Musicking Shakespeare: A Conflict of Theatres (review)

“Is there anybody who likes music?” asks Mrs. Clancy in Ruth Draper’s monologue, The Italian Lesson. “Everyone says they do, but I never believe them.”¹ Her skepticism is well founded, especially where early modernists are concerned. owing perhaps to this separation of disciplines, the burgeoning study of Shakespeare’s afterlife has produced relatively little work on musical manifestations, especially those in the European classical tradition. Most agree on the few sovereign successes—Mendelssohn’s incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Verdi’s Otello and Falstaff, Prokofiev’s score for Romeo and Juliet—and many are tantalized by one of the great unrealized projects, Verdi’s King Lear, musical sketches for which found their way into Un Ballo in Maschera. Those who do enter the field soon discover a host of false leads. Several apparently Shakespearean titles—Bellini’s I Capuletti e I Montecchi is an example—are based not on Shakespeare’s text but on earlier sources that filtered into English fiction and then onto the stage. There is much territory still to be covered, however, from Thomas Linley’s Lyric Ode on the Fairies, Aerial Beings and Witches of Shakespeare (1769); to Wagner’s very early Das Liebesverbot (1836), his youthful adaptation of Measure for Measure; to Aribert Reimann’s King Lear (1978).

Into this gap interlopes Daniel Albright, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard, modernist by profession, and author of books on Eliot, Pound, Beckett, Nabokov, and Schoenberg (to name only some of his specialties). His approach to the problem of adaptation is distinctive. Rather than predictably detail the omissions and reshapings of librettist and composer, he elects instead to concentrate on three major works that, in his view, distill the Shakespearean spirit of the originals: Berlioz’s genre-busting Roméo et Juliette of 1839; Verdi’s Macbeth of 1847, revised for performance in Paris, 1865; and, after an excursus on Purcell’s Fairy Queen (1692–93), Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1957). Albright’s argument is encoded in his subtitle, A Conflict of Theatres: most operatic versions of Shakespeare’s plays do not, because they cannot, recreate the essence of the original play since the conventions and rewards of the early modern stage are incompatible with the traditions of the opera house. The works Albright examines, on the other hand, release that rare, identifiable imaginative energy familiar to us from the Shakespearean theater: “Whenever one feels, in an opera, that the operatic and dramatic elements are hostile to one another, or somehow not working together properly, the special complexity of Shakespeare is close by” (30).

The book is divided into three major sections, each given over to a sequence of chapters on the relevant Shakespeare plays, followed by chapters on the musical versions. Albright’s literary criticism is surprisingly fresh: while the reader notices bits of René Girard, Norman Rabkin, Marjorie Garber, and others, the author’s status as a Shakespeare civilian affords him an unobstructed vantage point, making much of his critical commentary nondogmatic and welcome. For example, he provides a witty riff on the arithmetical permutations possible in the amorous tangles of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, complete with table. The approach to each play obviously helps to prepare for the musical analysis, and these three critical discussions constitute the truly valuable parts of the study. Albright brings to the task a degree of learning that is nothing less than dazzling.

The treatment of Berlioz is, if not predictable, at least not surprising: the irresolvable tensions that animate the Shakespearean original are seen as accounting for the originality and unclassifiable status of the French adaptation, whatever it is—not opera, not symphony, not tone poem. (Much of this material has appeared already in Albright’s 2006 book on Berlioz.) Britten emerges as an even more sophisticated and playful composer than he is usually considered to be: evidence of this is the tonal complexity of his Dream, “a higglety-pigglety opera...