Pub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.31
J. Kopecký
Shakespeare inspired Czech Romantic composers almost exclusively in the genre of comic opera, but adapting a Shakespeare play into the form of a high-quality libretto was an extraordinarily difficult task, which then had to be matched by the musical setting and performance. Moreover, it was difficult to compete with Verdi’s Otello premiered in Prague in 1888 as the first production outside of Italy. Given these circumstances, it is not surprising that Shakespearean comic operas were first successfully produced at Prague’s National Theatre only once the quality of the opera company there had been stabilized, that is, around 1900: Karel Weis’s Viola (1892), Zdeněk Fibich’s The Tempest (1895), Josef Nešvera’s Perdita (1897), and Josef Bohuslav Foerster’s Jessika (1905). While it was through theatre that political questions were dealt with in the Czech lands under Habsburg rule, and Shakespeare became a leading artistic authority for the Czechs (unlike Schiller, whose legacy was fostered mainly by German theatres), the operas of Czech composers based on Shakespearean subjects aroused the hope of promoting the Czech arts in the struggle for national independence in an international context.
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Pub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.39
B. Hoyle
Although they collaborated fully on only three feature films, the partnership of Sir Laurence Olivier and Sir William Walton remains one of the great filmmaker‒composer partnerships, one which bears comparison with the teaming of Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, or Federico Fellini and Nino Rota. The chapter draws on primary source materials in both the Walton archive at Yale University and the Olivier papers at the British Library in order to undertake a close reading of the scores for Henry V (1945), Hamlet (1948),and Richard III (1955) and assesses the ways in which Walton’s music complements and counterpoints both Shakespeare’s texts and Olivier’s editing, acting, and mise-en-scène. Comparisons are drawn between Walton’s film scoring practices and those of such prominent contemporaries as Sergei Prokofiev and Max Steiner, as well as more recent film composers such as Patrick Doyle. The chapter also situates the scores within the wider context of 1940s and 1950s British film and film music, and confirms filmmaker Michael Powell’s assertion that this trilogy represented a genuine attempt to enlarge the scope of film as an art form through its complex combination of words, music, cinematography, and design.
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Pub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.18
B. Barclay
The role of music at Shakespeare’s Globe has radically evolved since its opening in 1997. What began as a scholarly embrace of historically informed performance (HIP), yielded to modern instrumentation, and eventually, to electronic lights and sound. What have we learned about Shakespeare and the actor-audience relationship over these profound changes? How have the practitioners evolved to meet the challenges of new leadership? What is the purpose of Shakespeare’s original architecture without his seventeenth-century toolkit? This chapter charts the changing of ‘authenticity’ from its devotional Original Practices through modern experimentation, using the inexhaustible lessons of Shakespeare’s spaces to vouch anew for live music in twenty-first-century Shakespeare everywhere.
{"title":"Historically Informed Experience","authors":"B. Barclay","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.18","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.18","url":null,"abstract":"The role of music at Shakespeare’s Globe has radically evolved since its opening in 1997. What began as a scholarly embrace of historically informed performance (HIP), yielded to modern instrumentation, and eventually, to electronic lights and sound. What have we learned about Shakespeare and the actor-audience relationship over these profound changes? How have the practitioners evolved to meet the challenges of new leadership? What is the purpose of Shakespeare’s original architecture without his seventeenth-century toolkit? This chapter charts the changing of ‘authenticity’ from its devotional Original Practices through modern experimentation, using the inexhaustible lessons of Shakespeare’s spaces to vouch anew for live music in twenty-first-century Shakespeare everywhere.","PeriodicalId":166828,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music","volume":"48 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":"121085744","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/9780190945145.013.2
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/9780190945145.013.5
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.
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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.
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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).
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