Pub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.4
Katrine K. Wong
The relationship between music and female characters in the Shakespearean canon has attracted much exciting discussion in recent years. This chapter starts with an overview of gendered designs of musical episodes in Shakespearean plays and the corresponding gendered responses within the playtexts. Textual interpretation of ‘male music’ and ‘female music’, informed by conventional early modern context, yields seemingly clear-cut expectations of and attitudes towards musical performance on Shakespeare’s stage; however, modern stage productions have complicated and, at times, subverted the dichotomy. Dramaturgical reading of musical episodes in selected plays offers us an opportunity to understand gender relativity and performativity in Shakespearean characters.
{"title":"Gender and Music in Shakespeare","authors":"Katrine K. Wong","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.4","url":null,"abstract":"The relationship between music and female characters in the Shakespearean canon has attracted much exciting discussion in recent years. This chapter starts with an overview of gendered designs of musical episodes in Shakespearean plays and the corresponding gendered responses within the playtexts. Textual interpretation of ‘male music’ and ‘female music’, informed by conventional early modern context, yields seemingly clear-cut expectations of and attitudes towards musical performance on Shakespeare’s stage; however, modern stage productions have complicated and, at times, subverted the dichotomy. Dramaturgical reading of musical episodes in selected plays offers us an opportunity to understand gender relativity and performativity in Shakespearean characters.","PeriodicalId":166828,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122413165","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.15
M. Pisani, Mervyn Cooke
On the American stage, especially in the first half of the nineteenth century, performances of Shakespeare were closely allied with British practices since so many actors emigrated from Britain or toured in the United States. This tendency was also reflected in the musical provision for American productions of the Bard’s plays. The gradual development away from British-inspired scoring practices is surveyed in this chapter, which draws on evidence from six distinct sources: (1) individual songs or composers identified on theatrical playbills; (2) references to music in secondary sources such as books and scholarly articles; (3) promptbooks used in productions; (4) instrumental and/or vocal parts (typically in manuscript) found in libraries, mostly in theatre collections; (5) notices of music in primary sources such as reviews or autobiographies; and (6) printed music. The chapter covers music for the professional stage (notably at Daly’s Theatre in New York City, and melodramatic treatments of Macbeth), lower-budget touring and amateur productions, and the highly popular burlesque. The last of these, more than any other stage genre, transformed the Bard’s work into a middlebrow form of entertainment uniquely American in the diversity of the cultural and musical influences it embodied.
{"title":"Music for Shakespeare in Nineteenth-Century American Theatre","authors":"M. Pisani, Mervyn Cooke","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.15","url":null,"abstract":"On the American stage, especially in the first half of the nineteenth century, performances of Shakespeare were closely allied with British practices since so many actors emigrated from Britain or toured in the United States. This tendency was also reflected in the musical provision for American productions of the Bard’s plays. The gradual development away from British-inspired scoring practices is surveyed in this chapter, which draws on evidence from six distinct sources: (1) individual songs or composers identified on theatrical playbills; (2) references to music in secondary sources such as books and scholarly articles; (3) promptbooks used in productions; (4) instrumental and/or vocal parts (typically in manuscript) found in libraries, mostly in theatre collections; (5) notices of music in primary sources such as reviews or autobiographies; and (6) printed music. The chapter covers music for the professional stage (notably at Daly’s Theatre in New York City, and melodramatic treatments of Macbeth), lower-budget touring and amateur productions, and the highly popular burlesque. The last of these, more than any other stage genre, transformed the Bard’s work into a middlebrow form of entertainment uniquely American in the diversity of the cultural and musical influences it embodied.","PeriodicalId":166828,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music","volume":"89 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131015328","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.28
William P. Germano
At least a dozen of Shakespeare’s plays provided the basis for nineteenth-century Italian operas. Poets and composers took on the double project of transforming the playwright’s work into a text suitable for musical setting, and then producing a work of dramatic vocal music that could succeed in the fertile and competitive world of nineteenth-century opera. The century’s operatic output is marked by monumental gateposts—Rossini’s groundbreaking Otello (1816) and Verdi’s final stage works, Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893)—but many other significant Italian composers, including Pacini, Piccinni, Vaccai, Bellini, Mercadante, Marchetti, and Faccio (whose recently recovered Amleto is of special interest) would contribute interpretations of Henry IV, Henry V, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and Hamlet. Even non-Italian composers, such as Halévy and Balfe, composed Italian-language operas based on Shakespearean subjects. These operas also mark at least two trajectories of interest to Shakespeareans. First, the development of a Shakespearean ‘voice’—the movement from a vocal world dominated by tenors and women’s voices to what we view today as the more ‘realistic’ distribution of gendered sounds heard in Verdi’s musical Cyprus and Windsor. Second is the recovery of the Shakespearean text—the movement from fanciful or surgically expedient versions of Shakespeare to linguistically and poetically attentive settings of Shakespeare’s dramas. Such developments connect opera, the most extravagant of theatrical forms, to the literary history of a translated, internationalized, and now fully musical Shakespeare.
{"title":"Shakespeare and the Nineteenth-Century Italian Operatic Stage","authors":"William P. Germano","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.28","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.28","url":null,"abstract":"At least a dozen of Shakespeare’s plays provided the basis for nineteenth-century Italian operas. Poets and composers took on the double project of transforming the playwright’s work into a text suitable for musical setting, and then producing a work of dramatic vocal music that could succeed in the fertile and competitive world of nineteenth-century opera. The century’s operatic output is marked by monumental gateposts—Rossini’s groundbreaking Otello (1816) and Verdi’s final stage works, Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893)—but many other significant Italian composers, including Pacini, Piccinni, Vaccai, Bellini, Mercadante, Marchetti, and Faccio (whose recently recovered Amleto is of special interest) would contribute interpretations of Henry IV, Henry V, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and Hamlet. Even non-Italian composers, such as Halévy and Balfe, composed Italian-language operas based on Shakespearean subjects. These operas also mark at least two trajectories of interest to Shakespeareans. First, the development of a Shakespearean ‘voice’—the movement from a vocal world dominated by tenors and women’s voices to what we view today as the more ‘realistic’ distribution of gendered sounds heard in Verdi’s musical Cyprus and Windsor. Second is the recovery of the Shakespearean text—the movement from fanciful or surgically expedient versions of Shakespeare to linguistically and poetically attentive settings of Shakespeare’s dramas. Such developments connect opera, the most extravagant of theatrical forms, to the literary history of a translated, internationalized, and now fully musical Shakespeare.","PeriodicalId":166828,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131080121","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.47
Mervyn Cooke
Perhaps no production of a Shakespeare play has highlighted the controversies, contradictions, and misunderstandings attendant on promoting the Bard’s work in a postcolonial anglophone environment as vividly as Gregory Doran’s staging of Titus Andronicus at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, in 1995. This chapter examines the music for the production, by Dumisani Dhlamini, as well as Tayo Akinbode’s music for Doran’s later and similarly Africa-set production of Julius Caesar for the Royal Shakespeare Company (2012). In the process, the discussion draws on Natasha Stiller’s concept of ‘coconuttiness’ as an aid to understanding the cultural significance of—and the inevitable controversies engendered by—these bold stagings. The chapter concludes with a critical assessment of the striking transformation of Britten’s opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream by the Isango Ensemble into a distinctive brand of ‘township’ opera (2015), the project being a direct reflection of its remit to promote ‘performances with a strong South African flavour’ inspired by a ‘re-imagining [of] Western theatre classics within a South African or township setting and by creating new work reflecting South African heritage’.
{"title":"Shakespeare, Music, and South Africa","authors":"Mervyn Cooke","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.47","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.47","url":null,"abstract":"Perhaps no production of a Shakespeare play has highlighted the controversies, contradictions, and misunderstandings attendant on promoting the Bard’s work in a postcolonial anglophone environment as vividly as Gregory Doran’s staging of Titus Andronicus at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, in 1995. This chapter examines the music for the production, by Dumisani Dhlamini, as well as Tayo Akinbode’s music for Doran’s later and similarly Africa-set production of Julius Caesar for the Royal Shakespeare Company (2012). In the process, the discussion draws on Natasha Stiller’s concept of ‘coconuttiness’ as an aid to understanding the cultural significance of—and the inevitable controversies engendered by—these bold stagings. The chapter concludes with a critical assessment of the striking transformation of Britten’s opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream by the Isango Ensemble into a distinctive brand of ‘township’ opera (2015), the project being a direct reflection of its remit to promote ‘performances with a strong South African flavour’ inspired by a ‘re-imagining [of] Western theatre classics within a South African or township setting and by creating new work reflecting South African heritage’.","PeriodicalId":166828,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music","volume":"56 1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117315573","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.40
Fiona Ford
Dmitri Shostakovich crowned an extensive film-composing career with his scores for Gamlet (Hamlet, 1964) and Korol’ Lir (King Lear, 1971) which were directed by his long-time collaborator Grigori Kozintsev and based on Boris Pasternak’s free translations. These films are regarded internationally as masterpieces in the Shakespeare filmic canon. Kozintsev drastically cut and re-ordered Pasternak’s translations, re-wrote sections, added many narrative elaborations, and—particularly in Hamlet—made use of dramatic mimes in which gestures expressed the essence of Shakespeare’s text without having the lines spoken. Drawing upon the most up-to-date publications of Shostakovich’s scores and correspondence between director and composer, this chapter demonstrates how Shostakovich’s music was vital to Kozintsev’s radical reshaping of Shakespeare’s texts, highlighting the occasions when the director requested that the music should reinforce and even replace entire sections. The resultant films merge Shostakovich’s often brutal but essentially humanist music with the timeless and universal themes in Shakespeare’s tragedies. Though arguably devoid of overt ideology, they are nonetheless deliberately provocative. Decades after their releases, these two magnificent Shakespeare adaptations can still provoke audiences to make their own associations and interpretations, to reflect on the current corrupt governments and senseless wars in which ordinary people are suffering because of the political machinations of their leaders.
{"title":"Reshaping Shakespeare","authors":"Fiona Ford","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.40","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.40","url":null,"abstract":"Dmitri Shostakovich crowned an extensive film-composing career with his scores for Gamlet (Hamlet, 1964) and Korol’ Lir (King Lear, 1971) which were directed by his long-time collaborator Grigori Kozintsev and based on Boris Pasternak’s free translations. These films are regarded internationally as masterpieces in the Shakespeare filmic canon. Kozintsev drastically cut and re-ordered Pasternak’s translations, re-wrote sections, added many narrative elaborations, and—particularly in Hamlet—made use of dramatic mimes in which gestures expressed the essence of Shakespeare’s text without having the lines spoken. Drawing upon the most up-to-date publications of Shostakovich’s scores and correspondence between director and composer, this chapter demonstrates how Shostakovich’s music was vital to Kozintsev’s radical reshaping of Shakespeare’s texts, highlighting the occasions when the director requested that the music should reinforce and even replace entire sections. The resultant films merge Shostakovich’s often brutal but essentially humanist music with the timeless and universal themes in Shakespeare’s tragedies. Though arguably devoid of overt ideology, they are nonetheless deliberately provocative. Decades after their releases, these two magnificent Shakespeare adaptations can still provoke audiences to make their own associations and interpretations, to reflect on the current corrupt governments and senseless wars in which ordinary people are suffering because of the political machinations of their leaders.","PeriodicalId":166828,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127275506","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.29
A. Streete
The premiere of Giuseppe Verdi and Arrigo Boito’s opera Otello on 5 February 1887 at La Scala, Milan was an event of international significance. The first London performances in July 1889 were given by many of the cast who had participated in the Milan premiere, including Francesco Tamagno as Otello, Victor Maurel as Iago, and the conductor Franco Faccio. This chapter considers the London premiere, arguing that contemporary discussions of subjects such as acting and singing techniques, finance, Wagnerian influence, celebrity, and national versus international style, are all bound up with larger questions of British national identity at the fin-du-siècle. The author also compares the reception of Tamagno’s performance with that of the Polish tenor Jean De Reszke, who took on the part two years later in London. The author contends that debates about these singers’ conceptions of the role recasts an earlier controversy about the relative merits of two of the most famous Victorian Othellos, the Italian Salvini and the British Irving. Shakespeare’s cultural status is, of course, central to all these debates. On the one hand, Victorian commentators on Verdi’s opera assert Shakespeare’s unique and dominant Britishness. On the other hand, the appropriation of the Bard in the ‘foreign’ medium of opera, and by foreign nations and performers, reveals nascent anxieties about the ideological security of Shakespeare, and by implication Britain, in the age of Empire.
{"title":"Performing Verdi’s Otello in Fin-de-Siècle London","authors":"A. Streete","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.29","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.29","url":null,"abstract":"The premiere of Giuseppe Verdi and Arrigo Boito’s opera Otello on 5 February 1887 at La Scala, Milan was an event of international significance. The first London performances in July 1889 were given by many of the cast who had participated in the Milan premiere, including Francesco Tamagno as Otello, Victor Maurel as Iago, and the conductor Franco Faccio. This chapter considers the London premiere, arguing that contemporary discussions of subjects such as acting and singing techniques, finance, Wagnerian influence, celebrity, and national versus international style, are all bound up with larger questions of British national identity at the fin-du-siècle. The author also compares the reception of Tamagno’s performance with that of the Polish tenor Jean De Reszke, who took on the part two years later in London. The author contends that debates about these singers’ conceptions of the role recasts an earlier controversy about the relative merits of two of the most famous Victorian Othellos, the Italian Salvini and the British Irving. Shakespeare’s cultural status is, of course, central to all these debates. On the one hand, Victorian commentators on Verdi’s opera assert Shakespeare’s unique and dominant Britishness. On the other hand, the appropriation of the Bard in the ‘foreign’ medium of opera, and by foreign nations and performers, reveals nascent anxieties about the ideological security of Shakespeare, and by implication Britain, in the age of Empire.","PeriodicalId":166828,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114342297","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.51
David W. Roberts
Beethoven and Wagner shared a lifelong passion for the plays of Shakespeare, but their enthusiasm took different forms and enjoyed contrasting relationships to the German critical tradition. Where Beethoven only contemplated setting Macbeth, Wagner completed an opera based on Measure for Measure; where Beethoven had no great literary ambitions, Wagner wrote drama and fiction influenced by Shakespeare. To Beethoven, Shakespeare offered prompts that ultimately were transcended by music; Wagner, while increasingly finding source material in German mythology, continued to see in Shakespeare proof of the transcendence of the artist. Speculation about sources for the works of both composers has often assumed a Shakespeare unmediated by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German philosophy, literary criticism, and theatre performance. This chapter describes what Beethoven and Wagner knew of Shakespeare and reviews critical opinion on how that knowledge may have informed their music. An account of trends in German literary criticism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with particular reference to the spectral, leads to distinctions between Beethoven’s and Wagner’s engagement with Shakespeare and concepts of the ghostly and the heroic.
{"title":"Living with Ghosts","authors":"David W. Roberts","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.51","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.51","url":null,"abstract":"Beethoven and Wagner shared a lifelong passion for the plays of Shakespeare, but their enthusiasm took different forms and enjoyed contrasting relationships to the German critical tradition. Where Beethoven only contemplated setting Macbeth, Wagner completed an opera based on Measure for Measure; where Beethoven had no great literary ambitions, Wagner wrote drama and fiction influenced by Shakespeare. To Beethoven, Shakespeare offered prompts that ultimately were transcended by music; Wagner, while increasingly finding source material in German mythology, continued to see in Shakespeare proof of the transcendence of the artist. Speculation about sources for the works of both composers has often assumed a Shakespeare unmediated by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German philosophy, literary criticism, and theatre performance. This chapter describes what Beethoven and Wagner knew of Shakespeare and reviews critical opinion on how that knowledge may have informed their music. An account of trends in German literary criticism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with particular reference to the spectral, leads to distinctions between Beethoven’s and Wagner’s engagement with Shakespeare and concepts of the ghostly and the heroic.","PeriodicalId":166828,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129615082","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.38
Nina Penner
Max Reinhardt’s productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (dozens of stage productions, beginning in 1905, culminating in a 1935 film) were notable for their privileging of the forest realm over Athens. Although much has been written about the spectacular visual effects that brought about this bias in the film, little attention has been paid to the role of music, since the film does not have an original score. Erich Wolfgang Korngold arranged its score from Mendelssohn’s incidental music as well as various other works by the composer. Most discussions of Korngold’s work on the film emphasize his fidelity to Mendelssohn. However, attempting to following the soundtrack with Mendelssohn’s scores reveals few direct quotations. Like the sleight of hand of a magician, Korngold creates the illusion that one is hearing Mendelssohn unadulterated, yet, a Mendelssohn one has never heard before. Instead of merely selecting bolts of music of the requisite lengths, he wove together his own fabric from an array of musical-thematic threads, all the while adorning it with glamorous modern accoutrements all his own. This chapter shows how Korngold brought skills he acquired on the operatic stage to his glamorization of Mendelssohn, and how the sonic spectacle he created contributed to the foregrounding of the forest.
{"title":"Sonic Spectacle in Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Score to Max Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935)","authors":"Nina Penner","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.38","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.38","url":null,"abstract":"Max Reinhardt’s productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (dozens of stage productions, beginning in 1905, culminating in a 1935 film) were notable for their privileging of the forest realm over Athens. Although much has been written about the spectacular visual effects that brought about this bias in the film, little attention has been paid to the role of music, since the film does not have an original score. Erich Wolfgang Korngold arranged its score from Mendelssohn’s incidental music as well as various other works by the composer. Most discussions of Korngold’s work on the film emphasize his fidelity to Mendelssohn. However, attempting to following the soundtrack with Mendelssohn’s scores reveals few direct quotations. Like the sleight of hand of a magician, Korngold creates the illusion that one is hearing Mendelssohn unadulterated, yet, a Mendelssohn one has never heard before. Instead of merely selecting bolts of music of the requisite lengths, he wove together his own fabric from an array of musical-thematic threads, all the while adorning it with glamorous modern accoutrements all his own. This chapter shows how Korngold brought skills he acquired on the operatic stage to his glamorization of Mendelssohn, and how the sonic spectacle he created contributed to the foregrounding of the forest.","PeriodicalId":166828,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music","volume":"100 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124585868","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.46
Pam Waddington Muse
A study of Shakespeare song in UK concerts during the first half of the twentieth century reveals a developing appetite among performers and audiences for more cogent song programming capable of satisfying a range of demands beyond pure entertainment. For example, concerts providing education, a philanthropic platform, or improvement through participation in ‘high’ art (albeit passive) appealed to audience members from a spectrum of social classes; and singers too participated in this gradual move away from the variety-hall style of performances that tended to be prevalent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Shakespeare song in particular provided easy access to cultural prestige. Additionally, it evoked nostalgia for the perceived glories of the Elizabethan age (often referred to as the ‘Merry England’ effect). In the first half of the twentieth century, a number of composers of English song who had a strong influence on song programming (Quilter, Warlock, Gurney, and Finzi, for example) produced Shakespeare settings that were popular additions to programmes, lending themselves to coherent theming and groupings. The German Lied, and the song cycles of Schubert in particular, had dominated song recitals in the United Kingdom and provided a ready-made programming strategy for performers; but many star singers, such as John Coates and John Goss, were eager to promote English song, and Shakespeare settings were a recurrent feature of their recitals. These singers were particular favourites at London’s Wigmore Hall, but their performances featuring Shakespeare song were repeated nationwide to great acclaim.
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Pub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.3
Florence Hazrat
In his fantastical mood, Falstaff bids the sky perform miracles: ‘let [it] rain potatoes, let it thunder to the tune of Greensleeves’. At any moment, he can burst into snatches of ballads on King Arthur, or Robin Hood. Falstaff, Shakespeare’s quintessentially English figure, creates an aural environment that resonates not only with music, but more specifically with songs that conjure up ideas of England which are at once more elusive and more available by being in everyone’s ear, and in everyone’s mouth. This chapter examines the creation of a ‘sonic nationhood’ in Shakespeare’s plays through songs which had seeped into collective (musical) memory. In primarily oral societies, refrains, repetitions, and tunes acquire a key role in the mnemonic and sonic circulation of national narratives: their catchy brevity comes to emblematize the song, helping playwright and audience to remember. Shakespeare’s plays are particularly peppered with tune quotations from popular songs and ballads which reflect, suggest, and test national and local identities. Alternative stories are heard, literally, through music made and evoked. ‘Sonic nationhood’, therefore, does not complement but subtly qualifies official attitudes, while remaining elusive—just sound, depending as it does not on writing but on human memory. It is precisely this slipperiness which makes it hard for us today to listen back, though all the more exciting as well, when we give ear to the singers from the centre stage, or indeed the margins: the buffoons, the revellers, the Falstaffs.
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