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THAT SHAKESPEHEAREAN RAG
The Globe was a low-tech theatre. With its roof open to the elements there
wasn’t much chance of sophisticated lighting cues; its tiny stage (which often
contained some of the A-reserve seats) could be transformed into fair Verona
or Burnham Wood only by a poet’s language. The one special effect at
Shakespeare’s disposal was music: a song like ‘Come away, Death’ in Twelfth
Night lets the drama stop and breathe; trumpet calls (‘sennets’ and
‘alarums’) might transport the audience to the fields of Agincourt. And when
Shakespeare wants us to understand that a miraculous transformation has taken
place – a statue restored to life as a woman, four noble lovers waking from
what they think was a crazy dream, a prince cast ashore on a desert island –
he does so by calling for music.
Shakespeare was as magical for music as music was for Shakespeare, at least
when the temper of the times allowed it. The mere handful of
Shakespeare-derived musical entertainments from the later 17th century
includes John Blow’s Venus and Adonis and the unconscionably
bowdlerised version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream which became Henry
Purcell’s The Fairy Queen. The Enlightenment had little use for a poet
of verbal ambiguity, supernatural visitations and unhappy endings, though
Beethoven acknowledged the influence of Romeo and Juliet on the slow
movement of his String Quartet in F, Op.18 No.1 and a sadly abortive project
of an opera on Macbeth seems to have left its mark on the so-called
‘Ghost’ Trio Op.70 No.1.
With the rise of Romanticism in the 19th century, however, the
Bard was back, combining as he does the ‘gothic’ world of King Lear,
Macbeth or Hamlet, the only momentarily requited passion of Romeo
and Juliet, the magical realms of the ‘Dream’ or The Tempest. One
of the first to succumb was the young Hector Berlioz – partly no doubt as a
side effect of his passion for the Irish actress Harriet Smithson whom he saw
act the role of Juliet. Through the translations of Nerval, Berlioz became
well acquainted with Shakespeare’s work: his early cantata The Death of
Cleopatra (1829), while not based on Shakespeare’s play, uses a quotation
from Romeo and Juliet as a superscription above a passage which
Berlioz went on to recycle as a musical description of the ghost of Hamlet’s
father in Lélio, or the return to life. Shakespeare remained a potent
and profound force in Berlioz’s music throughout his life, in the ‘dramatic
symphony’ Romeo and Juliet, the
fantasy on The Tempest, the King Lear overture and the gentle
comedy of his last opera Béatrice et
Bénédict, but also in
what he called the ‘Shakespeareanized Virgil’ of his operatic masterpiece, The Trojans. Berlioz’s countryman Ambroise Thomas likewise produced operas on A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1850) and Hamlet (1868) – the
latter famed for its drinking song.
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream was one of a motley
band of sources for Carl Maria von Weber’s last work, Oberon,
commissioned by the London based impresario Kemble in 1824; at the same time,
Schlegel and Tieck – themselves in the vanguard of the Romantic movement –
were translating Shakespeare into German, inspiring the young Felix
Mendelssohn to write his celebrated Overture in 1826 and many years later (at
Tieck’s request) his incidental music to the ‘Dream’. Shakespeare’s blend of
broad-brush dramaturgy and the contrasting exploration of individual
characters’ inmost thoughts was attractive to composers like Berlioz, as we have
seen, and Franz Liszt, whose (wordless) symphonic poems Hamlet and Othello
likewise balance a sense of dramatic action with that of profound soliloquy.
Liszt’s model proved invaluable to Richard Strauss in his symphonic poem Macbeth
of 1892 and a century later to Hans Werner Henze, whose Eighth Symphony is a
musical commentary on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Liszt also influenced
Tchaikovsky in his concert overture (a symphonic poem by any other name…) Romeo
and Juliet.
Romeo and Juliet was irresistible to a number of composers: Charles
Gounod made an opera of it, as did, mutatis mutandis, Leonard
Bernstein in West Side Story (1957). Other Broadway versions of
Shakespeare include Cole Porter’s Kiss me, Kate – based on The
Taming of the Shrew, and Rodgers’ and Hart’s The Boys from Syracuse
– their take on A Comedy of Errors. One of the more spectacular
‘translations’ of Romeo and Juliet is into Sergei Prokofiev’s ballet
score of 1938. (The Soviet authorities, incidentally, insisted at first on a
happy ending…) Russian interest in Shakespeare grew hugely during the Soviet
period, with the music that Dmitri Shostakovich contributed to the burgeoning
film industry including an astonishing incidental score to Hamlet.
Incidental music such as Mendelssohn’s spawned its own genre, with Claude
Debussy writing for stagings of King Lear and Jean Sibelius for The
Tempest; like Shostakovich, William Walton had a gift for capturing
Shakespeare as filmed – in Henry V (1944-1955), Hamlet (1948)
and Richard III (1955) – by Laurence Olivier.
Giuseppe Verdi, perhaps inevitably, looked to Shakespeare for his blood and
thunder Macbeth and for the late masterpieces Otello and Falstaff
(based on The Merry Wives of Windsor). Ralph Vaughan Williams had a go
at the latter in his Sir John in Love, a work which tests the orthodox
view that Shakespeare’s actual words should not be set to music, as if they
contain sufficient inherent music of their own. Benjamin Britten likewise
felt that this was an empty taboo, noting dryly (as he set to work on cutting
A Midsummer Night’s Dream down to a manageably singable length in
1960) that ‘the original Shakespeare will survive’. Tan Dun, using fragments
of The Tempest alongside Chinese folk song in his Ghost Opera
for Chinese lute and string quartet (1994), or Michael Tippett, whose The
Knot Garden draws heavily on The Tempest, might have said the same
thing.
Shakespeare does of course survive. What Keats called Shakespeare’s ‘negative
capability’ – the ability to seem completely removed from his poetry, makes
his work endlessly interpretable, and particularly suited to the fluid
responses of music.
Gordon Kerry © 2002
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