Musicking Shakespeare
Subtitle: a conflict of theatres
By: Daniel Albright.
Series: Eastman studies in music -- v. 45
Publisher: University of Rochester Press
Published: 2007
Place of publication: Rochester
Language: eng
Number of pages: 332
ISBN-13: 9781580462556
Subjects: Shakespeare, William, -- 1564-1616 -- Adaptations -- History and criticism; Berlioz, Hector, -- 1803-1869; Verdi, Giuseppe, -- 1813-1901; Britten, Benjamin, -- 1913-1976; Music and literature; Opera
Description: In this book, Daniel Albright, one of today's most intrepid and vividly communicative explorers of the border territory between literature and music, offers insights into how composers of genius can help us to understand Shakespeare. Musicking Shakespeare demonstrates how four composers--Purcell, Berlioz, Verdi, and Britten--respond to the distinctive features of Shakespeare's plays: their unwieldiness, their refusal to fit into interpretive boxes, their ranting quality, their arbitrary bursts of gorgeousness. The four composers break the normal forms of opera--of music altogether--in order to come to terms with the challenges that Shakespeare presents to the music dramatist. Musicking Shakespeare begins with an analysis of Shakespeare's play The Tempest as an imaginary Jacobean opera and as a real Restoration opera. It then discusses works that respond with wit and sophistication to Shakespeare's irony, obscurity, contortion, and heft: Berlioz's Roméo et Juliette, Verdi's Macbeth, Purcell's The Fairy Queen, and Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream. These works are problematic in the ways that Shakespeare's plays are problematic. Shakespeare's favorite dramatic device is to juxtapose two kinds of theatres within a single play, such as the formal masque and the loose Elizabethan stage. The four composers studied here respond to this aspect of Shakespeare's art by going beyond the comfort zone of the operatic medium. The music dramas they devise call opera into question [Publisher description].
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Romeo and Juliet. Introduction to part 1 ; The Veronese social code ; The code of love ; Love against language ; The afterlife of Romeo and Juliet ; La lance branlée : French opinions of Shakespeare ; Berlioz in the plural ; Roméo et Juliette : introduction ; Roméo et Juliette : the symphony ; Roméo et Juliette : the opera resumes; title: Macbeth. Shakespeare's random ; Magic as theft ; Prophesying ; Squinting at consequences ; Macbeth's children ; Macbeth as an actor ; Two theatres ; Witches amok ; Sortileges of speech ; Lady Macbeth as witch ; Time slips ; La sonnambula; title: A midsummer night's dream. Cosmicomedy ; The picture of cupid ; Depictorializing cupid ; Cupid's wax ; The tedious brief scene ; Other dreams in other summers : the aesthetic of the masque ; Purcell's The fairy queen ; Lampe's Pyramus and Thisbe ; Experimenters : Mendelssohn and Korngold ; Britten's A midsummer night's dream.