrati, depending on who was available or what was legal where), and 2 lesser men Artabano and Megabise who could be cast as lower voice types. So you’ve got yourself in this setting pretty much an idea opera casting, with strong potential for a star castrato to really ham it up as Arbace (this role was played by Farinelli and Carestini), a rather good role for the secondo uomo castrato, a potential second good role for another star castrato in the prima donna role, or that could be a good vehicle for a strong woman singer, and and then the other roles can be filled more or less with whoever is standing around. The first performance had a whopping 5 castrati and one lonely tenor. So you can kinda see why they just said “ohhh let’s do Artaserse this season” over and over again.
The first setting (Vinci) also gives you a nice breakdown of baroque aria turf-warring:
The 2 minor male roles actually have a rather generous allotment of arias.
Also amusingly, in a major reboot of the Hasse version of the opera starring Farinelli, one of the patrons wanted Farinelli to sing one of Arbace’s arias from the original setting, which was one of Carestini’s arias, and Farinelli totally freaked out about not doing it, because he hated Carestini. In a letter to Count Pepoli from 1731:
As for the arias, I’ll bring them along with me since I haven’t had time to have them done as I would like. Regarding the one Signor marches Bentivoglio wants, “Vo solcando il mar crudele,” I beg your excellency to persuade him that in the privacy of his chamber or outside the theater I’ll sing it as many times as he commands me to, but inside the theater I implore you to leave me free not to sing it. For as long as I’ve been in this business there has never been a single occasion on which I’ve sung others’ arias on the stage, especially those of that conceited person [Carestini]. I myself enjoy the fact that others sing my arias in the theater and thus give me the pleasure of hearing them, as has often happened to me, so I do not want some vainglorious person to be able to boast that Farinelli sings his arias.
(translation is by Martha Feldman and is from Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy)
He also, in a different letter, referred to Carestini as “that damned castrato.” Bitchy! Unfortunately I have never been able to find out why Farinelli hated him so much.
Anyway, here is the noble Metastasio’s Artaserse, maybe the most rebooted thing ever. There is a recent all-male cast version with countertenor big-boys that is really quite good.
For more, see:
edit: messed up some names. Gosh darn you Italian versions of Greek versions of Persian names.
I suspect the answer to this depends on how you define 'reboot'. A lot Chinese Ming dynasty vernacular fiction has roots in folk tales, in earlier stage plays, in early poetry, etc. The authors of the Ming novels didn't always repurpose entire stories (although they did sometimes), but they often used existing characters or set pieces for their own stories, and incorporated parts of existing stories into them. Then too, whole books were sometimes 'remade'. Different versions of them, sometimes of very different lengths, with very different sorts of language (some were in stiff classical prose, some much easier to read), and some with illustrations all existed. Does that sort of thing count as 'remaking'? I'm not sure 'reboot' is the right word, since the folk tales presumably were always sort of there.
In Classical mythology, stories were being remade and retold all the time. Ovid did a remake of the Echo and Narcissus myth (as told by Pathernius of Nicaea many years earlier) and is the first known storyteller to introduce Echo (the nymph that falls in love with Narcissus) into the story.
Different myths have Cassandra (the never-trusted prophetess) gaining her abilities by different ways. One story has her cursed by snaked after dozing off in a temple. Aeschylus' version paints a different story, cursed after breaking a promise to Apollo.
There are retellings of myths like these with plot changes small and large. Stories were translated into other languages by poets trying to make a name for themselves and they often changed the details. It would be like making a graphic novel of Bram Stoker's Dracula story today.
I think you could argue that if the 'reboot/remake' is a specific phenomenon it is the result of copyright. Prior to this, stories were re-told by others (or the same person) or moved from one medium to another.
Copyright allows much greater control by rights-holders, and enshrines the idea of a single 'authorised' version. The phenomenon of 'rebooting/remaking' is thus new in the sense that it only becomes notable when contrasted to the idea that there is, say one canonical film version of Superman, directed by Spencer Bennet, authorised by DC.
From this perspective, the phenomenon is specific to the 20th & 21st centuries, as these have seen a massive international growth in the strength of copyright legislation and enforcement.
Of course, there are economic and marketing forces that have also driven this phenomenon, particularly from the 90s onwards (and especially in films) but I think those are not the fundamental issue.
A significant proportion of English plays of the 16th/17th centuries were reworkings of previous material, either other plays or legends. Gerald Langbaine (1691) compiled a list of plays and their sources at the time in his "Plagaries of the English Stage".
This just happens to be a source I have to hand: another example would be the large number of operas based on Greek legend or pre-existing plays, and oratorios by Handel and others rework Biblical material.
There are two examples I can think of from the Bible.
The one, kind of squidgy one, is the way the gospel writers cast the Christ story to fit older prophecies & poetry. (I think Matthew is the foremost practitioner of this, isn't he?)
The second one, which is more of a straight-up reboot, is the creation story of Genesis. The very first bit of the Bible.
It appears to be a retelling (and ret-conning, even) of older ANE stories about sky-gods conquering monstrous water-goddesses and bringing our Earth into being (see: Marduk & Tiamat in the Enuma Elish, or Atum & Nun in the Pyramid Texts. You can read more about Psalm 104's relation to even more ANE myths on page 60 of this theological article.{pdf})
BUT even within the Hebrew Bible, Genesis 1 seems to be a reboot of a chronologically older creation story in Psalm 104*. This story is again retconned in the beginning of the Gospel of John.
So that's a reboot tradition going back perhaps 2,800 years, and at least 2,000 years.
Of course, the dating is somewhat speculative - the psalm might be from post-exile (around 500 BCE), or might be from the court of Solomon (around 800 BCE), but is likely dated somewhere in between those two.
* Note: There's also some evidence that Genesis 1 is a reboot of an older creation story... in Genesis 2. Which then would be based on the older text in Psalm 104. All three tell slightly different versions of the order of first events: watery chaos, light, separation of land and water, lights in the sky, plants and animals, finally first humans.
But that gets needlessly complicated, right?
There are other traces of reboots throughout the Hebrew Bible: see also the Sodom and Gomorrah story as an echo of (or echoed in) the problem with the Benjaminites.
During the European Middle Ages. many writers told and retold stories about various knights of the court of King Arthur. Le Morte D'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory (written in late Middle English, despite the title) is an excellent example of a remix. Malory wrote it while serving a long prison term, and he didn't make very much of it up; he retold various poems and legends that were popular during the previous century.
It's an interesting collection, and it doesn't hold together all that well, I think mainly because his sources were a hodgepodge of quest stories (Sir Gawain in particular seems like a guy who could have hung out with Beowulf), courtly romances (Sir Tristram spent his life trying to track down the love of his life, and seems hardly to have spent a day in King Arthur's court), and religious epics (anything having to do with the Holy Grail). In modern terms, it's an anthology of romance novels, science fiction, and Christian fiction, all set in Camelot. And for all that -- I'd say because of the incompatibility of Malory's many sources -- it's fascinating (mostly; Malory's retelling of Tristram and Isolde is unfortunately plodding).
The majority of Arthurian manuscripts are lost. Among the earliest readable ones are by Chrétien de Troyes, who wrote around 1200. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is an outlier; it was probably contemporaneous with Chaucer, but is written in a northern English dialect that is much more difficult to understand than Chaucer. Malory wrote in the 15th century. Of particular note is the Holy Grail, which in some renditions is a stone, and along the way became identified as a cup from the Last Supper or a vessel that captured some of Jesus's blood from the Crucifixion.
So this collection of work can be counted as over 250 years worth of remixes: much longer, if you count T. H. White's 20th-century recasting The Once and Future King, as well as some other modern works by Mary Stewart (a popular romance novelist of the 1950s and on), and an interesting curiosity that has the knights colonizing Alabama.
Source: I spent a couple of semesters studying this stuff as an undergrad.