A tip of the hat to Shakespeare

It is doubtful that Claudio Monteverdi knew the work of Shakespeare, yet his last opera, L’Incoronazione di Poppea (1643), is arguably closer to Antony and Cleopatra than are the settings of that work by Gian Francesco Malipiero (1938) or Samuel Barber (1966). The constant formal invention displayed by Monteverdi mirrors Shakespeare’s fast succession of contrasting scenes: both pieces combine comic, tragic, ironic, and sentimental elements; both portray ambition and lust, shedding poetic light on the unbridled passions of a Roman leader, the repudiation of a virtuous empress (named Octavia in both pieces), and her replacement by a scheming courtesan; both include comic nurses—usually sung by male performers—belonging to the same tradition as the character in Romeo and Juliet.

It has long been recognized that Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte and Shakespeare’s The Tempest share many features: initiation, the supernatural, the power of music, the wise magician and his uncouth servant. Mozart, it seems, planned to write the music to a singspiel based on August Wilhelm von Schlegel’s translation of The Tempest. The proposed book was actually set four times and, like most other German Tempest operas, resembles a sequel of Die Zauberflöte. It is also worth noting that Mozart’s Così fan tutte was reworked into a French version (1863) of Love’s Labour’s Lost by Léo Delibes, although one might contend that it is closer to other Shakespearean comedies involving cross-dressing or a love-quartet, such as Twelfth Night or A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Berlioz conceived Les Troyens (1863), he said, according to the “Shakespearean system.” The only words by Shakespeare in the opera are in Didon and Enée’s love duet, which uses the “On such a night” dialogue of Lorenzo and Jessica in Act V, scene 1 of The Merchant of Venice, but other traceable borrowings are the ghosts that persuade the hero to leave Carthage and the comic scene that precedes Enée’s tempestuous confrontation with Didon. The latter scene provides the only moment of comic relief in this highly dramatic work. All in all, the opera’s epic force derives as much from Shakespeare’s histories as from the Aeneid.

Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov (first performed 1874) is a literal setting of a play by Aleksandr Pushkin, itself modeled on Shakespeare’s histories, to which the composer added the Macbeth-inspired hallucination scene. The opera navigates in Shakespearean style between epic and drama, between the tragedy of the Russian people and the guilt-harrowed Tsar Boris, between popular comedy and the fate of the realm. The character of the Innocent can be seen as a direct echo of the Fool and Poor Tom in King Lear, while the murdered tsarevitch and his living counterpart point to characters and situations in Richard III.

One might think that Mussorgsky’s masterpiece is an unlikely beneficiary of Shakespearean inspiration. The point, however, is that, unlike most adapters who have been wary of being defeated by their model, Pushkin was not afraid of Shakespeare. And Mussorgsky was not afraid of Pushkin, whose lines are set mostly as they were written. Librettists have tended for various reasons to avoid direct contact with Shakespeare’s text and have turned not to Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet but back to Shakespeare’s sources, using Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum or Matteo Bandello’s novella of the lovers of Verona. However, it seems to be of little doubt that, even in these two cases, not the venerable older authors but Shakespeare’s masterpieces provided the original inspiration.