Pub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.2
L. Austern
From less than a century after Shakespeare’s death through the present time the search for the original ‘Song of Willow’ assigned to Desdemona in Othello (4.3) has occupied a wide range of antiquarians, philologists, musicologists, composers, and stage directors. What unifies these successive explorations is nostalgia for an English musical past and a literal reading of Desdemona’s claim that the song was already ‘an old thing’ and therefore part of collective memory in Shakespeare’s day. By the time of the early music movement and coincident folk-music revival of the 1950s and ’60s, one version, first identified as the original during the eighteenth century, had become central to what emerged as an ‘authentic Shakespeare music’ canon. It still remains the most recorded and widely circulating piece in the repertory of ‘original’ or ‘authentic’ Shakespeare music. This chapter traces its much-neglected history in the context of an entire genre of willow songs, all of which are concerned with musical and cultural remembrance, against the background of a nostalgic multi-century search for ‘original’ Shakespeare ephemera.
{"title":"‘Sing Willow, &c.’","authors":"L. Austern","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.2","url":null,"abstract":"From less than a century after Shakespeare’s death through the present time the search for the original ‘Song of Willow’ assigned to Desdemona in Othello (4.3) has occupied a wide range of antiquarians, philologists, musicologists, composers, and stage directors. What unifies these successive explorations is nostalgia for an English musical past and a literal reading of Desdemona’s claim that the song was already ‘an old thing’ and therefore part of collective memory in Shakespeare’s day. By the time of the early music movement and coincident folk-music revival of the 1950s and ’60s, one version, first identified as the original during the eighteenth century, had become central to what emerged as an ‘authentic Shakespeare music’ canon. It still remains the most recorded and widely circulating piece in the repertory of ‘original’ or ‘authentic’ Shakespeare music. This chapter traces its much-neglected history in the context of an entire genre of willow songs, all of which are concerned with musical and cultural remembrance, against the background of a nostalgic multi-century search for ‘original’ Shakespeare ephemera.","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":"132716182","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/9780190945145.013.8
S. Hampton-reeves
This chapter focuses on several key moments when the history of jazz intersected with Shakespeare. It discusses, analyses, and contextualizes the three most significant jazz suites composed with a Shakespearean theme: Duke Ellington’s Shakespeare-inspired Such Sweet Thunder (1957), George Russell’s Othello Ballet Suite (1968), and Shakespeare Songs by Guillaume de Chassy and Christophe Marguet (2016). Shakespeare’s connection with jazz dates right back to the music’s early years, when both the word and the music were synonymous with modernity, youth, and Americanization. After several early attempts to set Shakespeare’s words to music, Ellington’s Such Sweet Thunder (written with Billy Strayhorn) was the first significant jazz composition to engage with Shakespeare in a creative and non-verbal way, blending swing harmonies with European atonal ideas. Russell’s experimental interpretation of Othello went even further in fragmenting the text into repeated motifs and polytonal soundscapes. The chapter concludes with a study of a recent Shakespeare suite, de Chassy and Marguet’s set of compositions inspired by lines in Shakespeare. For all these musicians, the plays are a starting point for musical creations which draw on the signature sounds of jazz and twentieth-century experiments in atonal and polytonal music.
{"title":"‘A noise of thunder’","authors":"S. Hampton-reeves","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.8","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter focuses on several key moments when the history of jazz intersected with Shakespeare. It discusses, analyses, and contextualizes the three most significant jazz suites composed with a Shakespearean theme: Duke Ellington’s Shakespeare-inspired Such Sweet Thunder (1957), George Russell’s Othello Ballet Suite (1968), and Shakespeare Songs by Guillaume de Chassy and Christophe Marguet (2016). Shakespeare’s connection with jazz dates right back to the music’s early years, when both the word and the music were synonymous with modernity, youth, and Americanization. After several early attempts to set Shakespeare’s words to music, Ellington’s Such Sweet Thunder (written with Billy Strayhorn) was the first significant jazz composition to engage with Shakespeare in a creative and non-verbal way, blending swing harmonies with European atonal ideas. Russell’s experimental interpretation of Othello went even further in fragmenting the text into repeated motifs and polytonal soundscapes. The chapter concludes with a study of a recent Shakespeare suite, de Chassy and Marguet’s set of compositions inspired by lines in Shakespeare. For all these musicians, the plays are a starting point for musical creations which draw on the signature sounds of jazz and twentieth-century experiments in atonal and polytonal music.","PeriodicalId":166828,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music","volume":"61 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":"130039519","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/9780190945145.013.30
Klára Škrobánková
This chapter focuses on three operas created in Czechoslovakia, their political significance, and the problems their creators faced when adapting drama for the operatic stage. It first considers the relationship between Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors and its operatic adaptation Upheaval in Ephesus by the Czech composer Iša Krejčí. Even though written during the Second World War with the wish to uplift the Czech people, the piece was later often used by the Communist regime as an example of Czech buffa, sharing happiness as well as propaganda with the audience. The second analysed opera is the 1969 work by Karel Horký entitled Poison from Elsinore, a prequel to Hamlet. In the opera, the main character of Polonius investigates the murder of King Hamlet, yet finds himself trapped in the totalitarian world, pondering on the responsibility of the individual and the greater good. The author of both music and libretto of the third examined opera, Ján Cikker, started composing his Coriolanus under the influence of the Soviet invasion of August 1968. Premiered in 1974, the opera features many parallels between Shakespeare’s Rome and the occupied Czechoslovakia, which Cikker emphasizes by the changes he makes in the process of the adaptation. All three considered operas therefore offer valuable insight into the state of Czechoslovak opera and the reception of Shakespeare’s work in the second half of the twentieth century.
{"title":"Shakespeare in Czechoslovakia","authors":"Klára Škrobánková","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.30","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.30","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter focuses on three operas created in Czechoslovakia, their political significance, and the problems their creators faced when adapting drama for the operatic stage. It first considers the relationship between Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors and its operatic adaptation Upheaval in Ephesus by the Czech composer Iša Krejčí. Even though written during the Second World War with the wish to uplift the Czech people, the piece was later often used by the Communist regime as an example of Czech buffa, sharing happiness as well as propaganda with the audience. The second analysed opera is the 1969 work by Karel Horký entitled Poison from Elsinore, a prequel to Hamlet. In the opera, the main character of Polonius investigates the murder of King Hamlet, yet finds himself trapped in the totalitarian world, pondering on the responsibility of the individual and the greater good. The author of both music and libretto of the third examined opera, Ján Cikker, started composing his Coriolanus under the influence of the Soviet invasion of August 1968. Premiered in 1974, the opera features many parallels between Shakespeare’s Rome and the occupied Czechoslovakia, which Cikker emphasizes by the changes he makes in the process of the adaptation. All three considered operas therefore offer valuable insight into the state of Czechoslovak opera and the reception of Shakespeare’s work in the second half of the twentieth century.","PeriodicalId":166828,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music","volume":"79 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":"130380694","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/9780190945145.013.17
Val Brodie
This chapter explores music in the performance of Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon in two crucial but very different eras. The Shakespeare Memorial Theatre opened in 1879, and in the thirty years before the First World War, most of the time actor-manager Frank Benson was in charge during the annual festivals. The study reveals the financially threadbare workings of a provincial touring company for whom music was a necessary add-on. Audiences had a lingering nineteenth-century taste for sumptuous effects with ballet and familiar songs, but it was a style that was waning. Latterly Ralph Vaughan Williams attempted to pare back extraneous effects (something that was to come fifty years later), but he struggled to change entrenched Bensonian practices. Radically different in the 1960s was the approach of the newly renamed Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), which, under the rejuvenating leadership of Peter Hall, was rapidly established as a major national and international company. The influx of new talent included Guy Woolfenden embedded in a team of innovative directors and designers; he studied the work of the actors in rehearsal and sensitively wrote songs for their individual voices. He developed a skilled permanent instrumental team and a cornucopia of percussion was purchased. Eventually Woolfenden wrote for all the plays in the canon, some several times. This chapter argues that he influenced the approach to theatre-music in the second half of the twentieth century; it explores some of his scores and edges towards an understanding of the impact of his thirty-seven years with the company.
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Pub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.5
N. Isenberg
This chapter explores the complex, reciprocal influences that weave back and forth through the performance histories of Shakespeare and of ballet, tracing their concerted force in shaping and reshaping commonplaces in Shakespeare, ballet, and the world at large. It offers a preliminary sketch of the historical landscape in which Shakespeare-ballet connections reside, laying out routes across time, and signalling landmarks both past and present that figure importantly in the development and our understanding of these connections. It analyses the pivotal role of Romeo and Juliet ballets danced to Prokofiev’s score, as Shakespeare ballets became prominent in this landscape in the mid-twentieth century. The mediation involving three voices and languages—verbal, corporeal, and musical—plays a central role in this discussion which includes first-hand accounts from present-day choreographers, composers, and dancers. Throughout, the chapter offers observations, reflections, and questions aimed at moving the young but burgeoning field of Shakespeare-and-Ballet forwards, pushing its boundaries and signalling new intersections. The larger aim of this chapter is to demonstrate the full measure of Shakespeare-ballet connections and their value in even wider cultural contexts than Shakespeare studies and dance studies.
{"title":"Tangled Relations","authors":"N. Isenberg","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.5","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores the complex, reciprocal influences that weave back and forth through the performance histories of Shakespeare and of ballet, tracing their concerted force in shaping and reshaping commonplaces in Shakespeare, ballet, and the world at large. It offers a preliminary sketch of the historical landscape in which Shakespeare-ballet connections reside, laying out routes across time, and signalling landmarks both past and present that figure importantly in the development and our understanding of these connections. It analyses the pivotal role of Romeo and Juliet ballets danced to Prokofiev’s score, as Shakespeare ballets became prominent in this landscape in the mid-twentieth century. The mediation involving three voices and languages—verbal, corporeal, and musical—plays a central role in this discussion which includes first-hand accounts from present-day choreographers, composers, and dancers. Throughout, the chapter offers observations, reflections, and questions aimed at moving the young but burgeoning field of Shakespeare-and-Ballet forwards, pushing its boundaries and signalling new intersections. The larger aim of this chapter is to demonstrate the full measure of Shakespeare-ballet connections and their value in even wider cultural contexts than Shakespeare studies and dance studies.","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":"128288357","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/9780190945145.013.16
Leah Broad
When the director Per Lindberg took up the Artistic Directorship of the Lorensberg Theatre in Gothenburg in 1919, he intended to use the position to revolutionize Swedish theatre. Believing that realism, the predominant theatrical style, was outdated and made theatre unpopular, Lindberg wanted instead to create a spectacular form of theatre that he hoped would be popular with a broad audience. Shakespeare was central to this new theatre, as Lindberg framed him as an accessible, modern playwright, staging multiple Shakespeare plays at the Lorensberg. This chapter examines the role that music played in Lindberg’s Shakespeare productions, focusing on the 1922 Romeo and Juliet with music by Wilhelm Stenhammar. Both Stenhammar and Lindberg saw the theatre as a potential force for social improvement, and the chapter contextualizes their conception of modern theatre within interlinked debates about contemporary politics, theatrical style, and musical modernism. It argues that this context is crucial for understanding both Stenhammar’s resistance to musical modernism, and Shakespeare’s significance as a playwright in 1920s Sweden.
{"title":"Shakespeare in Sweden","authors":"Leah Broad","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.16","url":null,"abstract":"When the director Per Lindberg took up the Artistic Directorship of the Lorensberg Theatre in Gothenburg in 1919, he intended to use the position to revolutionize Swedish theatre. Believing that realism, the predominant theatrical style, was outdated and made theatre unpopular, Lindberg wanted instead to create a spectacular form of theatre that he hoped would be popular with a broad audience. Shakespeare was central to this new theatre, as Lindberg framed him as an accessible, modern playwright, staging multiple Shakespeare plays at the Lorensberg. This chapter examines the role that music played in Lindberg’s Shakespeare productions, focusing on the 1922 Romeo and Juliet with music by Wilhelm Stenhammar. Both Stenhammar and Lindberg saw the theatre as a potential force for social improvement, and the chapter contextualizes their conception of modern theatre within interlinked debates about contemporary politics, theatrical style, and musical modernism. It argues that this context is crucial for understanding both Stenhammar’s resistance to musical modernism, and Shakespeare’s significance as a playwright in 1920s Sweden.","PeriodicalId":166828,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music","volume":"14 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":"122402863","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/9780190945145.013.41
Timothy Koozin
This chapter explores how music is used in Akira Kurosawa’s three Shakespeare films in order to explore problems of Japanese modernity. Working with composers Masaru Sato and Toru Takemitsu, Kurosawa created films that are widely regarded as among the most successful and also the most radically new filmic adaptations of Shakespeare. Throne of Blood (1957), with a score by Sato, is Kurosawa’s adaptation of Macbeth. Set in fifteenth-century Japan, it uses Shakespeare’s plot to depict the treachery, lawlessness, and violent power struggles that occurred between rival clans embroiled in civil war. Music is an essential component as Kurosawa projects the Shakespearean drama of murder, madness, insanity, and tragedy into a spirit world inspired by Nō drama. The Bad Sleep Well (1960), a dark satire based on Hamlet, is Kurosawa’s rebuke of modern Japanese corporate corruption. The film borrows conventions of the Japanese medieval drama, reconfiguring the Samurai warrior as an urban businessman. This study explores musical irony in Sato’s score, showing how styles of Western and traditional Japanese music are deployed to highlight binary oppositions and ironic reversals in Kurosawa’s radical reimagining of his source text. Kurosawa’s historical epic, Ran (1985), is a transcendental lament based on King Lear. The epic scale of image and sound expresses the technological and social amplification of violence deeply rooted in humanity. Takemitsu’s score includes solo flute music derived from Nō, Mahler-like scoring composed at Kurosawa’s request, and the strategic use of silence as a narrative tool.
{"title":"Music in Akira Kurosawa’s Filmic Adaptations of Shakespeare","authors":"Timothy Koozin","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.41","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.41","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores how music is used in Akira Kurosawa’s three Shakespeare films in order to explore problems of Japanese modernity. Working with composers Masaru Sato and Toru Takemitsu, Kurosawa created films that are widely regarded as among the most successful and also the most radically new filmic adaptations of Shakespeare. Throne of Blood (1957), with a score by Sato, is Kurosawa’s adaptation of Macbeth. Set in fifteenth-century Japan, it uses Shakespeare’s plot to depict the treachery, lawlessness, and violent power struggles that occurred between rival clans embroiled in civil war. Music is an essential component as Kurosawa projects the Shakespearean drama of murder, madness, insanity, and tragedy into a spirit world inspired by Nō drama. The Bad Sleep Well (1960), a dark satire based on Hamlet, is Kurosawa’s rebuke of modern Japanese corporate corruption. The film borrows conventions of the Japanese medieval drama, reconfiguring the Samurai warrior as an urban businessman. This study explores musical irony in Sato’s score, showing how styles of Western and traditional Japanese music are deployed to highlight binary oppositions and ironic reversals in Kurosawa’s radical reimagining of his source text. Kurosawa’s historical epic, Ran (1985), is a transcendental lament based on King Lear. The epic scale of image and sound expresses the technological and social amplification of violence deeply rooted in humanity. Takemitsu’s score includes solo flute music derived from Nō, Mahler-like scoring composed at Kurosawa’s request, and the strategic use of silence as a narrative tool.","PeriodicalId":166828,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music","volume":"96 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":"124671757","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/9780190945145.013.34
Katherine R. Larson, Lawrence Wiliford
Benjamin Britten’s writings reveal a fascination with the question of how music evokes experiences of spatial and temporal change. Nowhere is this more evident than in his operatic reworking of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960). This chapter’s argument begins in the forest surrounding Athens, which Britten foregrounds to a much greater extent than Shakespeare does. Both musically and structurally, the opera revolves around the forest, positioning the characters and the audience from its opening measures within a space that facilitates and demands ‘translation’. The forest’s effects are revealed most strikingly through the metamorphosis of Shakespeare’s ‘rude mechanicals’ into Britten’s ‘rustics’, and especially in Britten’s depiction of Francis Flute, who blossoms from nervous bellows-mender to self-assured thespian. The remarkable trajectory of this adolescent character offers a productive case study for considering how Britten’s opera reframes the transformative encounters that lie at the heart of Shakespeare’s celebrated comedy. Drawing on the experience of tenor and co-author Lawrence Wiliford, who has portrayed Flute in recent productions by the Canadian Opera Company and the Aldeburgh Festival, this chapter also illuminates the crucial interpretive role that directors and singers play in bringing Britten’s operatic adaptation to life.
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Pub Date : 2019-07-22DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.7
Adam Hansen
English folk has long been critical of and opposed to the political and cultural status quo, yet also rooted, atavistic, despairing, and utopian in equal measure. These characteristics combine to create a form of culture both integral and eccentric to understandings of ‘English’ national identity. So what happens when folk’s musics, histories, and meanings encounter or engage with another potent, iconic, and equally vexed and complex signifier of ‘Englishness’: Shakespeare? What assumptions and expectations come into play—about Shakespeare and about ‘folk’—when the two are combined? If Shakespeare used, and moved back and forth between, ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture at various points in his career (and in his afterlives), might he now be considered part of ‘folk’ culture? This chapter tries to answer these questions by exploring how a range of these engagements have happened, focusing on and comparing two in detail: Harley Granville-Barker’s 1914 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with music by Cecil Sharp, and Maria Aberg’s 2013 staging of As You like It, featuring music from the ‘neo-folk’ artist Laura Marling. Discussion broadens beyond Shakespeare in performance to consider what conflicts and contradictions about Shakespeare, ‘Englishness’, and ‘folk’ are suppressed or realized through aligning Shakespeare with a ‘folk’ aesthetic.
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Pub Date : 2018-09-12DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.23
M. Assay
Despite recurrent mutual suspicion between the Soviet Union and the West, Shakespeare was almost as sacrosanct to the Soviets as their own canonical authors were. Many of the greatest Soviet (and post-Soviet) adaptations and appropriations of Shakespeare’s works have been enhanced by musical scores provided by the most prominent composers of the time. During the Soviet regime, several of the most famous Shakespearean musical works were introduced to the repertoire, from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet ballet to Shostakovich’s setting of Sonnet 66 and his film music for the screen adaptations of Hamlet and King Lear. Soviet composers were also active in the field of operatic adaptation of Shakespeare, though in this regard their works have received less international attention. Soviet musical responses to Shakespeare have inevitably been intertwined with the cultural-politico climate of the country, and in many ways they could be used as a means of understanding that context and the vacillations of artistic freedom. Disregarding boundaries between ‘learned’ and ‘popular’, this chapter offers an overview of the wide range of musical responses to Shakespeare and his works in Russia and the Soviet Union, covering works in which music has been central (as in symphonic poems, operas, ballet, songs) or accompanying (theatre and film music).
{"title":"Shakespeare and Soviet Music","authors":"M. Assay","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.23","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.23","url":null,"abstract":"Despite recurrent mutual suspicion between the Soviet Union and the West, Shakespeare was almost as sacrosanct to the Soviets as their own canonical authors were. Many of the greatest Soviet (and post-Soviet) adaptations and appropriations of Shakespeare’s works have been enhanced by musical scores provided by the most prominent composers of the time. During the Soviet regime, several of the most famous Shakespearean musical works were introduced to the repertoire, from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet ballet to Shostakovich’s setting of Sonnet 66 and his film music for the screen adaptations of Hamlet and King Lear. Soviet composers were also active in the field of operatic adaptation of Shakespeare, though in this regard their works have received less international attention. Soviet musical responses to Shakespeare have inevitably been intertwined with the cultural-politico climate of the country, and in many ways they could be used as a means of understanding that context and the vacillations of artistic freedom. Disregarding boundaries between ‘learned’ and ‘popular’, this chapter offers an overview of the wide range of musical responses to Shakespeare and his works in Russia and the Soviet Union, covering works in which music has been central (as in symphonic poems, operas, ballet, songs) or accompanying (theatre and film music).","PeriodicalId":166828,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music","volume":"32 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133076463","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}
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