Shakespeare and Opera
If William Shakespeare’s ascendancy over Western theatre has not extended to the opera stage—a fact explained by the want of Shakespeare-congenial librettists, the literary indifference of composers, and the difficulties involved in setting iambic pentameters to music—the Shakespeare canon has nonetheless established itself as one of the great inspirers of operas. This is clear from the 200-odd operas based on Shakespeare’s plays, about half a dozen of which are among the rare monuments of operatic achievement. It is further demonstrated by an even more extended series of furtive references—moments of other operas that show signs of unmistakable Shakespearean family resemblance without any declared genealogical link to their source. Shakespeare’s plays have thus given rise, side by side, to a “legitimate” operatic offspring and to an anonymous operatic dissemination, a recorded and an unrecorded history of Shakespeare on the opera stage.
Opera derived from Shakespeare
The necessity of accommodating the formal unruliness and many-faceted characters of Shakespeare’s theatre to the succession of recitative and aria, elaborate scenery, and other conventions of opera makes adaptation of Shakespeare a hazardous business. Actor-manager David Garrick’s opera version of The Tempest (1756) was accused of “castrating” Shakespeare’s original play, while Lord Byron (in an 1818 letter to the poet Samuel Rogers) berated Gioacchino Rossini’s librettist for “crucifying” Othello (1816).
Henry Purcell’s The Fairy Queen (1692) is usually dubbed the first Shakespearean opera. Its music, however, is confined to interludes within a curtailed A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Only in Dido and Aeneas (1689) did Purcell have the chance to write music for a tragic heroine of mythical status. Purcell’s only real opera, written for a cast of young girls, displays distinctly Shakespearean influences that can be safely ascribed to his librettist, the poet and playwright Nahum Tate, who was familiar with the canon. Tate consistently “improved” Shakespeare to suit new audience tastes, the most famous instance being the happy ending he appended to King Lear (Tate’s King Lear of 1681—in which Cordelia not only lives but marries Edgar—was in fact the only version to be presented on the English stage for the next 150 years). For Dido and Aeneas, Tate actually followed Virgil quite faithfully, with the exception of the addition of two Macbeth-inspired witch scenes that both complicate the action and introduce a considerable measure of doubt about the role of destiny in Aeneas’s decisions; Mercury here becomes a mere decoy sent by the witches to trick Aeneas with the overall purpose of hurting Dido. Yet this addition established a Shakespearean dimension that made this short opera appropriate for use as a “play within a play” in performances of Measure for Measure on the London stage in 1700. Indeed, such insertions of musical pieces in or after Shakespeare’s plays were customary in the 18th century: George Frideric Handel’s pastoral Acis and Galatea, for example, was performed at Drury Lane in 1724 as an afterpiece for The Tempest.
Opera seria and opera buffa
It is tantalizing, with regard to Shakespearean dramaturgy, to note that opera was born in Florence in 1600—about the time that Hamlet first voiced Shakespeare’s views on acting. Shakespeare and the theorists of opera expressed similar concerns about language and performance. (See also Sidebar: Shakespeare on Theatre.) Opera prospered, and Venice started opening public opera houses in 1637; in 1642 Puritan London closed its theatres. Italian opera reached London only at the beginning of the 18th century, when it immediately became a fashion and divided the public. Shakespeare was called upon in this contest: the “rude mechanicals’ ” play from A Midsummer Night’s Dream was turned into a caricature of Italian opera in Richard Leveridge’s A Comick Masque of Pyramus and Thisbe (1716). Some 30 years later (1745), J.F. Lampe revived the book as a “mock opera,” complete with rage aria and contrived happy ending.
More antagonistic still were the reactions to Italian opera written on Shakespearean librettos. Francesco Gasparini’s Ambleto (Hamlet), having been played throughout Europe, was taken to London in 1712 by the celebrated castrato Nicolini but quickly disappeared from the scene. Francesco Maria Veracini’s Rosalinda (1744)—As You Like It staged as a polite Italian pastoral and written for a cast of female and castrato sopranos—suffered the same fate. Gli equivoci, an opera buffa by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s only English disciple, Stephen Storace, presents a different case. Written on a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte (much in the spirit of his—and Mozart’s—The Marriage of Figaro) and auspiciously received in 1786 at the Vienna Burgtheater (now the Hofburgtheater) and throughout Germany, Gli equivoci, which is the only known setting of The Comedy of Errors, was considered too “Mozartian” and never made its way to London.
Others, such as J.C. Smith and the aforementioned David Garrick, both used and challenged the Italian opera fashion. While their opera on The Tempest, as well as The Fairies (1755), where the Prologue jokingly attributes authorship to a “Signor Shakespearelli,” were poorly received, Garrick’s Tempest book was successfully revived in 1777 with music by the remarkable Thomas Linley (1756–78). Throughout the 18th century, The Tempest, like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, was never actually performed except as a musical entertainment.
After the turn of the century, composers of opera buffa (such as Antonio Salieri) and German singspiel (such as Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf) turned their eyes to Shakespeare’s more farcical vein. In 1849 Otto Nicolai, having declared that only Mozart could do justice to Shakespeare, wrote a successful opera on Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (The Merry Wives of Windsor). Hermann Goetz’s Der Widerspenstigen Zähmung (1874; The Taming of the Shrew) made Kate fall in love with Petruchio almost at first sight—mutating Shakespeare’s self-confident antiheroine into a hochdramatisch 19th-century hysteric.
Women from theatre to opera
The twilight of opera seria and the advent of Romantic opera are epitomized by the emergence of the prima donna and the female conquest of the formerly castrato-dominated soprano region. Shakespeare’s female roles, because they were played by boys, were usually less developed than his male roles; with the notable exceptions of Rosalind (in As You Like It) and Cleopatra (in Antony and Cleopatra), Shakespeare’s female roles were far less significant. But the 19th-century primacy of the soprano extends to many other Shakespearean female roles, turning them into major parts.
Rossini’s Otello (1816), the first opera seria with a tragic ending, poises three tenors—Iago (the villain), Rodrigo (the rejected lover), and Otello (the interloper)—against a besieged Desdemona who outweighs them all—and her basso father, Brabantio, to boot. Following the 18th-century French “translation” of Othello by Jean-François Ducis, Rossini replaces the handkerchief, that shockingly intimate piece of female lingerie, with the more acceptable misdelivered, unaddressed letter of Italian comedy. The French poets Victor Hugo and Alfred de Vigny made endless fun of this “improvement,” yet the painter Eugène Delacroix was so impressed by this reading that his paintings show Desdemona, not Othello, as the protagonist. Most of the action in the first acts is indeed forced into the mold of conventional opera seria. It contains bravura arias for all the soloists and dramatic grand finales that only distantly relate to the subtle progression of the Shakespearean narrative. Contrary to the stage version, which travels from Venice to Cyprus and involves lowlife characters such as prostitutes and gulls, the whole opera is set in magnificent palaces in Venice, staging mostly polite exchanges between members of a single noble class of individuals governed by acceptable passions. Yet in the final act of this seminal opera, Rossini introduced a quotation from Dante’s Inferno, sung by a passing gondolier, which prompts Desdemona to sing an elaborate Willow Song that she accompanies on her harp, followed by a very moving prayer, leading on to the murder scene and a terse conclusion. Otello is the only Rossini opera to end in this manner, and the influence of this last act on 19th-century opera has proved enduring and far-reaching.
The passionate “Shakespearien” Hector Berlioz put the sopranos in the forefront in his last work, Béatrice et Bénédict (1862), based on the “merry war” subplot of Much Ado About Nothing. Shakespeare was a never-ending inspiration to Berlioz, notably in his Roméo et Juliette choral symphony (composed 1839). Romeo and Juliet has proved to be an all-time favourite for opera composers, prompting more than 20 versions. In adaptations by such composers as Nicola Antonio Zingarelli and Nicola Vaccai, the part of Romeo is sung by a mezzo-soprano, to the disapproval of Berlioz, who preferred, for this and other reasons, Daniel Steibelt’s Roméo et Juliette (1793). I Capuleti, a vehicle for the famous Grisi sisters (Giuditta and Giulia), privileged female ensembles and conquered the public in the lovers’ final duet by means of a timely awakening of Giulietta—an ending popularized by Garrick. Juliette is a sophisticated coloratura in Charles Gounod’s 1867 opera (termed by Rossini “a duet in three parts: one before, one during, and one after”), overdeveloped, like the Ophelia of Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet (1868), at the expense of male partners. Other examples of that tendency include Saverio Mercadante’s Amleto (1822), where the part of Hamlet is sung by a woman, and a verismo opera renamed Giulietta e Romeo (1922) by Riccardo Zandonai.
Both Gounod’s and Thomas’s librettos were written by the successful team of Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, who together and separately or with others authored the librettos of some of the most enduring French operas. The plot of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette is fairly faithful to the original, doing away with many secondary characters and expanding others (the page Stefano, for example, who is unnamed in Shakespeare’s tragedy, has a memorable aria). The major departure from the original plot is once again the reawakening of Juliette just in time for a pathetic duet with Romeo before both die, begging God’s forgiveness for their unchristian suicide.
The opera, which begins with the ball scene at the Capulets’, overdramatizes several episodes, including the first appearance of Juliet, the revelation (by Tybalt rather than her nurse) of Romeo’s identity to Juliet, and Juliet’s fake death, which occurs just as her father has taken her arm to lead her to the chapel to marry Paris. In short, it possessed all the ingredients for success and was an immediate hit. It has remained in repertoire along with Faust, Gounod’s other adaptation from a literary masterpiece.
In the early 1990s Thomas’s Hamlet, after a long period of neglect, began once again to be performed by celebrated singers on prestigious stages and to be recorded. The opera poises Hamlet mostly against Gertrude, his mother, and his beloved Ophelia, but it also offers interesting insights into the political questions that troubled France at the time it was written, two years before the end of the Second Empire: Gertrude knows all about the murder of her former husband by Claudius (her current husband), and Hamlet rejects Ophelia only when he realizes that Polonius was an accomplice in the deed. In the “mousetrap” scene the seemingly mad Hamlet pulls the crown off Claudius’s head, prompting a finale of epic proportion, as the Court comments on this act of lèse-majesté. In the final scene, at the graveyard, the ghost of Hamlet’s father appears for a third time, visible to all this time, demanding action from Hamlet, who immediately kills King Claudius, thus restoring legitimacy to the throne and bringing stability to his tormented country. The opera ends to the sound of the people shouting “Vive Hamlet! Vive notre roi!”
In Das Liebesverbot (1836), Richard Wagner’s only Shakespeare opera and the only extant setting of Measure for Measure, the Duke’s role is entirely devolved to Isabella, who secretly loves the freethinker Lucio. The original performances were a complete failure, and the piece all but disappeared from the repertoire. Some performances in the mid-to-late 20th century, as well as recordings, however, have saved the work from utter oblivion and shed light on Wagner’s formative years, when he was still attempting to write mainstream music.
As for the prominent role of the soprano in Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth (1847), it is due to Shakespeare himself: Verdi simply recognized that Lady Macbeth’s soliloquies read exactly like opera solos. His instruction that she “should not sing at all” is echoed in Ernest Bloch’s Macbeth (1910), where the orchestra plays the leading part, providing counterpoint, depth, and tragic irony that voices alone cannot convey. Like Thomas’s Hamlet, Verdi’s Macbeth reflects the political situation in the composer’s homeland in more ways than one: the tyrannical authority of the usurpers is opposed by Scottish exiles clamouring for liberty. The chorus of the Profughi Scozzesi is an echo of “Va, pensiero,” the famous chorus from Nabucco that became an anthem in the struggle for Italian unity—prompting Verdi’s name to become an acronym for the motto “Vittorio Emmanuele, Re d’Italia.”
Rossini’s Otello was saved by the memory of Shakespeare’s, as Stendhal put it. Twentieth-century adaptations swung in the opposite direction: in Mario Zafred’s Amleto (1961) or Frank Martin’s Der Sturm (1956), the parlando music encumbers Shakespeare’s words; literal readings by Reynaldo Hahn (1935) and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1961) have resulted in two disproportionately lengthy versions of The Merchant of Venice.
Opera inspired by Shakespeare
The slower pace of operatic plots—the result of the singing of the dialogue and the interruption of the action by arias—imposes simplification. Composers therefore have been faced with the task of filling the gaps in most Shakespeare-based librettos. Their problem is that, as W.H. Auden pointed out, contrary to plays, operas cannot easily present characters who are “potentially good and bad.” However, opera has other advantages: music speaks directly to the emotions, and its means are expanded by ensemble singing and the support of the orchestra. The simultaneous expression of different ideas and feelings thus made possible was first fully applied to Shakespearean opera in Verdi’s Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893), composed when the operatic form had reached its full maturity, just before the musical revolutions of Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, and Igor Stravinsky.
The first and definitive attempt to challenge Rossini’s work, Otello is the only Shakespeare opera that generates the same critical response as the original, including G.B. Shaw’s quip that “instead of Otello being an Italian opera written in the style of Shakespeare, Othello is a play written by Shakespeare in the style of Italian opera.” Verdi’s librettist, Arrigo Boito, a composer in his own right, took the opposite stance to Rossini’s librettist and set the whole opera in Cyprus. He dropped altogether the confrontation between the lovers and Desdemona’s father in the Doges’ Palace, which had occupied so much of the earlier opera. Instead, he transposed Othello’s tale of the wooing of Desdemona to an extended love duet, one of the most beautiful in the operatic canon. Jago (Iago), all trills and chromaticism, is epitomized by his “Credo”—a piece in line with the 19th century’s fascination with Mephistophelian characters (Boito himself wrote an opera called Mefistofele)—which concludes with the nihilistic line “la morte è il nulla” (“death is nothingness”). It takes its cue from some of Iago’s quizzical statements and “motiveless malignity” but definitely steps outside Elizabethan conceptions and presents a distinctly 19th-century air. The degradation of Otello’s heroic stature, which was established in his terse entrance aria (“Esultate”), is depicted by his gradual appropriation of Jago’s style and his distortion of Desdemona’s lyrical phrases. In the tradition of Italian opera, Otello includes a “state scene” with a grand finale, in which stunned onlookers comment on the passions opposing the protagonists, but, like Rossini’s final act, Verdi’s reaches heights of simplicity and emotion unlike any opera that had gone before. Desdemona’s Willow Song, followed by a Prayer, becomes a poignant lull before the stormy denouement. Otello, who has often been compared to Wagner’s Tristan, dies on the interrupted word bacio (“kiss”), in a rapturous recall of the theme developed in the earlier love duet.
The plot of Verdi’s Falstaff tightens The Merry Wives of Windsor while integrating elements from the Henry IV plays—such as Falstaff’s well-known speech on honour—which give more depth to the main character. Verdi was thus able to develop in parallel the comedy involving Falstaff and his acolytes on one side and Mistress Quickly and her friends on the other, as well as the darker undertones of the scenes involving the jealous Ford, and the lyrical development of the love-interest of Fenton and Nannetta. The final fugue, “Tutto nel mondo è burla,” is loosely based on the “Seven Ages of Man” speech from As You Like It (“all the world’s a stage” becomes “all the world’s a joke”). It celebrates against all evidence the victory of the “fat knight,” who both invokes and provokes the liberating force of laughter. Like Otello, Falstaff moves imperceptibly from aria to duet or ensemble, unhampered by recitative, as if Shakespearean inspiration had helped the old master to free himself from the conventions on which he had thrived.
Credited with being the only successful setting of Shakespeare’s words, Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960) shares a nostalgia for Elizabethan England with two earlier, Falstaff-inspired works: Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Sir John in Love (1929) and Gustav Holst’s At the Boar’s Head (1925). Both of these integrate “old English melodies,” while Frederick Delius’s A Village Romeo and Juliet (1900–01) transposes the mythical “star-crossed lovers” into a supposedly more realistic context.
Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the work of a mature opera composer who was able to devise the libretto himself, with the help of Peter Pears (who sang the part of Lysander), trimming the play without altering the text and making bold choices in the musical treatment of the characters. Opening in the woods with the fairies, in a musical atmosphere akin to that of Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges, Britten takes his audience without mediation into the world of the supernatural, where misrule and desire are given free rein. Britten’s fascination with the alternation and occasional interaction between three groups of very different characters provides the key to the opera: the fairies seem to embody nostalgia, sung as they are by boys accompanied by harps and percussion, while the role of Oberon is devolved to a countertenor, Titania to a coloratura—perhaps a subtle reference to Mozart’s Queen of the Night (in Die Zauberflöte [The Magic Flute]). It is interesting to note that the part of Oberon was written for Alfred Deller, the performer who played an essential part in the rediscovery of the countertenor tessitura and the popularization of the Elizabethan repertoire. Puck, the mediator between the three worlds of court, country, and supernatural and between the stage world and the audience, is a spoken role usually devolved to a teenager. The roles of the lovers, on the other hand, are characterized by an absence of arias or set pieces, making them hard to tell apart, following Shakespeare’s deliberately confusing design but also in the spirit of the first acts of Mozart’s Così fan tutte. Finally, the Mechanicals, whom Britten called the Rustics, provide the composer with a delightful opportunity for parody, underlined by the use of brass and bassoon. The opera ends with marriage and reconciliation at the court of Theseus and Hippolyta, but the musical climax is the love scene between Titania and Bottom, at the very heart of the piece. The gradual blending of two radically opposed musical styles into the most exquisitely lyrical language can be deciphered as a musical interpretation of Victor Hugo’s Shakespeare-inspired theory that the sublime is often born of the grotesque.
Eminent recent European adaptations include Aribert Reimann’s Lear (1978), based on an extraordinarily austere rendering of Shakespeare’s hitherto unadapted play, and Luciano Berio’s Un re in ascolto (1984; A King Listens), a reflection on creation and the complex workings of memory that is based on The Tempest. The French composer Pascal Dusapin’s Roméo et Juliette (1988) is a metatheatrical opera built around a rehearsal of Shakespeare’s play. Wintermärchen (1999) by the Belgian composer Philippe Boesmans (born 1936) is an adaptation in German of The Winter’s Tale, a kaleidoscopic work that develops the game of contrasts provided by the Shakespearean plot. One great originality of the new version of The Tempest by Thomas Adès (born 1971), first performed at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in 2004, resides in its libretto by Meredith Oakes, a completely rewritten text following the original plot but allowing an English-speaking composer to benefit from the same distance as Continental musicians working with translations. Adès adopts an eminently lyrical and introspective approach, with a gentle Caliban who seems to be Prospero’s doppelgänger. The opera, which in 2005 won an Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Opera, is notable for the instrumental treatment of the part of Ariel, whose coloratura vocalizing contributes to create the supernatural atmosphere that underscores the whole piece.
More than 200 operas based on Shakespeare’s plays have been written since 1945, but very few of them have remained in repertory. Coming a few years after Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate (1948; a lighthearted version of The Taming of the Shrew), Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story (1957) was a landmark at the frontier between musical and opera that transposed the story of Romeo and Juliet to a mid-20th-century New York torn apart by rival gangs, but it circumvented many key elements of the Shakespearean original, most notably Juliet’s suicide.
