How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank here, will we sit and let the sounds of music creep in our ears,
soft stillness and the night become the touches of sweet harmony.
These words from the dialogue between Jessica and Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice are some of Shakespeare's most
poignant on the nature of music and inspired Re-form Williams to set them for 16 solo singers in his Serenata music,
as well as the huge volume of songs set to Shakespeare's words. His plays have inspired numerous operas,
beginning with the fairy queen first performed in 60 90 to a semi opera consisting of
incidental music written by Parcell to accompany an adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
There are many fascinating questions surrounding the role music has to play within Shakespeare's plays.
How thoroughly with songs in the plays such as those of Festo Twelfth Night integrated into the action.
What considerations are there in choosing music to accompany a Shakespeare production now?
How did Shakespeare use music and song as a motif within his plays? I'm Alice Hobert and with me to discuss Shakespeare and music are Michael Dobson,
professor of Shakespeare Studies at Birmingham University and director of the Shakespeare Institute at Stratford-Upon-Avon Flat.
Smith, a 30 year English undergraduate at the Queen's College. Adrianna Stoiber,
a first year music master's student at new college and musical director of a recent production of the Fairy
Queen by Purcell and Dr Simon Smith leave early career fellow and senior research fellow at the Queen's College.
Thank you all very much for joining me.
And perhaps we could start by discussing how you felt about the way that the music and drama combined in Fairy Queen.
The Furqan was an interesting challenge for me as a music director,
because my part of the operation was to make these masks at the end of every act cohesive with the text.
And because Persil didn't set any of Shakespeare's text,
they were just metaphorical representations how to make that sort of accurate and compelling representation of the story,
though they were quite disparate.
So I had a separate cast of singers and some were very direct representation, as in the wedding mask, where Himan comes to bless the marriage.
And there's a lot of marriages happening in Act five anyway. But then there are some some are looser connexions.
So one of the most famous songs from the opera is the plant, and it's introduced around, asks a fairy to sing it and talks about Laura.
But we never know who Laura is or what she does. So we sort of have to figure out how to make that cohesive.
In the way I did that was to treat it like I would treat any opera, which is all of the music was essentially a look into the characters.
So every aria was a sort of a deeper look at tend to the themes that were happening within the text.
So establishing character through mask, I suppose, operates a little bit like an aria in that respect.
Would you say? Yeah, especially in the the tale. Exactly.
So the masks were sort of these global arias, these large looks into the act that just happened.
Or even if you think about a moment of repose in a sense.
So the spectacle going on, the dancers singing and just sort of beautiful moments of music within themselves.
But the Shakespeare text really moves the action along quite quickly.
And then you get a pause at the end of every act to think about these greater themes.
And personal did a really nice job because setting Shakespeare's taxes on a child,
musically speaking, when you talk about metre and phrasing, it can be very complex.
So, of course, because he used his own words,
he was able to make these sort of sweeping phrases that perhaps the text wouldn't have been able to accomplish in the same way in that Baroque style.
So it's a really interesting marriage of the two that changed a lot in later settings.
But the person is kind of a nice period piece in that sense. Michael, I believe he did an amount of work on the fairy queen idea.
If you feel you've got anything to add to this, you know, it's it's a very interesting thing that happens to Shakespeare in the later 17th century
that certain plays look like pretexts for making them into something more operatic.
And it tends to be the ones that got magic in them. And magic means music even in Shakespeare scripts, as they were in his time.
And The Tempest and Macbeth and Midsummer Night's Dream all get done in this very intriguing style where, as we've been hearing,
you get a bit of dialogue, a bit of the story, and then what is almost like the incidental music, except you get it separately.
So instead of having music underneath the action, as we would expect in a movie,
nowadays you get a little bit of action and then a set piece with some extra singers and dancers and special effects.
Obviously, Midsummer Night's Dream.
One of the things that prompts this is that it's got a great lullaby in it in the fairy sing to Titania to make her go to sleep.
And that can work very powerfully in Shakespeare's original text.
Also, it works marvellously in the fairy queen. One of my actress friends, Amanda Harris, is one of the only people to have done Titania,
both in the Shakespeare in great dance production in Stratford and in an English national opera production.
The Fairy Queen, I'm afraid, in the Shakespeare.
She found that lullaby extremely effective in that there were a couple of performances when she did actually go to sleep and they had
to stage managers had to rattle her power to finally get her to wake up in time to respond to the bottom when her cue came around.
So this is some real live demonstration of the force of music and performance.
So having looked at music as this kind of external representation of what's going on in a plot,
perhaps we could look at how internally music can operate as part of a Shakespeare plot, maybe have something to say about that in terms of song?
Well, I think what's interesting about the songs in Shakespeare is the role that they actually play within the plays
because there's been a lot done to show sometimes more about on whether the songs stick in where you like,
type things and to what extent actually any of them are relevant to the plots of the plays.
I think something like, for example, the release of testimonies is something that is very relevant to the plot.
She's just been accused of being unfaithful so that you've got a good reflection.
But in a lot of them, it's more a case of no, let's have some music and then get some character singing.
Yes. So I suppose a good example of this, perhaps we could talk about songs in Twelfth Night,
which is a play with quite a few prominent singing experiences. Absolutely.
In Twelfth Night, a fantastic example, because we seem to see perhaps two extremes of of music,
degrees of integrated ness with the rest of the performance. So we looked at something like Come Away Death, which is sung by Feste.
This is one of the moments where the text seems to be perhaps most fragmentary.
We have this slightly peculiar situation where at the beginning of the play,
Viola tells us that she's going to disguise herself as a eunuch and that she'll be able to to sing, but she never sings in the play.
And so one explanation for this switch that historians have often propounded is that the boy who would have been playing that female part,
his voice broke or that boy was no longer in the company at the time of the text that we have, which is sixteen, twenty three texts.
And so those songs perhaps got reassigned to fester.
In fact, it's even questionable whether come away death is entirely in keeping with the song, which was called for immediately before.
In contrast, however, we've got other songs in the same play which seem to be so utterly integrated,
the dramatic action that you could you couldn't really conceive of without it. I'm thinking, for example, when Malvolio comes down to Tarloff,
so Toby and Andrew and WFA cut all in the middle of the night, Toby defies motivated by singing in his face and the song.
Sings Farewell, Dear Heart is originally a love song called Farewell Dear Love,
which was published about two or three years before or two years before Twelfth Night was first
performed many times this kind of young man's love song into a song that's about Tobi himself,
his ageing, and whether or not he should tell Malvolio to shove about it.
Where do I mention go? No, no, no, no, no, you dare not. So this seems to be a song which is not only integral to the drama of the scene,
but it also relies on a very fundamental level on not only audience's knowledge of the musical culture of the very early 16 hundreds.
There seems to be a very long way away from these more fragmentary songs which are down has done so much work on really fantastic work,
showing how songs can be very fragmentary in other places. I believe you were the accompanist for a lecture, including song by Tiffany on the subject.
What did you think of what she had to say? I thought it was interesting. I had never because as a pianist,
I typically encounter these songs as sort of separate entities for people will gather a bunch of Shakespeare and make a set out of them,
but not in any sort of context other than a recital. We did come away death mysteries mine with a too big.
We did several sightings of each.
And one of the most interesting things I thought, which I never would have thought because I did these things out of context so often.
You know, Mistress' mine, they talk about this sort of play on voice types because we don't know what was happening.
And the text is sing both high and low, which could mean a lot of things. Again, pitch wise, it could mean female male voice types.
So we don't know. So there's this interesting way composers deal with that sort of thing.
And there's actually if you when you do them in a recital like that next to each other,
you see other composers have fundamentally different understandings of what Shakespeare was trying to say now that we can know.
But their interpretations of what they think, I mean, even down to things being completely joyful and completely solemn,
the same text, especially with Twelfth Night, because I think things like come away that can be read so many different ways.
So such an interesting thing to see the place next to each other in that way.
Yes, I think looking at different treatments of the same text or the same Shakespeare stimulus is perhaps a very interesting thing to do.
And maybe we should move on to ways in which Midsummer Night's Dream has become a musical entity elsewhere.
So, for example, the Britten opera, Mendelson's incidental music.
Michael, I believe he recently saw production of Britain's Midsummer Night's Dream in Cambridge. I did indeed.
It was wonderful. It's a lovely piece. And of course, it's very much composed in relation to the Mendelssohn, which everybody knows.
Mendelssohn writes the overture when he's ridiculously young, then he expands.
It produces a complete score for the play, is performed in Potsdam in 1844, becomes pretty much compulsory for 19th century productions of the play.
And Mendelssohn score is all about the fairies being very small and very literary.
And there's lots of very high string music very quick. It goes along with those shortened lines that you get for the fairies rhymes within the play.
And as I say, it's all about delicacy and quickness and smallness.
So Britain turns it inside out and when he writes his own opera for it in 1960, instead,
it's all about low cellos suggesting this rather gloomy sort of gothic kind of world in which the fairies aren't small and charming at all,
but potentially sinister and sort of like and more dangerous.
It's Titania who gives the high notes. She is extremely reactive.
My daughter song to in this production.
I mean, I might have gone anyway, but she complained very much that this was a road which really have no development,
that she was kind of came on and responded to things that were done to her and then was carried off again and spent a lot of the time asleep.
But Britain's music very much. Seems to foreground the way in which to Tanya is a victim in the story and doesn't find the love as funny at all,
you know, they're rather gloomy in the Britain version. We're not really allowed to laugh at them for having such a horrible time
without the lightness and sort of comedy at the expense of these young people.
And we're not really allowed not to care which one pays off with which in the Britain version, which is not the mainstream stage history of that play.
So it's very intriguing to see these two famous and full scale responses to that play in producing such a very, very different music.
Yes, it's very interesting to see ways in which music might be able to suggest alternative interpretations of the same text in that way.
I believe that metaphor measure also has interesting things to offer on this topic.
Well, measure is an interesting one in lots of ways,
partly because the text has clearly been mucked about with before it gets into print in the Folio in sixteen, twenty three.
It looks as though the text we've got is already partly adapted, probably by Middleton.
And in particular, one of the anxieties of the adaptor seems to concern the character of Marianne Angelo's jilted fiancee,
who has to be brought into the action very, very quickly and has to agree very,
very quickly to go and sleep with Angelo in the dark, posing as Isabella.
And one of the ways the adaptor decides to get round this is to have a song and a boy comes on.
The first time we've seen Marijana, she's all alone on stage and there's a boy singing an interpolated song about Fall in love.
Take her, take the slips away that so sweetly were forsworn.
And that describes Marianna's this figure in a sort of permanent Stacie's of pining for Angelo.
So of course, she's going to jump at the first opportunity to get into the story and get her life moving again,
even if it involves tricking her ex fiance into sleeping with her in the dark in a summer house.
And there seems to be a deliberate intervention where music is providing the equivalent of a soliloquy in the later history of the play.
It gets bizarrely expanded in that around the turn of the 18th century,
a man called Charles Gilden decides that the way to make this play actable again is to take some personally into it.
And Angello, while he's falling in love with Isabella, he fancies Isabella.
He's in a desperate state over this.
And every now and then [INAUDIBLE] say, well, I really need to take my mind off this, bring on the musicians, let's have some more of that music.
And they stage a bit more of Dido Narnia's, which, of course, is a whole opera about a lovelorn, abandoned woman.
It's all sort of all takes off from Teiko tape. It slips away.
I've never seen that version performed. I must say, I'd quite like to I think might be quite frustrating to be quite unwieldy.
Well, you do get two major works for the price of one, just done in a rather strange alternation with each other.
I think you even had a sense of very clear that the integration of the two was quite a large managerial task.
I think, especially when you're dealing with two things that are on the surface the same,
but composed of so many moving parts is just always difficult, especially when you're talking about Dido.
And yes, that's just a huge, huge thing for all the singers involved.
It would be a huge undertaking.
I suppose that integrating Dido and Aeneas with the Shakespeare play presumes a certain amount of understanding on the part of the audience,
perhaps it would be worth discussing the context the 16th and 17th century audiences could be expected to be familiar with.
Absolutely. This is a really fascinating topic in terms of precisely which audience members would have.
Which particular frames of reference certainly is very clear that Shakespeare is often turning to classical myth for his musical metaphors or theory.
To look at the time, Orpheus turns up in Merchant of Venice at the end of the speech,
which we had at the beginning of the podcast, again in song in Henry the Eighth, co-written with John Fletcher.
So the image of office music is being this compulsive and powerful sound,
which can not only make audiences listen at the play, but also get rocks and trees and so on to come in here.
This is quite present a lot of the time. We've also got Midas ticking away in the background all the time when we're thinking about musical judgement.
And this is an idea which Shakespeare finds too often we think about end of Richard.
The second, for example, Richard has kind of displayed spectacularly poor judgement for the best part of five acts.
And then finally in prison, his music, which he's very upset by because he said it's out of tune or out of time.
And in this moment, suddenly, despite himself to be a very good judge of music, perhaps today that seems fairly inconsequential.
But in the context, when not hearing music very well means that you have the use of the donkey,
perhaps this is a more significant and meaningful shift in the characterisation Richard is
finally learning to hear properly in which he's spectacularly failed to do in earlier acts.
And this is an image which comes up in a sentence as well as on a tape particularly.
So this is something which Shakespeare seems to be very interested in using.
The question then is how widely would these stories have travelled through his early audiences?
My sense is wider than we might think, that there are vernacular reach through which these stories were being transmitted.
And then the question beyond that, I suppose, is how do we then approach a play today in which we may not have quite the same
context of background knowledge to bring to the playhouse or to the theatre? Absolutely.
Maybe we should discuss incidental music for Shakespeare nowadays and how that interacts with past decisions about that.
Michael, do you have anything to add? Well, yes.
I mean, Shakespeare scripts, as we have them, particularly in the Folio, include a lot of musical stage directions.
They call explicitly for incidental music at different points in the action they call fanfares.
They call for drums and they call for different kinds of fanfare, which modern audiences can't recognise anymore.
I mean, sometimes you get a fanfare on the cornet if you're important, but not that important.
And sometimes you get a fanfare on the trumpet. Modern audiences can't be expected to know that a cornet means you're less important than a trumpet.
I mean, it's a big gag in Midsummer Night's Dream that the mechanicals overuse trumpets for Pyramus and Thisbe and a ridiculously bombastic about it.
You convey that in music, but the simple difference between and trumpet isn't going to do it for you anymore.
Write down the history of the performance of Shakespeare's plays. Incidental music tends to expand.
It's something producers have used a lot.
There were versions of the comedies with added choruses and glees in the early 19th century by Patrick Reynolds Comedy of Errors,
which is one of the only Shakespeare plays that has no songs in it at all because it's a short text, because it's quite light.
People don't really care what you do with it has been made into a musical often the boys from Syracuse, Trevor None's famous version in the 70s,
that of which that's mercifully still a video with Judi Dench as the and so on,
had loads of songs thrown in in the 19th century when Shakespeare was being performed with enormous sets and lots of pageantry.
So you need long pauses with the curtains shut. We're seeing changes.
There's an enormous industry in producing incidental music every time the plays produced,
which is one of the reasons why you get all that Mendelssohn used in Midsummer
Night's Dream is they've got to keep changing the forest back into Athens. And so we just got to do something practical.
Exactly. In the meantime, it's a very pragmatic business.
And nowadays, when a director is going to make a choice about that setting and the design of a play,
then they're going to commission music that supports that design.
And it's much more a directorial choice as to whether it's going to be Strauss waltzes or music concrete,
like that famous King Lear in Stratford in the 50s, or whether it's going to be jazz or what it's going to be.
You can expect that one of the main ways in which the audience is going to be told what
they're supposed to be feeling is likely to be provided by musicians as well as by the actors.
Simon, do you think that the same ethic was underlying use of music in earlier productions?
It's difficult to know how far musical sound worlds would necessarily have to cohere or not with the stage world.
I suppose the obvious analogy here is if we think about Henry Beecham, the patron during Titus Andronicus,
which is the only source we have costuming in only play in which what we seem to have is a
nice mixture of kind of bits of Elizabethan garb with kind of Roman touches on the outside.
An approach to stage in classical history there is not trying to be utterly specific.
So perhaps if we were to stand out to think about music, I'm not sure it would necessarily then follow that the well being worked on the stage with.
Necessarily here with musical numbers in quite the same way, I suppose.
The problem here is simply we've lost so much in terms of incidental music.
The problem is with songs, we can sometimes find them because we have the words and so we can go to musical sources.
If all we have is music, we're not really going to find that elsewhere in the archive.
So we have a very, very limited means to track down any incidental music, and that makes it very hard to trace these things.
On the other hand,
there are moments where we can think about what's going on dramatically and how particular types of music might have useful associations.
One example might be, for example, The Winter's Tale, where we have a statue coming to life now that's going to draw on certain traditions.
Pygmalion is obviously going to be working away there. But there's also a hermetic alchemical tradition of statues being brought to life by music.
This type of occult chemical theory was very trendy in the early 60s,
and James the first was even sent a Christmas card with no chemical fukin and still in children's parties today.
Such is the enduring tradition, a wonderful, wonderful tradition.
This perhaps allow us to speculate, well, what kind of music would therefore make sense to bring the statue to life?
Because it's very clear from the text it's the music that brings the statue to life.
Well, perhaps then we should be going to the alchemical music that survived.
Michael Meyer has a collection of writings in which contains lots of music.
Perhaps that would be inappropriate music to think of as fitting to that only context. What is alchemical music?
What makes it different from other forms of incidental music?
The main thing about it is that it allows alchemy to work so it has the power to turn base metals together.
That has the power to give eternal life and allows you to unite yourself with Christ.
Those was a kind of Christian version of alchemy happening at the time, somewhere between a metaphor,
a clue as to how to do the chemistry and a magical force itself in the way that it's written about in these various texts.
So they might come on the set of fugues that he presents.
Very interesting because they're in a book called Atlanta Fugitives, which is based on the myth of Atlanta.
And the idea is that the Lopata is the apples, which are laid out in a nice row,
and then the two characters pursuing one another with the two figure voices moving along and consort like that.
So you've got a very kind of heavily programatic composition.
It's a wonderful text because my sort of clear description, precisely what symbolic work it's doing.
And that really tells us how much symbolic work can be placed on things in the period.
I mean, I suppose a far more obvious example of that would be something like lacrimal by Darwin,
where we've quite simply got the volunteers represented by the Knights rolling down the page.
So music could certainly bear a wide range of symbolic ideas, I think, in the period.
And so that would be how the community. But of course, you'd have to know. Yes. So that was what was going on.
Otherwise, you just had some rather nasty tricks that actually comes to light. Yeah.
Or you just noticed that you studs on your tablet had just had to go in between.
Yes. I think topics were a huge way that people in that time period would recognising they'd have recorded music.
So fanfares, the terror motif or death motif that they knew from operas that they had seen.
I just think they became so powerful and emblematic, much more, much more than if we heard jazz, the things we associate with that.
It's just a completely different sound world that I find it very hard to imagine. Absolutely.
This kind of literally entrenched illusion is quite, I think, inimical to some of the ways that we like to use music today.
But maybe we should use that reflection and take it into Shakespeare's text.
What do you think Shakespeare means by allowing the characters to sing?
I think that to the songs in Shakespeare performed some low status characters that often prefaced by an instruction to say, let's have some music.
I think there are two very interesting characters who sing on stage who don't fit that context.
And these are just very different ways because Desdemona is singing when it's
just her immediate companion on stage and it's happened in a private setting,
which makes it doesn't happen in a chamber acceptable because although she's performing, the world that they're performing in is a very private one.
Yes. Whereas with Ophelia, you have a young girl singing actually by bawdy songs before the court.
Denmark, which is actually very fact of the music that she sings,
is signifying her madness because it's against all the etiquette that she would have been brought up with.
The song she sings are all the folk songs from ballads, and there's a lot about sex or love that she sings.
And most people don't work on trying to associate the things that she sings with things that happened in her life,
that she sings about a journey that somebody has died.
And it doesn't quite match up because she's saying that you love who's died but hasn't died at the time, that she's still alive.
But her letter has stuck to the sort of the sort of confused things.
But actually, to some extent, it's not so much the symbolism of what she's singing about.
It's the very fact of her singing on stage before these people.
That is how Shakespeare uses that. Yes, that's a really interesting link through that from the Ophelia songs.
Back to what Desdemona sings, whether it's on being a popular ballad, incredibly,
surprisingly, all of the known exemplars of this ballad and there are many.
The period that also, from my perspective, about a woman who has been unfaithful, so in fact,
something incredibly powerful, I think is going on when there's too many things that she is taking.
What if it were to be sung by essentially a song about how she is unfaithful and turning it into a complaint of her having been forsaken?
To talk to the about is a complaint to the lover forsaken of his love,
and she makes a complaint of her lover, forsaken of her love, and the gendering is entirely switched.
So this seems to me like an incredibly powerful way of reworking populism, not just powerful because it would be visible to an audience.
Perhaps the general has been changed, but she's taken essentially a sum which men can use to moan about how they don't trust women and
turns into something which instead Desdemona can use to complain about how badly treated her.
Yes, but in both cases, I think it's that embedding a popular song into the text that allows him to make those shifts.
Well, so there's a portion of it because she actually introduces the song as a song that she's heard from her mother's made Bulgari.
So she's actually putting it into someone else's mouth. But it's also an old song, so you've always got it from somewhere else.
She talks about what in her mind, and I think that's an interesting link to their music and magic in there's something else going on there that she,
to some extent is knowing by singing about. I don't think she sort of knows what Awesomes is thinking without actually really knowing it,
perhaps music or accessing different parts of your cognition, which I suppose is operational in the Affinia example as well,
because it's perhaps a way of acknowledging madness or not acknowledging it, then revealing madness.
That May was a behaviour alone could not.
There's another interesting point about the context in which it's sung is that it's the only song in Shakespeare,
I think that is actually repeated media sitting at the end when she has just been killed by her husband, who's obviously the bad guy with.
So she actually sings it when he he's treated very badly. She sort of is this forsaken mother.
And actually that echoes it's also to what I do of music.
It brings in this sense of echoing what Desdemona has already gone through,
which is already echoing because of conditions of fidelity and fidelity is already echoing what's happening.
The play just sort of ties everything up really nicely and carries more meaning than all of the other songs.
Yeah,
and you can see why Verdi should pick on Othello and make it into such a very successful operatic adaptation that Turlough and very simply takes.
That takes the way music is already working in that scene and sort of extends it to the whole play.
Except he makes the play much more polla because as well as Desdemona singing a version of the Willo song,
she's given a prayer to the Blessed Virgin, which is the musical counterpart to the other big thing that he puts in, which is the Yorgos credo.
He has a Yorgos sing a whole aria about. Yes, I'm a kind of demonic atheist.
I know, you know. So I'm I'm absolutely the opposite of Desdemona musically and ideologically.
On the whole, opera sort of revolves around these two poles of what he sounds like and what Desdemona sounds like.
But it's much more closely related to the way the original play thinks about music than some of the other Shakespeare based operas, I think.
Yes. I suppose maybe we should bring round a discussion of Shakespeare being a trope within music itself.
There have been so many different uses of his texts and dramas in musical culture that we have today.
I think perhaps you could comment on that.
I think Shakespeare, when I find it or play it or when the text is used in recitals that I've played or concerts that I find,
there's a powerful sense of self consolation,
which I think speaks to I think whether it's you're mad and you're singing about it or you're sad and you're singing about it or you're angry,
angry, not a mad sense, mad, crazy, angry that either way, the Shakespeare text is so powerful and one set to music is in a positive sense.
The self-indulgent nature of music magnifies the words and also turns them inward in a really special way.
As a musician myself who has never performed Shakespeare play, I tend to think of it as quite declamatory as actors speaking to an audience.
And when that is set to music, I tend to see that turn inward something and it adds a new dimension to the text.
So as a musician, I find it is always a treat because it's the text that we all know typically really raised to another level.
And in every sense, with every composer, it's quite different. And that interpretation is always fascinating to me.
Yes, I suppose we could look perhaps to parallelism between the way that musicians use Shakespeare and Shakespeare uses music,
and both are appealing to a sort of a trope of common experience in a sense, and that Shakespeare, so prominent in our society and culture generally,
that music drawing on it is likely to achieve perhaps a greater resonance there by similarly,
the use of song in Shakespeare and music will likely, I think, again,
just allows a different resonating chamber, as it were, to offer it,
although it must be said that occasionally the way in which this is carried out may seem quite bizarre to us.
I think, like you were talking earlier about a sort of pastiche of China being used in the original version of the fairy queen.
Well, yeah.
I mean, in a way, it makes perfect sense in the late 17th century context that one of the masks which we've heard about in the fairy queen,
the culminating one for the marriage of Theseus and Ippolita, the fairies turn up in court and say,
you know, there are fairies, you know, will kill your incredulity. We'll put on a show for you right here, even now.
And the show they put on includes this huge,
spectacular set piece set in China with Chinese people singing about how great it is in China and how they're all faithful lovers.
They all have the art of peace. And look at our lovely ceramics and here are some orange trees.
There's this whole sheen was very spectacular because for a 17th century audience or a 17th century audience,
China seemed to be this place that was like Arcadia, where people clearly had lots of time on their hands and just made lots of lovely ceramic vases.
So, of course, it was a place of harmony and peace personally, clearly never heard any Chinese music.
They seeing Orthodox European Baroque music to each other, these Chinese characters.
And they probably didn't look very convincingly Chinese either. But it's this extra space.
It's this place that is neither the forest nor the court. It's magically exotic.
And of course, opera lovers exoticism.
It's only Madame Butterfly except a bit more cheerful to do the Far East on stage because we all think we have escapism.
That's what we like. That's one of the things music can do for us. It can take us out to somewhere else that we can't otherwise reach.
Absolutely. I must admit, I was tickled, though, in our discussion of this earlier when you mentioned that a further relevance of the orange
trees could be found in the fact that the patron of this production was William of Orange.
So the mask written for the ages 15, 20, 30.
Yes. Yeah. And he and Mary were great collectors of Chinese porcelain.
So having lots of that on set, of course, is kind of like it brings us back to a common theme in this discussion,
which has been the root of pragmatism at the bottom of a lot of artistic decisions.
I think you were talking about that in terms of decisions made today with a lot of Shakespearean productions that use music.
Yeah, I mean, certainly the Royal Shakespeare Company,
who have a charter to keep on doing Shakespeare plays over and over again, also have a policy that they always use live music.
So they've got a set number of professional musicians who live in Stratford-Upon-Avon and they've got much else to do.
So, of course, they're going to produce scores for those musicians, possibly supplemented by some.
Mohideen, if they decided to go for a particularly opulent sound and bring in a few more string players.
But usually it's a band of about four or five, often not visible.
I mean, often the music is piped into the auditorium anyway, which rather spoils the sense of liveness.
But of course, we're not in the 19th century anymore. There isn't an orchestra pit that used to be an orchestra pit in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.
But of course, it's now being rebuilt to have a thrust stage so you can still do fun things like having musicians under the stage as Antony Cleopatra,
where we hear cornets under the stage and the soldiers don't know what's going on and decide, well, it's the God Hercules abandoning Antony.
That's obviously what that would stop. So there are effects like that with bringing musicians on stage.
There are some economic consideration. If musicians appear on stage amongst the actors, they get paid extra.
Yeah, I have an old old friend who works at the Globe from.
Time to time, and if he has to actually cross the stage thumping a drum rather than just sitting at the back thumping a drum,
he gets a slightly higher rate of pay, which may discourage the use of procession's with drummers in them.
So I realise we've got this far without discussing The Tempest, which is a play with a lot of music.
So perhaps let's move on to that is actually reasonably unusual to have what we do have for The Tempest,
namely what appear to be songs composed specifically for the first production,
perhaps around 16 or nine, six in 10 at the Golden Blackfriars by Shakespeare Company.
And these songs by Robert Johnson, different Robert Johnson to the one he sold his soul in the 20th century.
This one was a lutenist, eventually becoming a lutenist. James is caught but working in Denmark for many years before that.
Many of the songs that we have, Shakespeare plays, are songs which appear to have been composed elsewhere and then integrated.
But we seem to have with full faith and faith. And where the bee sucks is the original settings by Johnson in a 17th century manuscript.
And that's quite fitting for a play which seems to put music at the heart of its dramatic purpose. And in such striking ways.
It's interesting, again, a play which seems to be engaging with ideas of otherness, indifference,
perhaps not quite using the same geographical locations as these later examples we've just mentioned.
But it puts music at the heart of the way it seems to be working through those ideas in The Tempest and the songs, all variables.
And I think largely I don't speak much alone.
Things like Where the Bee Sucks is actually the way of introducing the character soliloquy.
Exactly. And there's a sort of sense that because there's some magical beating, you actually get it in song.
Well, the spoken word and it's such a lovely one, which seems to be more or less automatically redundant,
we're kind of waiting for everything to be tied up. And we have this peculiar moment where Prospero's having his robe taken off and
we get the song that it seems to do and very little apart from delaying the end,
if we imagine it as a moment, which is, is that to give everyone that voice,
which he perhaps hasn't had so much, I don't think that's quite a nice way of thinking about the play and be emphasising
how significant music can be to the dramatic shape of something like The Tempest.
Yeah, again, it's that using music to reach to another dimension and kind of get I mean, Aryal is almost pure energy.
You can't quite tell what gender area is. And that varies very much over the play's performance history.
And this is something composers have repeatedly taken up right down to Thomas.
Ardeche, of course, does a whole lot of the tempest whenever that was about 10 years ago,
in which Ariel has the most extraordinary and punishing high notes and really does sound like almost like something completely inhuman,
almost like electricity rather than a character. But is that written for very high?
Sacramento's wearing, as I remember it, extremely dayglo yellow and black costumes look like some sort of wasp.
Interestingly, the other kind of musical threat to that band, the one which does the most sometimes interesting cultural work,
is obviously Caliburn speech and actually take note of this kind of noise.
It sounds and sweet at which you might remember it in the Olympic closing ceremony, I believe, as this kind of epitome of Shakespearean beauty.
And I think that's a perfectly fair reflection in the text. And yet it's in the mouth of a character who is not perhaps framed in quite those ways.
Quite how we then think about that speech and what that tells us about Caliban, I think is open to discussion.
But it seems interesting that the music seems to be associated with everyone.
Caliban, take on it, perhaps slightly polla figures, and yet it's kind.
He's the one who demonstrates the most appealing response to music in the play.
As you mentioned, the second that musical judgement is such an important thing to an audience, what other plays do you think?
We see musical judgement play an important part in defining character?
Because it's an interesting question. I don't think it's across the Shakespearean corpus because it's interesting to see it
both in a history play and not you get something slightly like it's in Hamlet when,
yes, he plays the recorder on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,
but that's more about a pun about being played like a record which isn't quite as aphoristic, I think, of Shakespeare, the phrase might become.
But that's more about the performance skill. But that's certainly in Hamlet.
There must be other examples where they must do that. So yes to start.
Yes, yes. That man who has no music in his soul is a bit for trees and stratagems and spoils.
One of the reasons we're supposed to recognise that Shylock is a complete outsider is that
he wants his house soundproofed so that he can't hear any music coming in from the streets.
And he talks in the trial scene about his hatred for Antonio being like the response of somebody to bagpipe music,
which he says makes some people involuntarily urinate.
And of course, we all know that's true of bagpipe music, but it's interesting that he that he brings it up.
Yeah.
That the Shakespeare canon is permeated by the expectation that music is going to be valued and that people who value music are the ones to trust.
And then indeed that music is good for you. It's therapeutic.
And Cordelia, has it played to King Lear in the recognition scene and that's what brings him around and enables their.
Very brief moment of reunion to take place.
I think it's interesting that Shakespeare appears to have lived briefly in the same house as Thomas Morley, who may have contributed it was a lover.
And his last to as you like it in fifty ninety nine is rather nice idea of Shakespeare more commonly wrote.
The setting of Come Away and Play in Shakespeare apparently quite liked it.
So we think we know what characteristics of that would you say. A notable.
It's very simple, very folksy. It was the first setting we did at this lecture recital in Morley style, but it was quite profound in its simplicity.
Settings later became more modern and it really wasn't.
I was on an interesting time that someone sings who isn't quite an enlightened person is important.
In fact, the only time someone sings outside of a mask is Bob singing to himself to consoled himself on his mind himself in the woods.
And so interesting. I feel like that's the moment where because you kind of don't like bottom, or at least I didn't if I have a body.
And then at that moment that's when my view of him really changed and I kind of felt for him.
Well, I suppose we should perhaps have an heir to the magical connotations of that song as part of his transformation.
Maybe he's not singing. Maybe he's he hollering at that stage. Yes.
Abscesses, which may have some bearing on how good a judge of music is. Yes.
I saw production last week in which he has a line with the Today Show and he says, I have a good day for music.
And the lines, the structure was added. Let's have some Bon Jovi, which is a choice about how you rate his musical judgement.
It's about the nearest equivalent. We've got the Toms and the bones, which is to actually bring on the tongues.
And the bones is a terrible good eerie music that the tones on the bones, you know, this is the percussion.
Oh, it's like fire tongs. Yeah, it's like playing the spoon.
And otherwise he's singing the song. He sings in the original When the Totani wakes up is is about birds and he just doesn't get the point of cuckoos.
What point does he infer for the you. He just doesn't understand the joke in the song lyric about,
about how nobody wants to hear the cuckoo and therefore who would pay any attention to say foolish things could be so stupid.
Well, I suppose that's another interesting example of music or musical allusion,
being able to provide a further voice to the fact that the character actually speaking to a lovely moment, in fact,
in The Tempest when one of the characters come ashore and he's terrified about the lantern and he sings songs
like The Might of this one where the action is made and the songs were about people having died or drowned.
And that's just going to be joining us in another.
But what he can't articulate verbally, which is I'm terrified and I might die, is coming through to the music.
Yes. I suppose that returns to our discussion about Fiddler Desdemona,
a sort of music providing an outlet for maybe thoughts above or below consciousness in some way.
Right, well, I think we should probably wrap up at this stage. Thank you very much for your contribution today.
I really enjoyed speaking to you all.
And hopefully our listeners will also have enjoyed our conversations on Shakespeare and music for this 100th anniversary of his death,
a special episode of In Our Spare Time.