Shakespeare and music

We mark the Bard's anniversary by exploring how his works have inspired composers

Shakespeare: a continual inspiration to composers (photo: Nathan Benn / Alamy)

By John Steane

Conveniently if not quite precisely we can say that "bardolatry" began in 1769. In that year the Great Shakespeare Jubilee established the small market town of Stratford-upon-Avon as a place of pilgrimage. For three crowded days, the beau monde, up from London, squeezed into lodging-houses bursting at the seams and risked their courtly footwear in the muddy streets which were now "enchanted ground, where Shakespeare walk'd and sung". On the second and third day the rain poured down in torrents, but with "Sweet Willy 0" to lead them, the pilgrims were exhorted to join the choral song, or, as David Garrick proclaimed in his Festal Ode, to "roll the full tide of harmony along". Music was enlisted in the Bard's service from the first, and on this occasion its prime representative, as composer and conductor, was Dr Thomas Arne.

But Arne, remembered now principally for his melodious injunctions to Britannia, was nothing if not British. The Great Shakespeare Jubilee was no more than a national celebration. Europeans were to become increasingly aware of Shakespeare from that time onward, and the cult began in earnest as the Romantic movement got under way early in the next century. In 1795 Haydn published his tender and thoughtful setting of the five famous lines from Twelfth Night starting "She never told her love". But there is nothing of Shakespeare in Mozart or, more surprisingly, Beethoven (what a King Lear or, for that matter, Falstaff we may have lost). From Schubert we have most notably the two song-settings, "Who is Sylvia?" and "Hark, hark the lark", both in German translation. Then, in 1827, a German production of A Midsummer Night's Dream was graced by the Overture provided by the genius of the 18-year-old Mendelssohn. And it was at just this time in Paris that performances by a visiting English company were providing what he later called "the supreme drama of my life" for the inspiration of the leading crusader in this Shakespearean revival, Hector Berlioz.

For Berlioz the discovery, as he describes it, "struck like a thunderbolt". It revealed "the whole heaven of art, illustrating it to the remotest corners". This is the language of passionate youth, and it was in this way that Shakespeare appealed to the young, ardent and imaginative of that time. He was the man of inspiration who (as the Romantics saw it) followed only the laws of his genius, defying academic precept and conventional taste. In default of a precedent by Beethoven, Berlioz wrote a King Lear Overture; from Hamlet he chose the death of Ophelia, in solo setting and in the lovely and haunting movement for women's chorus in Tristia. Towards the end of his life, in 1862, he wrote the opera Beatrice et Benedict based on Much Ado About Nothing. Earlier (1839) there had been the dramatic symphony Roméo et Juliette, in which the chorus pays explicit tribute. Referring to poetry, they sing of Shakespeare as he "who alone had the supreme secret", one which he "took with him to Heaven". Such was the veneration.

The history of opera based on Shakespeare might be a volume in itself. It can be traced back, in annals if not in extant texts, well into the 18th century, and of course it extends into our own. The 19th century was nevertheless its age of plenty, its widely acknowledged masterpieces. They also command attention here because of their closeness to the original. Falstaff is both the culmination of the whole Verdi oeuvre and a rich expression of so much of the humanity we feel to be essentially Shakespearean. Even so it concerns us less in this context than do the two tragedies. The Merry Wives of Windsor is not poetic drama in a comparable sense; its words and all other features of the writing are not of the same irreplaceable nature. Boito, as Verdi's librettist, adds weight by incorporating (for instance) the Honour monologue from Henry IV and by allowing Verdi to develop Ford's soliloquy into a serious and, in its resonances, even a tragic utterance. For the present the point is that The Merry Wives is still sufficiently itself, with no great harm done, in spite of alterations to Shakespeare’s text, and in this Macbeth and Othello are quite another matter.