A Question Inspired By MUSIC CHOICE

[dulcinea]

As I listened yesterday to an Abbado performance of the Overture to the OTHELLO of Rossini, this thought occurred to me:
is there a complete collection of all the music inspired by Shakespeare, such as, in the case of ROMEO AND JULIET, the opera of Gounod, the poem of Czajkowski, the ballet of Prokofiev, and the soundtrack of the movie by Zeffirelli, which is by no means the only film version of that play?

[jserraglio]

a complete collection of all the music inspired by Shakespeare?

Had we but world enough, and time, . . . & etc.


https://youtu.be/XJIpp2Jj8AQ

[John F]

as jserraglio suggests, a mere list of "all the music inspired by Shakespeare" would be enormous and the time required to compile it, a life's work. A 1991 list of compositions for use in performances of the plays includes over 20,000 songs, overtures, entr'actes, and other pieces, not including movie soundtracks. A list of stage works adapted from or based on Shakespeare included over 270 published operas and 100 operettas, and that was 30 years ago. As for a "complete collection" of all that music, there isn't and can't be any such thing.

[dulcinea]

as jserraglio suggests, a mere list of "all the music inspired by Shakespeare" would be enormous and the time required to compile it, a life's work. A 1991 list of compositions for use in performances of the plays includes over 20,000 songs, overtures, entr'actes, and other pieces, not including movie soundtracks. A list of stage works adapted from or based on Shakespeare included over 270 published operas and 100 operettas, and that was 30 years ago. As for a "complete collection" of all that music, there isn't and can't be any such thing.

Wow, I knew WS was popular, but I didn't realize it was to such an extent!!!

[dulcinea]

Walter Leigh, an English composer who was killed in action at Tobruk, wrote his own version of A MIDSUMMER'S NIGHT DREAM; clearly a doubly brave man, not intimidated by Mendelssohn's take on the same subject.

[John F]

Carl Orff composed music for Midsummer Night's Dream when the Nazis banned Mendelssohn's music. Orff claimed he was not a conspirator in this antisemitic act, he had been writing music for this play since 1917. There are a couple of snippets on YouTube, not enough to give much of an impression of what the music is like. Who knows, it might actually be good.

[Belle]

Yesterday I presented a program about Baroque Theatre Music: Henry Purcell (England) to our music appreciation group. I concentrated on "Dido and Aeneas", "King Arthur" and "The Fairy Queen". In particular, I discussed the collaboration between Dryden and Purcell on 'King Arthur' and some of the subtexts found in the lyrics.

The subject of Shakespeare came up because of some of the allusions in the songs in the semi-operas - for example, ...'and when we die 'tis in each other's arms'. This is a very Shakespearean idea, of course, and found in many of his plays; completely consistent with that contemporary idea of sexual congress being "the little death". You'd be amazed how embarrassed the people (retirees) were when I openly discussed this matter. They were very coy and one even asked, "how do you know this?" to which I replied, "because I've studied Shakespeare". Later another friend wanted to know about audiences for the Restoration musical theatre and I hadn't really researched that aspect of the topic. But I directed him towards plays from the Restoration stage, particularly Wycherley, to provide an insight into audiences and social mores of the period. Then there are the lesser-known female dramatists of the period. Had audiences changed from the days of Shakespeare? Probably, yes.

Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream" was adapted for Purcell's "Fairy Queen" and its masques. At the end of the session a friend/audience member came over and said to me, "I'd rather listen to you than any of the music"!! I took that as a compliment.

[John F]

Audiences changed radically from the English Renaissance to the Restoration. Shakespeare's plays were rewritten by the likes of Colley Cibber; "Hamlet" and "King Lear" were provided with happy endings. In Shakespeare's time, cruelty was popular entertainment, not just in fiction but in reality, from bear-baiting to barbaric public executions; not so a few generations later.

[Belle]

Audiences changed radically from the English Renaissance to the Restoration. Shakespeare's plays were rewritten by the likes of Colley Cibber; "Hamlet" and "King Lear" were provided with happy endings. In Shakespeare's time, cruelty was popular entertainment, not just in fiction but in reality, from bear-baiting to barbaric public executions; not so a few generations later.

Consistent with the Italian models of early opera/late Intermedii, the happy endings and dance celebrations after the 'dramas' and extravaganzas - and the improbabilities of nymphs, furies, gods and allegorical 'characters' - Purcell's semi-operas ended the same way. Everybody went home pleased after a good 'entertainment'. And the king to the bed of that well-known English actress, Nell Gwynn.

[John F]

Purcell was a composer of the Restoration, a younger contemporary of Dryden. But at least he didn't provide a happy ending for "Dido and Aeneas."

[jserraglio]

Prokofiev's original 1936 ballet score for R & J, entitled “Romeo & Juliet, on Motifs of Shakespeare” featured a "happy" or at least a "happier-than-Shakespeare's" ending, but it was suppressed, later unearthed in Russia and performed at Bard in 2008.

As was mentioned above, Purcell was influenced by the festive Jacobean masque tradition. In D & A, though, he follows Virgil by having Dido die in the end. How much leeway did he and his librettist Nahum Tate (the guy that gave King Lear a happy ending) have to alter one of England's foundational origin myths? Aeneas has to leave Carthage to found Rome and, by extension, London. So the outcome, extrapolated, might be seen as comic as well as tragic.

[dulcinea]

Prokofiev's original 1936 ballet score for R & J, entitled “Romeo & Juliet, on Motifs of Shakespeare” featured a "happy" or at least a "happier-than-Shakespeare's" ending, but it was suppressed, later unearthed in Russia and performed at Bard in 2008.

The TV production of NICHOLAS NICKLEBY shows the theater company with whom NN and Smike stay for a while performing a R&J where, at the ending, it turns out that the poison of the apothecary did not work.
Intriguing question: what feels more satisfying=the star-crossed lovers dying and their families all grief stricken, or the couple happily together and the Capulets and Montagues agreeing to an alliance marriage?

[jbuck919]

Prokofiev's original 1936 ballet score for R & J, entitled “Romeo & Juliet, on Motifs of Shakespeare” featured a "happy" or at least a "happier-than-Shakespeare's" ending, but it was suppressed, later unearthed in Russia and performed at Bard in 2008.

The TV production of NICHOLAS NICKLEBY shows the theater company with whom NN and Smike stay for a while performing a R&J where, at the ending, it turns out that the poison of the apothecary did not work.
Intriguing question: what feels more satisfying=the star-crossed lovers dying and their families all grief stricken, or the couple happily together and the Capulets and Montagues agreeing to an alliance marriage?

You've got to be kidding. The only reason I don't post a performance of the tomb scene is that it is invariably butchered by gratuitous cutting, as though leaving out single lines is needed to shorten a play that requires no abbreviation. (This goes double for the famous Zeffirelli film, which squandered the rare gift of a passable Romeo in Leonard Whiting.)

How oft when men are at the point of death
Have they been merry, which their keepers call
A lightning before death! Oh, how may I
Call this a lightning?—O my love, my wife!
Death, that hath sucked the honey of thy breath,
Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.
Thou art not conquered. Beauty’s ensign yet
Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks,
And death’s pale flag is not advancèd there.—
Tybalt, liest thou there in thy bloody sheet?
O, what more favor can I do to thee,
Than with that hand that cut thy youth in twain
To sunder his that was thine enemy?
Forgive me, cousin.—Ah, dear Juliet,
Why art thou yet so fair? Shall I believe
That unsubstantial death is amorous,
And that the lean abhorrèd monster keeps
Thee here in dark to be his paramour?
For fear of that, I still will stay with thee,
And never from this pallet of dim night
Depart again. Here, here will I remain
With worms that are thy chamber maids. Oh, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest,
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last.
Arms, take your last embrace. And, lips, O you
The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss
A dateless bargain to engrossing death.
Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavoury guide.
Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on
The dashing rocks thy seasick, weary bark.
Here’s to my love! O true apothecary,
Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.

[jserraglio]

Samuel Johnson admired Shakespeare for the house he built, not the separate bricks:

Yet his real power is not shewn in the splendor of particular passages, but by the progress of his fable, and the tenor of his dialogue; and he that tries to recommend him by select quotations, will succeed like the pedant in Hierocles, who, when he offered his house to sale, carried a brick in his pocket as a specimen.

[jserraglio]

And Ben Johnson, who knew and admired him, nevertheless thought that Shakespeare could be pruned:

The Players [John Hemings and Henry Condell] have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare, that in his writing, (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out [a] line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand . . . . I had not told posterity this, but for their ignorance, who choose that circumstance to commend their friend by, wherein he most faulted.

[John F]

So much for Ben Jonson, whose plays are rarely and selectively performed in the English-speaking countries and even more rarely elsewhere, while of course Shakespeare's plays - every one of them - are performed everywhere all the time.

[dulcinea]

Prokofiev's original 1936 ballet score for R & J, entitled “Romeo & Juliet, on Motifs of Shakespeare” featured a "happy" or at least a "happier-than-Shakespeare's" ending, but it was suppressed, later unearthed in Russia and performed at Bard in 2008.

The TV production of NICHOLAS NICKLEBY shows the theater company with whom NN and Smike stay for a while performing a R&J where, at the ending, it turns out that the poison of the apothecary did not work.
Intriguing question: what feels more satisfying=the star-crossed lovers dying and their families all grief stricken, or the couple happily together and the Capulets and Montagues agreeing to an alliance marriage?

You've got to be kidding. The only reason I don't post a performance of the tomb scene is that it is invariably butchered by gratuitous cutting, as though leaving out single lines is needed to shorten a play that requires no abbreviation. (This goes double for the famous Zeffirelli film, which squandered the rare gift of a passable Romeo in Leonard Whiting.)

How oft when men are at the point of death
Have they been merry, which their keepers call
A lightning before death! Oh, how may I
Call this a lightning?—O my love, my wife!
Death, that hath sucked the honey of thy breath,
Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.
Thou art not conquered. Beauty’s ensign yet
Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks,
And death’s pale flag is not advancèd there.—
Tybalt, liest thou there in thy bloody sheet?
O, what more favor can I do to thee,
Than with that hand that cut thy youth in twain
To sunder his that was thine enemy?
Forgive me, cousin.—Ah, dear Juliet,
Why art thou yet so fair? Shall I believe
That unsubstantial death is amorous,
And that the lean abhorrèd monster keeps
Thee here in dark to be his paramour?
For fear of that, I still will stay with thee,
And never from this pallet of dim night
Depart again. Here, here will I remain
With worms that are thy chamber maids. Oh, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest,
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last.
Arms, take your last embrace. And, lips, O you
The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss
A dateless bargain to engrossing death.
Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavoury guide.
Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on
The dashing rocks thy seasick, weary bark.
Here’s to my love! O true apothecary,
Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.

Why did FZ omit the last duel, the one that comes before Romeo kills himself?

[jserraglio]

So much for Ben Jonson, whose plays are rarely and selectively performed in the English-speaking countries and even more rarely elsewhere, while of course Shakespeare's plays - every one of them - are performed everywhere all the time.

Kudos to Ben Jonson!

Far from a blanket condemnation, Jonson's wish about Shakespeare's "blotting" more lines contains a constructive point: Shakespeare's plays sometimes benefit by being adapted or cut.

Jonson's plays' lack of popularity in our time is irrelevant. Johnson, Coleridge and T.S. Eliot wrote plays too. Most, even if performable, are rarely performed today. So what?

Jonson generously and w/o envy placed his rival above all other playwrights and all other English authors, including by implication himself:

I therefore will begin. Soul of the age!
The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage!
My Shakespeare, rise! I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie
A little further, to make thee a room:
Thou art a monument without a tomb,
And art alive still while thy book doth live
And we have wits to read and praise to give.
That I not mix thee so, my brain excuses,
I mean with great, but disproportion'd Muses,
For if I thought my judgment were of years,
I should commit thee surely with thy peers,
And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine,
Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe's mighty line.
And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,
From thence to honour thee, I would not seek
For names; but call forth thund'ring Aeschylus,
Euripides and Sophocles to us;
Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead,
To life again, to hear thy buskin tread,
And shake a stage; or, when thy socks were on,
Leave thee alone for the comparison
Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.
Tri'umph, my Britain, thou hast one to show
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age but for all time!
And all the Muses still were in their prime,
When, like Apollo, he came forth to warm
Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm . . .

[jbuck919]

Yes, Jonson admired Shakespeare at the same time that he damned him with faint praise. He also wrote that Shakespeare had "little Latin and less Greek." (Though he appears not to have been a deep classical scholar, Shakespeare would have had much of his basic education in Latin and it figures in a learned way in more than one play, often comically.) Pooh on Ben Jonson. It is as though Vasari had written that Michelangelo's Last Judgment would be a masterpiece if only he had painted Jesus with a beard.

Are there longueurs in Shakespeare? Of course. Kenneth Branagh in his production of Henry V presented the early and interminable discourse on the Salic Law uncut. I half wonder if one of the players was so nagging Shakespeare for a speech that W.S. responded by writing what may be the most boring one in all his plays. That is a far cry from the kinds of cuts I am talking about, which are entirely gratuitous and aggrandizing to the egotistical modern director. Zefirrelli's Taming of the Shrew is just as bad. I can understand leaving out the opening matter about Christopher Sly, but just to begin with, Z. omits the wonderful scene where Lucentio woos Bianca, which, BTW, also happens to be an example of Shakespeare making nifty use of his Latin.

Lucentio. Here, madam:
'Hic ibat Simois, hic est Sigeia tellus, 1295
Hic steterat Priami regia celsa senis.'

Bianca. Construe them.

Lucentio. 'Hic ibat' as I told you before- 'Simois' I am Lucentio-
'hic est' son unto Vincentio of Pisa- 'Sigeia tellus' disguised
thus to get your love- 'Hic steterat' and that Lucentio that 1300
comes a-wooing- 'Priami' is my man Tranio- 'regia' bearing my
port- 'celsa senis' that we might beguile the old pantaloon.

Hortensio. Madam, my instrument's in tune.

Bianca. Let's hear. O fie! the treble jars.

Lucentio. Spit in the hole, man, and tune again. 1305

Bianca. Now let me see if I can construe it: 'Hic ibat Simois' I
know you not- 'hic est Sigeia tellus' I trust you not- 'Hic
steterat Priami' take heed he hear us not- 'regia' presume not-
'celsa senis' despair not.

(The passage is from Vergil, and means "Here flowed the Simois; this is that very site. Here stood Priam's high old castle.")

[jserraglio]

Yes, Jonson admired Shakespeare at the same time that he damned him with faint praise. He also wrote that Shakespeare had "little Latin and less Greek."

Jonson's summary assessment of Shakespeare: "He was not of an age but for all time!"

Damned with faint praise? If that be damnation, please conduct me to Hell.

If one looks at the problematic phrase "small Latin and less Greek" in context, Jonson probably means it as rhetorical compliment, not criticism, stating affectionately that "my Shakespeare," though he was not a classicist, nevertheless towered over the greatest Greek and Roman playwrights: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Seneca. How is that not sincere praise?

Even if it weren't, Jonson's tasking a playwright writing in English with having "small Latin and less Greek" would seem to be far less troubling than your conceding the "longueurs" present in his plays and pointing out an "interminable," boring, possibly filler passage in one of his significant plays.

So you might even agree with Jonson about the flaws in Shakespeare: "would that he had blotted" them.

Pooh on Ben Jonson.

Pooh-pooh him, but who before Jonson, who else among Shakespeare's rivals, no, who among all his contemporaries, ever spoke of Shakespeare's art so glowingly, yet w/o descending into hagiography?

[dulcinea]

Prokofiev's original 1936 ballet score for R & J, entitled “Romeo & Juliet, on Motifs of Shakespeare” featured a "happy" or at least a "happier-than-Shakespeare's" ending, but it was suppressed, later unearthed in Russia and performed at Bard in 2008.

The TV production of NICHOLAS NICKLEBY shows the theater company with whom NN and Smike stay for a while performing a R&J where, at the ending, it turns out that the poison of the apothecary did not work.
Intriguing question: what feels more satisfying=the star-crossed lovers dying and their families all grief stricken, or the couple happily together and the Capulets and Montagues agreeing to an alliance marriage?

You've got to be kidding. The only reason I don't post a performance of the tomb scene is that it is invariably butchered by gratuitous cutting, as though leaving out single lines is needed to shorten a play that requires no abbreviation. (This goes double for the famous Zeffirelli film, which squandered the rare gift of a passable Romeo in Leonard Whiting.)

How oft when men are at the point of death
Have they been merry, which their keepers call
A lightning before death! Oh, how may I
Call this a lightning?—O my love, my wife!
Death, that hath sucked the honey of thy breath,
Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.
Thou art not conquered. Beauty’s ensign yet
Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks,
And death’s pale flag is not advancèd there.—
Tybalt, liest thou there in thy bloody sheet?
O, what more favor can I do to thee,
Than with that hand that cut thy youth in twain
To sunder his that was thine enemy?
Forgive me, cousin.—Ah, dear Juliet,
Why art thou yet so fair? Shall I believe
That unsubstantial death is amorous,
And that the lean abhorrèd monster keeps
Thee here in dark to be his paramour?
For fear of that, I still will stay with thee,
And never from this pallet of dim night
Depart again. Here, here will I remain
With worms that are thy chamber maids. Oh, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest,
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last.
Arms, take your last embrace. And, lips, O you
The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss
A dateless bargain to engrossing death.
Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavoury guide.
Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on
The dashing rocks thy seasick, weary bark.
Here’s to my love! O true apothecary,
Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.

I watched Zeffirelli's production on TV with the text in my hand, and so noticed immediately the omission of the last duel. Why such a rush to end the story?

[dulcinea]

Albani, Barbarigo, Barberini, Borghese, Borgia, Della Rovere, Farnese, Medici, Odescalchi, Pamphili, Piccolomini, Pignatelli, Sforza and Visconti, among many others, are Italian princely houses analogous to the Capulets and the Montagues, and which have produced many statesmen, warriors, churchmen, and even Popes.
So whose big idea it was to cast street gangs and Mafia families as modern day equivalents of the Capulets and Montagues???!!!

[jbuck919]

Albani, Barbarigo, Barberini, Borghese, Borgia, Della Rovere, Farnese, Medici, Odescalchi, Pamphili, Piccolomini, Pignatelli, Sforza and Visconti, among many others, are Italian princely houses analogous to the Capulets and the Montagues, and which have produced many statesmen, warriors, churchmen, and even Popes.
So whose big idea it was to cast street gangs and Mafia families as modern day equivalents of the Capulets and Montagues???!!!

Sheesh, how would I know? In fact, I Capuleti e i Montecchi is a borrowing, as is every Shakespeare plot except The Tempest. Shakespeare never left England as far as we know, and all his foreign-set plays are more or less fanciful constructions. Why did he set a scene in A Winter's Tale on the seacoast of landlocked Bohemia? You're asking the wrong question. The greatest of writers can get away with anything as long as his dramatic poetry hovers over history at an incalculable height.

[dulcinea]

Albani, Barbarigo, Barberini, Borghese, Borgia, Della Rovere, Farnese, Medici, Odescalchi, Pamphili, Piccolomini, Pignatelli, Sforza and Visconti, among many others, are Italian princely houses analogous to the Capulets and the Montagues, and which have produced many statesmen, warriors, churchmen, and even Popes.
So whose big idea it was to cast street gangs and Mafia families as modern day equivalents of the Capulets and Montagues???!!!

The problem with casting the Italy of R&J in the modern USA is that there is simply no real equivalence between the two; dynasties like the Bushes and the Roosevelts are not comparable to the princely families of Italy.
If you want a R&J set in the modern era, a country like Colombia is a better fit. The Liberal and Conservative parties are dominated by lineages so powerful, they make the Bushes and the Roosevelts look pretty insignificant. The House Restrepo, in particular, is so preeminent in the Colombian society, politics, the military, the Church and the arts, that, if Colombia ever decided to become a monarchy, the Restrepos would be the inevitable choice for royal family.
Back in the 1950s, there was a civil war called la Violencia. About 300,000 people were killed, the national economy was ruined, and much of the countryside laid desolate, the peasantry having fled to the cities to escape the gangs of bandoleros that committed innumerable atrocities. Alarmed at the national disaster, the two main parties agreed to a peace treaty where they would share the power of the government.
This is a perfect setting for R&J, with the Capulets and the Montagues as lineages of the rival parties, and the couple's death at the end being doubly tragic because it comes at the time that the Violencia is about to end.
Read up on the Violencia; you will surely agree that it adds up to a gripping background to an story of doomed love.