If music be the food of love… how Shakespeare has inspired classical composers

Professor Russ McDonald explores the relationship between 'The Bard' and music as part of the Shakespeare400 celebrations

As almost everyone is aware, this is the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, but the real point is this: he's not dead!

As much as any other artist, and far more than most, Shakespeare has enjoyed an astonishing afterlife. Whether we measure by stage productions, fictional adaptations, films, parodies, editions, critical studies, musical comedies, overtures or tone poems or operas, the proliferation of titles and documents is staggering.

Musicians began to appropriate the works to their own uses very early:  immediately after the Cromwellian interregnum, when English theatres were closed for 18 years, playwrights and composers began to adapt plays to suit the Restoration taste for spectacle, both visual and aural. The first major operatic transformation was Henry Purcell’s The Faerie Queene, a work known as a “semi-opera”, in which each (abbreviated) act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was followed by a masque-like, operatic interlude.

In the eighteenth century that same magical comedy was adapted again at Drury Lane by John Christopher Smith: exploiting and mocking the fashion for Italian opera in London, the greatest actor of the age, David Garrick, wrote a prologue attributing the composition to Signor Shakespearelli.

The century ended without completion of the most tantalising prospect: just weeks before he died Mozart had accepted a libretto for an opera based on The Tempest, and for decades that play was the benefit of obsessive musical attention owing to its resonance with the themes of German Romanticism.

The rage for Shakespeare continued into the nineteenth century and expanded throughout Europe: in Italy Giuseppe Verdi, in France Hector Berlioz, and in Germany Richard Wagner looked to Shakespeare for inspiration.

The young Wagner’s flirtation was a failure: wanting to épater every form of conventional authority in sight, he chose for his second opera Measure for Measure, the dark comedy about sexual and political hypocrisy; it flopped and was forgotten.

But Berlioz’s treatment of Much Ado About Nothing, known as Béatrice et Bénédict, is characteristically original in its musical conception and is revived from time to time, and Verdi’s last two masterpieces, Otello and Falstaff, the latter based on The Merry Wives of Windsor, are among the greatest works of nineteenth-century music.

Nearer to our own time, Benjamin Britten adapted A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1960, using Shakespeare’s own shortened text, and in the twenty-first century the most frequently performed new piece is Thomas Adès’s version of The Tempest, which has played at Covent Garden, La Scala, and The Met.

The London Philharmonic is opening its concert on 3 February with Antonin Dvorak’s “Othello” overture. Unlike some such overtures, it was not written for a stage play; many composers produced music to accompany theatrical productions, although some simply wrote concert overtures designed to capture orchestrally the spirit of the play.

The Czech composer’s effort is part of a series of three tone poems, each designed to represent a fundamental aspect of human experience: Nature, Life, and Love. The first of these is ‘In Nature’s Realm’, the second (his most famous overture) ‘Carnival’, and the third ‘Othello’, an attempt to capture the power of passion, especially amorous jealousy. Sections of the piece, which runs about thirteen minutes, depict the love of Othello and Desdemona, the incursion of jealousy into Othello’s psyche, the brutal murder, and then his praying for forgiveness.

The composer has noted these passages at the appropriate places in his personal score.

As part of the Shakespeare400 celebrations, Professor McDonald will further explore these issues and more at a free talk ahead of a concert by the London Philharmonic.