The Devil Prefers Mozart

2. Shakespeare in Music

Shakespeare in Music, edited by Phyllis Hartnoll
London: Macmillan, 1964

Dr Samuel Johnson, that Berlin Wall of taste, may be taken as the patron saint of all literary men who lack a musical ear and somehow glory in lacking it. The 'dissociation of sensibility' which began in the Age of Reason goes further than the art of literature; it cracks up the whole corpus of art, turning a former continent into a number of islands. Since Johnson's day, the right ear has gloried in not knowing what the left ear is doing. It comes as a shock to some writers to be told that the arts of literature and music are cognate, and that you cannot successfully practise one without knowing the scope and limitations of the other. Swinburne, lacking this knowledge, tried to make his poetry a kind of pure music. Richard Strauss, with a kind of neurotic perverseness, made his music a sort of impure literature. To go back to the world of Shakespeare, in which the distinct but germane functions of literature and music were instinctively but perfectly known, is to encounter the life of a lost Eden, the air healthy, the food wholesome, no walls up anywhere.

John Stevens's essay - the first of the four that make up this admirable book - concerns itself with music as an aspect of Elizabethan drama. Shakespeare is, naturally, in the foreground, but it is salutary to be reminded that his virtues, in awareness of the function of music as in everything else, are great but not unique. Marlowe's Doctor Faustus must strike many a musician as a ready-made libretto (strange that no British composer has set it as it stands), with its arias, duets, ensembles, antiphonal Good and Evil Angels, sung exorcism scene, Seven Deadly Sins ballet, dances of devils, chorus commentary. There is something in the very blank verse of early Elizabethan drama - the cut-and-thrust of stichomythia, the binding of one line to the next with an echoing word - that suggests a near-musical heredity (were Seneca's closet-dramas perhaps not intoned rather than spoken?). Apart from all this, the Elizabethans knew precisely when and how to make music serve a dramatic end, the place for hautboys and the place for the 'broken consort', the delicately judged need for song or chorus, and Shakespeare, first among his peers, excelled here as in everything.

But there is something else in Shakespeare, something qualitatively different from the mere expertise of his fellows, and that is an apparent intimacy with, as it were, the two outer ends of music - the physical process of its making, the metaphysical significance of its make-up. When we hear Lady Macbeth telling her recalcitrant lord to 'screw your courage to the sticking-place', the reference is evidently to the tuning of a lute, the small agony of a delicate technical act. The Pythagorean disquisition in The Merchant of Venice is well known, though its curse on the unmusical has been ignored by too many. Ulysses's speech on the necessity of order in Troilus and Cressida uses the image of the untuning of a string, and one cannot doubt that this was no mere conventional trope - Shakespeare physically heard the untuning and in it was aware of the unholy jangling of what had been the music of the spheres.

But Shakespeare's musicianship has been made most evident to the world in the sheer craft of his lyrics (Charles Cudworth gives us an exhaustive historical survey of the settings of these). I doubt if the eagerness of three centuries of composers to make songs out of Shakespeare's words has had very much to do with mere reverential duty. Schubert heard the lyrics, and the music came. Jazzmen like Duke Ellington and Johnny Dankworth are too busy for bardolatry.1 Shakespeare is a god, but he was also a man of the theatre, and he knew which words would set and which would not. Simplicity - even conventionality - of theme, variety of vowel and diphthong, concentration on voiced consonants rather than unvoiced - these are the big lyric secrets. Sometimes, as in 'Take O take those lips away', meaning goes under and is not greatly missed. Once, in Pandarus's dirty song in Troilus and Cressida, the sound of orgasm only comes to shocking life when we hear the setting: it looks like mere harmless nonny-nonny on the page.2

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Sometimes setability spills over from the functional lyric to the blank-verse speech. Vaughan Williams's Serenade to Music ('How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank') joins Johnny Dankworth's very interesting 'If music be the food of love' in drawing words away from context, diminishing Shakespeare by enclosing him, however exquisite the result. Parry's setting of John of Gaunt's dying speech does what many political orations do with that great metaphorical catalogue - sets up an unfortunate confusion in the ear of the listener who remembers how the speech ends: '... Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it, / Like to a tenement or pelting farm'. How far should composers work in Shakespeare's service and how far merely use him?

This is the area where the book is of most interest. Write incidental music for Shakespeare's plays (songs or entr'actes) and there is the possibility that it may be swallowed up in the shadow of his mountain. Only those songs with the most general of themes survive in the repertory (like Quilter's or Warlock's or Schubert's): here the composer can assert himself. How many sets of incidental music are now heard in the concert-hall? After Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream music one can think of little, and even with Mendelssohn, as Roger Fiske reminds us here, we have less a true theatre overture than a symphonic poem. Sonata form is scrupulously fulfilled, but with subtleties of variation in the recapitulation section which suggest a pictorial aim (Bottom's ophicleide under Titania's fairy-music). The great Shakespearean orchestral scores have nothing to do with the theatre, but they have, in a miracle of transference, a great deal to do with Shakespeare. There aren't many of them. Berlioz's Queen Mab Scherzo is an exact musical equivalent of Mercutio's speech, not an ideal accompaniment for it. The composer touched that area of the mind which antecedes either words or music: here he met Shakespeare. I am glad that Dr Fiske spends so much space considering the greatest Shakespearean orchestral work of them all: Elgar's Falstaff. This astonishing symphonic poem achieves the ultimate penetration. The form is literary in that it follows the Falstaff story (though the two brief interludes reach a dimension no purely verbal art could touch); the themes themselves derive from that pre-articulatory region where the image trembles between music and poetry. Music is an international art, but only an Englishman could have composed Falstaff.

Yes, you will say, but don't we have Verdi? Winton Dean's remarkable essay on Shakespeare and Opera must convince most of us that we only have Verdi because we have Boito, and his account of the transmutation of Othello into Otello (a miracle of a libretto if ever there was one) illuminates the whole problem of turning great plays into great operas. Mr Dean's survey makes us gape with horror and wonder: the ineptitudes, the misunderstandings, the butcherings - can such things really have been? I said earlier that Faustus will set to music almost as it stands, but Shakespeare's length and complexity renders music supererogatory as well as (if we can achieve the music at all) calling for the expansiveness of a whole Ring for a single play. The librettist's job is to render down existing greatness into something potentially great, to concentrate on a structure equivalent to, but different from, that of the original, to provide opportunities for the poetry which is now music but himself to eschew anything like the verbal intensities which are strongest when they are spoken. Can Shakespeare's words be used in a libretto? Only when they carry a minimal poetry, as in Holst's admirable At the Boar's Head. Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream is all Shakespeare (though Shakespeare shifted totally to a fairy's-eye-view), yet this is a young and unbuttoned bard whose poetry is more decorative than expressive. The comedies, though not all that easy, are easier than the tragedies, and if we want an operatic Hamlet or King Lear (though this must be a near-impossibility) we must look for a new Boito.

That this is a useful book, as well as an eye-opening and provocative one, is attested not solely by the comprehensiveness of the descriptive and historical treatment but by the catalogue and composers' check-list that fill the last 80 pages. It is a worthy contribution to the quatercentenary celebrations, and it is not only for musicians but for all who consider themselves lovers of Shakespeare, whether their starting-point be the study, the theatre, or the critic's laboratory. A great artist throws his beams on every human endeavour. The sundering waters are dried up, and the islands are revealed once more as limbs of the total continent of art.

The Musical Times, 1964

1 In 'Song and Part-Song Settings of Shakespeare's Lyrics, 1660-1960', Cudworth writes, 'Johnny Dankworth, too, has added to the repertory of Shakespearean jazz with various settings, including a very attractive "If music be the food of love", as well as a vocal version of part of Duke Ellington's "Such...