Shakespeare Magazine 02

Shakespeare & classical music
Early
Wagner’s Shakespeare
mash-up
The ever-ambitious Richard Wagner nicked
bits from not one but several Shakespeare
works in order to fashion his first opera plot,
Leubald. In the mish-mash of a six-hour-long
libretto can be found parts of Romeo and
Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet, Richard III, King
Lear and Henry IV, Part One. There’s a pair
of ill-fated lovers, Leubald and Adelaide, a
sorceress and several ghosts, as well as various
murders and a mad scene. Over the top?
Well, Wagner was only 15 when he wrote it.
Signing off with
The Tempest
Sibelius was one of the 20th century’s greatest
composers, with seven symphonies to his
name. But for the last 32 years of his life he
hardly wrote any music at all. One of his
final big orchestral pieces was for a staging of
The Tempest, coincidentally also thought by
some to be Shakespeare’s last solo-authored
play. Written in 1925-26 for a production
at the Royal Theatre in
Copenhagen, Sibelius’s score
is a masterpiece of orchestral
colour and drama.
Romeo and Juliet’s
happy ending
They are the world’s most
famous doomed lovers. Apart
from in Prokofiev’s hands,
where instead of dying they
dance off happily ever
after. But this daring twist
by the Soviet composer,
who was penning music
for a new ballet of the
play, didn’t ever make it to
the theatre. Soviet leader
Stalin put his foot down, and
Prokofiev was obliged to stick
with Shakespeare’s tragic tale.
The original ending was recently
discovered and has since been
staged in New York.
work Macbeth
three Shakespearean
masterpieces.
Shakespeare’s
Oscar nominations
“For me, music made the film,” said
Laurence Olivier, the director and star of
the 1944 film of Henry V. The music in
question was by William Walton, who had
first met Olivier in 1935 on the film set of
As You Like It. They went on to work on
three Shakespeare films together, with the
superb scores of both Henry V and Hamlet
(1948) earning the British composer Oscar
nominations. Richard III (1955), though,
didn’t complete the hat trick.
The problem with Lear
Verdi and Britten both thought about setting
King Lear to music. Debussy even went
as far as writing a whole five minutes
of incidental music for it. But for
some reason, although several lesser
composers have tried their best with
it, King Lear has seemed to be the play
that defeated the greats. Most recently,
the acclaimed Alexander Goehr was
inspired by a dream to write
a King Lear staged as a
Japanese Noh play.
But his 2010
opera Promised
End didn’t go down
well with the critics.
The curse of King Lear
strikes again.
The Winter’s Tale –
the first new fulllength
Shakespeare
ballet from The Royal
Ballet since Romeo and
Juliet – will be available
on DVD soon. Go to
www.roh.org for further
details.
Photo: © ROH / Clive Barda
36 SHAKESPEARE magazine