Shakespeare in Music
The subject that we’re about to consider this evening—Shakespeare in Music—is a topic so immense, so vast, so seemingly endless—that I feel compelled to state up front that in no way are we going to be able to approach exhausting even the mere cream of the crop of this most bountiful phenomenon. But before we get very specific, let’s address a more general artistic matter that bears greatly on our subject at hand. I’m speaking of the friendly aesthetic tension that exists between words and music. I doubt that many of us here have lost too much sleep pondering the ramifications of this philosophical question, but it is something that has been debated for centuries, with passionate partisans on both sides. Let me see if I can shed a bit of light on what this standoff is all about.
Let’s start by recognizing that both words and music constitute language of some kind. Communication is at the heart of their respective missions. My favorite definition of music is the one found in the old Harvard Dictionary, which states that “music is the ordered flow of sound through time.” What a broad definition this is. It casts such a very wide net, gathering in all kinds of species—even some we would likely be tempted to throw back as either too small or unserious. For example, if I accidentally drop a glass in a restaurant, it will, of course make a sound. And I’ll likely get some applause for it! But can we say that it is music? Of course not. Why? Because it was an accident. Remember our definition: the ORDERED flow of sound through time. So what if I intentionally drop my glass, with the purpose of making a sound —at a specific time of my choosing—for whatever reason, sophomoric or otherwise. Is that music? Well, more nearly, perhaps—at least within our definition.
But what about spoken words? Doesn’t speech itself fall into our broad definition, “the ordered flow of sound though time?” The answer is yes—it does indeed. Most of us don’t think of the spoken word as music, per se…but consider what we know about inflection. If I say, “Wow! That’s really great!,” a certain meaning is obvious. But if I say, “Wow—that’s really…great,” then I’ve completely altered the meaning of those words. And I accomplished that by employing certain specific elements that we all recognize to be musical properties—pitch, dynamics, duration…even tone quality. So it would seem fair to state that speech is reliant on music—in the broadest, most non-discriminatory sense, to enhance and refine the very meaning of the words themselves.
Think of the word “lyric.” We speak of the “lyrics” to a song. Literary critics will sometimes write that a particular author writes in a “lyrical style” or with a “lyrical voice.” Now I know that everyone here shares my love of etymology. “Lyric” comes from the word “lyre,” an ancient Greek musical instrument that was somewhat akin to what we think of as a harp. Isn’t it a lovely bit of serendipity, then, that words and music can co-exist even in this one short little word.
Let’s extrapolate now, from these very elementary examples, something useful when addressing what we’ll call, for lack of better terminology, “art music.” Believe it or not, entire operas have been written on this very subject! Most of us are familiar with the name Antonio Salieri, courtesy of the movie Amadeus. He was a very fine composer in his day, but alas, not nearly as fine a composer as Mozart. Thus, the bitter rivalry. But in any case, Salieri wrote an opera called Prima la musica, poi le parole—First the Music, then the Words. It’s a facetious comedy about a composer and a librettist who are comissioned to write a new opera. The librettist is having writers block, so the composer goes ahead and writes all the music without any words. In desparation to meet the deadline, the librettist applies a random collection of pre-existing verses to the new music. The result, as one could imagine, is absurd.
One of my favorite operas is Capriccio, by Richard Strauss. The entirety of this opera is about the question of which is the greater art, Music or Poetry. The central figure of the opera—a countess—is being courted by a composer and also by a poet. At the end of the opera, when it is time for her to choose just one of them—she simply can’t do it, and is left, as she says, burning between two flames.
There are certain facts, though, that are undeniable. I challenge anyone to name a work of vocal music of enduring significance—that’s the caveat—in which the words are of greater artistic merit than the music. (And for our purposes, Bob Dylan doesn’t count.) When it comes to classical art music, there are countless examples, in opera, choral music and art song, in which the music carries the day and rescues an insipid or mediocre text. It’s the music that makes operatic stories come alive. It’s the music that allows us to overlook the abject absurdity of a soprano singing beautiful high notes as she takes ten minutes to die in a burlap sack. Ah, yes—but it’s also true that it is words that inspire composers to write their music. Composers of all ages have had their creative imaginations inflamed by the sheer beauty of words—the profound power of gut-wrenching dramatic stories. The fact is simple—in the hearts and minds of geniuses, words and music co-exist—co-communicate—co-inspire. And now that we’ve broached that particular word—“genius”—let’s turn our attention to Shakespeare.
If for some bizarre and unthinkable reason I were to have reached my current age of 55 without ever having seen or read a single play of William Shakespeare, I feel certain that I could still say, without too much exaggeration, that Shakespeare would count as one of the great aesthetic influences in my life. Now how coud that possibly be? Well, it’s easily explained by the fortuitous fact that I have spent nearly all of those 55 years immersed in music. I don’t have to convince any of you, since you are members of the English Speaking Union, of Shakespeare’s all-surpassing greatness. Shakespeare is the sun—the central orb around whom whole worlds have circled throughout the four centuries since his death. The worlds of literature, language and poetry. Worlds of thought, reason, religion, ethics, morality and history. The worlds of art and music. The closer these world’s draw in their respective orbits to the great solar bard, the more warmly they bask in Shakespeare’s most radiant gift: the clear illumination of human nature.
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It would seem that Shakespeare had much more than a mere passing appreciation of music. Indeed, music played a very lively part in his theatrical outlook. He wrote many songs and scattered them liberally throughout his 37 plays; but, the actual music for these songs remains largely unknown. Much of it was likely improvised on the spot. But it didn’t take long for composers to find inspiration in the imagery and musicality of the words themselves. Let’s listen to this setting of a song from The Tempest, one of Shakespeare’s last plays. The music is by Thomas Arne—an 18th-century British composer most famous for composing the music to “God Save the Queen.” Here we have a fairly early example of a Shakespeare text set to an orchestral accompaniment. This is a song of the spirit Ariel:
Where the bee sucks, there suck I:
In a cow-slip’s bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bat’s back I do fly
After sunset merrily.
Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.
There are a couple of subtle things I want you to notice as we listen to
Emma Kirkby sing this delightful setting. When she gets to the text, “there I couch when owls do cry,” listen for the owl in the flute and also in her voice—particularly the second time around. Notice, too, how the vocal line takes flight when she sings, “on the bat’s back I do fly.”
(Play music)
It wasn’t until the late eighteenth century that Shakespeare’s work became widely known on the European continent, as various translations were made more readily available in French, German, Italian and Russian. By the early 19th-century, Shakespeare had become the hero of many romantic idealists, who found in the Elizabethan master an equal share of dramatic realism and poetic comeliness. One of the most nearly perfect settings of a Shakespearean text is Franz Schubert’s An Sylvia. It is said that Schubert composed this song while he and some friends were at a beer garden in Vienna. While there, he noticed a volume of Shakespeare sitting on a table. (It must have been a fairly high-end beer garden!) After reading for a few minutes he exclaimed, "I have such a delightful melody running through my head. If only I had some paper!" A friend drew some lines on the back of a menu and Schubert spontaneously wrote the melody to the words he was reading:
Who is Silvia? what is she,
That all our swains commend her?
Holy, fair, and wise is she;
The heaven such grace did lend her,
That she might admirèd be.
Is she kind as she is fair?
For beauty lives with kindness.
Love doth to her eyes repair,
To help him of his blindness;
And, being helped, inhabits there.
Then to Silvia let us sing,
That Silvia is excelling;
She excels each mortal thing
Upon the dull earth dwelling;
To her let us garlands bring.
Here is the great German tenor Fritz Wunderlich singing in German, these beautiful words from Two Gentleman of Verona.
(Play music)
No creative artist has ever been more thoroughly in love with Shakespeare than the frenchman Hector Berlioz, whose entire life, from 1803 to 1869, can easily be seen as a living drama of Shakespearean proportions. Nobody wore his private and professional passions more vividly on his sleeves. His first encounter with Shakespeare was at a performance of Hamlet in which the great Enlglish actress Harriet Smithson played Ophelia. He was smitten, and returned the next night to see her perform Juliet. (Can you imagine performing the roles of Ophelia and Juliet…back to back?) Berlioz couldn’t speak a word of English at the time, yet he was transported by the acting of Harriet Smithson, and fell head-over-heels in love…both with her and with Shakespeare. (By the way, Puccini had a similar experience when he first saw the David Belasco play on which Madame Butterfly is based. He didn’t understand a word of English, but the acting was so powerful that he was inspired to write what has become one of the most popular operas of all time.)
Berlioz was not the most prolific composer of his era, but he certainly wrote more Shakespeare-inspired works than nearly anyone else. There’s the dramatic fantasy on The Tempest, a King Lear overture, a song on the death of Ophelia, a march for Hamlet, and his last opera, Beatrice and Benedict—a delectable version of Much Ado About Nothing. He also wrote an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet that is one of the strangest yet most wonderful pieces in the literature. Berlioz called it a dramatic symphony, but in truth, it’s a difficult work to categorize. It’s not what anyone would call a normal symphony, but neither is it fully an oratorio or an opera. It’s only rarely performed because it is so demanding. It requires an orchestra of a hundred players, a chorus of similar size, and three vocal soloists—none of whom sing the roles of Romeo or Juliet! But the music is sublime. Here is just a little bit of the great love scene—a movement in which only the orchestra plays…without any singers. Berlioz felt that the music alone could convey what words could not. It’s hard to disagree!
(Play music)
So you see, Shakespeare’s inspiration and dramatic influence goes well beyond the specifics of spoken language. This is the magic and great mystery of music! Listen to this bit of music from Felix Mendelssohn as he conjures the nocturnal fairy world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
(Play music)
That was Mendelssohn’s concert overture on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, composed when he was only 17 years old, in 1826—the same year Schubert wrote An Sylvia, which we heard just a few moments ago. Much later in his career, Mendelssohn went on to write incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We use the word incidental to describe music that is designed to be performed during performances of an actual play. We could probably get away with calling it something less high-brow, so let’s just call it background music. Mendelssohn’s background music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream includes this joyful bit of pomp and circumstance..
(Play music)
Isn’t it magnificent to hear that played by full orchestra! Nothing wrong with a church organ, of course, but the next time your daughther or granddaghter gets married, why don’t you show her just how much you love her and spring for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. I know she’ll appreciate it.
So, now that we’ve stumbled across some music that is familiar to all of us, why don’t we continue down that path without apology. Let’s just enjoy ourselves for a couple of minutes.
(Play music)
Well, I assume that most all of you have heard that glorious music before, and many of you know what it is. It’s Tchaikovsky, of course—the incomparably passionate love theme from his Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture. It’s a one movement work that is, in fact, a symphonic tone poem. Tchaikovsky didn’t try to tell the whole story; instead, he selected three contrasting elements from the play—the sombre world of Friar Laurence, the warring strife of the Capulets and Montagues, and, of course, the fatal passion of the star-crossed lovers themselves. It’s a piece of music that was poorly received by critics in his day; but, it has gone on to be one of the most beloved works in all of music. Just think how much poorer we would be without Shakespeare to kindle the creative flames of so ardently romantic a composer as Tchaikovsky. Thank God for this kind of genius!
Well, I know you’re probably wondering when I’m going to get around to talking about opera. After all, it’s something I’m supposed to know a little bit about. Well, let’s do it. Let’s talk about Shakespeare and opera.
Here’s a question for you. Think of all the operas you know, all the operas you know about, and try to guess how many operas have been written on Shakespeare plays. Would it surpise you if I told you that there are nearly two hundred and fifty operas that are based…in whole or in part…on Shakespeare plays? And believe it or not, nearly all of the plays are represented! Only a handful—King John, Richard II, Henry V, Henry VI and Titus Andronicus—these six plays have not, as of yet, been turned into operas. Just imagine Titus Andronicus as an opera—it would certainly be the bloodiest opera in history!
It has to be said that no literary figure even comes close to Shakespeare in this category. Of course, there are other great writers who feature prominently in opera—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in particular. It would be impossible to overstate the importance of Faust, Goethe’s huge two-part play. Persuasive arguments could be made that Faust may be the single most influential literary work of all time. Charles Gounod’s setting of Faust is one of the two most important French operas of the 19th-century. (The other is Carmen, by George Bizet.) Mefistofele, another work based on Goethe’s Faust, is an impressive opera by Arrigo Boito—an Italian composer and poet who, as we’ll see shortly, became one of the world’s very greatest librettists. And Goethe wrote more than just Faust. Die Leiden des jungen Werthers—The Sorrows of Young Werther—is a short novel in which a young artistic man commits suicide over the unrequited love of a woman who marries another man. Within months of its publication in 1774, a phenomenon called “Werther Fever” had swept over Europe. Young men everywhere were dressing up like Werther and literally killing themselves in a rash of copycat suicides. Talk about literary influence! French composer Jules Massenet wrote a gorgeous operatic adaptation of Werther in 1887.
And there are many, many others. Opera composers have exhaustively combed the literary shelves of western civilization—and beyond—in search of operatic material. You’ll find Pierre Beaumarchais, Victor Hugo, Sir Walter Scott, Alexander Pushkin and Leo Tolstoy. You’ll find Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Louisa May Alcott, John Steinbeck and even Allen Ginsburg. And of course there’s no escaping Homer, Virgil, or even the Bible.
But numbers tell the story, and Shakespeare wins the prize for diversity, with at least 31 different plays set as operas, as well as the prize for frequency—Romeo and Juliet alone has been set as an opera some 25 times at least. And with all this we’re not even taking into account the world of musical theater. Bernstein’s Westside Story is a retelling of Romeo and Juliet, Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate is all caught up in The Taming of the Shrew, and The Boys from Syracuse, by Rodgers and Hart, is based on A Comedy of Errors.
So all of these operas must be masterpieces, right? Well, sadly, no. Only a comparative handful of them are considered worthy of their muse. Part of this assessment, I have to say, seems a little bit unfair. It’s based on unrealistic expectations. You see, nearly every opera draws its inspiration from pre-existing material, usually a play or a novel. (The opera Pagliacci, by Leoncavallo, is one of the few exceptions. He based his gutsy verismo tale on actual events that he witnessed as a child. ) But when the origninal material is a highly regarded—even cherished work of art (like many Shakespeare plays happen to be)—well, then, the stakes are already high from the very beginning.
Let me give you an example from my own experience. In 1998 Elizabeth sang the role of Stella in the world premiere of Andre Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire, an operatic setting of Tennessee William’s great play—a piece of literature considered to be one of the finest of the 20th-century. Please don’t ask me to elaborate on the gaps in my education, but I confess that I had never seen or read the play, nor had I even seen the movie. So going into the experience, I was what you might call a “Streetcar virgin.” I was there for all the rehearsals, I studied the score, and I attended each performance with increasing rapture. For me, this opera was “A Streetcar Named Desire,” and I loved it. (In fact, I want to do it some day here in Roanoke!) Well, the reviews were largely favorable, but some of them struck me as unfair. They’d say things like the baritone singing Stanley Kowalski is “no Marlin Brando.” Give me a break! I doubt Marlin Brando could have carried a tune. And besides that, the opera is a different work of art than either the movie or the play. Familiarity breeds expectation. It’s just like when we go to see a new movie based on our favorite book—we always leave disappointed! It requires great discipline and honesty to assess and appreciate any single work of art on its own terms.
Alright—now that I have that out of my system, I’ll descend from off my high horse and get back to the matter at hand. Giuseppe Verdi is the operatic composer who attained the highest level of success in transforming Shakespeare into opera. Of course, there were many who came before him, starting with Henry Purcell, whose 1692 semi-opera The Fairie Queene, is based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The plot bears a good bit of resemblence to the original, but despite being written in English, contains not one word of Shakespeare! I’d have to point to Rossini’s Otello of 1816 and Vincenzo Bellini’s 1830 bel canto opera, I Capuleti e i Montecchi (The Capulets and the Montagues), as the most significant Shakespearean operas before Verdi. Now please forgive me for bringing up my wife again, but I thought you might be interested to know that Elizabeth has recorded Rossini’s Otello with the London Philharmonia orchestra. This historically-informed recording includes—believe it or not—an alternate happy ending that Rossini wrote. Imagine how creative one would have to be even to consider a happy ending to Shakespeare’s Othello, one of the greatest tragedies in all literature. Well, Rossini had skills.
At last we arrive at 1847, the year of Verdi’s Macbeth. Even from his earliest operas Verdi was a master at shaping characters. It’s not hard to see why the characters of Macbeth and, most particularly Lady Macbeth, would grip his fascination. But I want to play an example of something that demonstrates a rare advantage that opera has over spoken plays. I’m talking about the chorus. Intelligibility in crowd scenes is always a challenge in plays—everyone talking at once can become confusing. Ah, but in opera—the chorus becomes an expressive character all its own. Listen here to a bit of the Act I finale of Macbeth. It has just been discovered that Duncan the King has been murdered, and everyone in the castle unites to sing:
Jaws of Hell, open wide and swallow all creation in your bowels;
Upon the unknown and accursed assassin throw down your flames of wrath, O heaven!
(Play music)
Such exhilarating music that is! And it sounds like no one but Verdi. The music we just heard comes from 1847, just three years before his so-called middle-period masterpieces, Rigoletto, Il trovatore and La traviata. Let’s now leap forward sever several decades and go to Verdi’s final two operas, Otello of 1887 and Falstaff, of 1893. One of the biggest challenges of turning a play into an opera is the necessity of shortening and compressing the material. Some might ask why that would be necessary. Why not just set all of a play’s words to music and be done with it? Well, I’m afraid that’s not usually possible. Text that is set to music takes much longer to realize than text that is spoken. We can see that by picking nearly any song—let’s say, Amazing Grace. I’m going to time myself. (SPEAK TEXT) Ok, that took about eleven seconds. Now let’s put the same text to music and get a timing on that. (SING) Well, there go my eleven seconds, and I’m not even half way through! You see my point. At this rate, it would probably take us a day or two to sing our way through Hamlet!
So composers and librettists usually have to make wholesale cuts just in order to make the material even viable. It’s a process called telescoping. Sometimes, however, making necessary cuts means that a character ends up inadequately defined. For example: Shakespeare’s Othello provides Iago with seven soliliquies, through which the depth of his evil nature is revealed incrementally to the audience. Well there was no way that Verdi was going to give Iago seven arias, so he asked Boito, his librettist, to write a new soliloquy. You remember Boito, the composer of Mefistofele whom I mentioned a bit earler. He came up with his own original text that does full justice to the profile of Shakespeare’s own characterization of Iago:
“I believe in a cruel god,” Iago bellows.A god who created me like himself.In anger I name him.From the cowardice of a seedor of a vile atom I was born.I am a son of evil because I am a man,and I feel the primitive mud in me.
(Play music)
That’s pretty nasty stuff! You don’t even have to understand a word he’s saying to know that Iago is one evil character. Listen here to the very end of the aria, where he shows himself to be the ultimate nihilist: “Death is nothingness. Heaven is an old wives’ tail.”
(Play music)
That was the great American baritone Sherrill Milnes.
Verdi’s final opera is Falstaff, finished in 1893, the composer’s eightieth year. It is perhaps the greatest Shakespearean opera of them all. Boito once again shows himself to be the ultimate librettist, perfectly and seamlessly quilting together a tight and hilarious story that is drawn not from one single play, but from three: The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry IV part one and Henry IV part two. Every note and syllable of this divinely inspired comedy is full of the same wit and wisdom that is the very hallmark of Shakespeare himself. Verdi’s glittering alchemy is on full display in this final ensemble—indeed, this is the last musical offering of his life. He pulls out all the stops, giving us an unbelievably complex fugue that scampers and dances with youthful buoyancy all the way to the end:
Everything in the world is a joke. Man is born a jester. In his mind, his reason Is always wavering. Everything is mocked! All mortals Taunt one another, But…he-laughs-well, who has the last laugh.
(Play music)
Well very clearly, that makes an excellent place to draw this little discussion to a close. But you have to know how terribly guilty I feel for all the things I’ve had to leave out. How I’d love to show you the several ways in which Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet influenced Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, a work that changed the course of music history! What I wouldn’t give to play at least one of the four rapturously beautiful duets from Gounod’s Romeo and Juliette—an opera I’m getting to conduct again in just a few weeks. And how overwhelmingly remiss I feel for not even mentioning Prokofiev’s great Romeo and Juliet ballet or Benjamin Britten’s magical Midsummer Night’s Dream—the only opera in which every single word is Shakespeare. Oh, and what genuine joy I would take in the opportunity to share Vaughan-Williams’ ineffably sublime Serenade to Music. The words are drawn from a discussion about the music of the spheres in Act I, scene 5 of The Merchant of Venice. It’s one of the most beautiful texts ever penned:
How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!Here will we sit and let the sounds of musicCreep in our ears: soft stillness and the nightBecome the touches of sweet harmony.
Shakespeare himself encourages me to go on. Didn’t he say, “If music be the food of love, play on?” Why, yes he did! But, alas, he also said, “brevity is the soul of wit.”
So…I’ll choose the latter course, and thank you for your attention.
-Steven White