Opera inspired by Shakespeare

The slower pace of operatic plots—the result of the singing of the dialogue and the interruption of the action by arias—imposes simplification. Composers therefore have been faced with the task of filling the gaps in most Shakespeare-based librettos. Their problem is that, as W.H. Auden pointed out, contrary to plays, operas cannot easily present characters who are “potentially good and bad.” However, opera has other advantages: music speaks directly to the emotions, and its means are expanded by ensemble singing and the support of the orchestra. The simultaneous expression of different ideas and feelings thus made possible was first fully applied to Shakespearean opera in Verdi’s Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893), composed when the operatic form had reached its full maturity, just before the musical revolutions of Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, and Igor Stravinsky.

The first and definitive attempt to challenge Rossini’s work, Otello is the only Shakespeare opera that generates the same critical response as the original, including G.B. Shaw’s quip that “instead of Otello being an Italian opera written in the style of Shakespeare, Othello is a play written by Shakespeare in the style of Italian opera.” Verdi’s librettist, Arrigo Boito, a composer in his own right, took the opposite stance to Rossini’s librettist and set the whole opera in Cyprus. He dropped altogether the confrontation between the lovers and Desdemona’s father in the Doges’ Palace, which had occupied so much of the earlier opera. Instead, he transposed Othello’s tale of the wooing of Desdemona to an extended love duet, one of the most beautiful in the operatic canon. Jago (Iago), all trills and chromaticism, is epitomized by his “Credo”—a piece in line with the 19th century’s fascination with Mephistophelian characters (Boito himself wrote an opera called Mefistofele)—which concludes with the nihilistic line “la morte è il nulla” (“death is nothingness”). It takes its cue from some of Iago’s quizzical statements and “motiveless malignity” but definitely steps outside Elizabethan conceptions and presents a distinctly 19th-century air. The degradation of Otello’s heroic stature, which was established in his terse entrance aria (“Esultate”), is depicted by his gradual appropriation of Jago’s style and his distortion of Desdemona’s lyrical phrases. In the tradition of Italian opera, Otello includes a “state scene” with a grand finale, in which stunned onlookers comment on the passions opposing the protagonists, but, like Rossini’s final act, Verdi’s reaches heights of simplicity and emotion unlike any opera that had gone before. Desdemona’s Willow Song, followed by a Prayer, becomes a poignant lull before the stormy denouement. Otello, who has often been compared to Wagner’s Tristan, dies on the interrupted word bacio (“kiss”), in a rapturous recall of the theme developed in the earlier love duet.

The plot of Verdi’s Falstaff tightens The Merry Wives of Windsor while integrating elements from the Henry IV plays—such as Falstaff’s well-known speech on honour—which give more depth to the main character. Verdi was thus able to develop in parallel the comedy involving Falstaff and his acolytes on one side and Mistress Quickly and her friends on the other, as well as the darker undertones of the scenes involving the jealous Ford, and the lyrical development of the love-interest of Fenton and Nannetta. The final fugue, “Tutto nel mondo è burla,” is loosely based on the “Seven Ages of Man” speech from As You Like It (“all the world’s a stage” becomes “all the world’s a joke”). It celebrates against all evidence the victory of the “fat knight,” who both invokes and provokes the liberating force of laughter. Like Otello, Falstaff moves imperceptibly from aria to duet or ensemble, unhampered by recitative, as if Shakespearean inspiration had helped the old master to free himself from the conventions on which he had thrived.

Credited with being the only successful setting of Shakespeare’s words, Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960) shares a nostalgia for Elizabethan England with two earlier, Falstaff-inspired works: Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Sir John in Love (1929) and Gustav Holst’s At the Boar’s Head (1925). Both of these integrate “old English melodies,” while Frederick Delius’s A Village Romeo and Juliet (1900–01) transposes the mythical “star-crossed lovers” into a supposedly more realistic context.

Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the work of a mature opera composer who was able to devise the libretto himself, with the help of Peter Pears (who sang the part of Lysander), trimming the play without altering the text and making bold choices in the musical treatment of the characters. Opening in the woods with the fairies, in a musical atmosphere akin to that of Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges, Britten takes his audience without mediation into the world of the supernatural, where misrule and desire are given free rein. Britten’s fascination with the alternation and occasional interaction between three groups of very different characters provides the key to the opera: the fairies seem to embody nostalgia, sung as they are by boys accompanied by harps and percussion, while the role of Oberon is devolved to a countertenor, Titania to a coloratura—perhaps a subtle reference to Mozart’s Queen of the Night (in Die Zauberflöte [The Magic Flute]). It is interesting to note that the part of Oberon was written for Alfred Deller, the performer who played an essential part in the rediscovery of the countertenor tessitura and the popularization of the Elizabethan repertoire. Puck, the mediator between the three worlds of court, country, and supernatural and between the stage world and the audience, is a spoken role usually devolved to a teenager. The roles of the lovers, on the other hand, are characterized by an absence of arias or set pieces, making them hard to tell apart, following Shakespeare’s deliberately confusing design but also in the spirit of the first acts of Mozart’s Così fan tutte. Finally, the Mechanicals, whom Britten called the Rustics, provide the composer with a delightful opportunity for parody, underlined by the use of brass and bassoon. The opera ends with marriage and reconciliation at the court of Theseus and Hippolyta, but the musical climax is the love scene between Titania and Bottom, at the very heart of the piece. The gradual blending of two radically opposed musical styles into the most exquisitely lyrical language can be deciphered as a musical interpretation of Victor Hugo’s Shakespeare-inspired theory that the sublime is often born of the grotesque.

Eminent recent European adaptations include Aribert Reimann’s Lear (1978), based on an extraordinarily austere rendering of Shakespeare’s hitherto unadapted play, and Luciano Berio’s Un re in ascolto (1984; A King Listens), a reflection on creation and the complex workings of memory that is based on The Tempest. The French composer Pascal Dusapin’s Roméo et Juliette (1988) is a metatheatrical opera built around a rehearsal of Shakespeare’s play. Wintermärchen (1999) by the Belgian composer Philippe Boesmans (born 1936) is an adaptation in German of The Winter’s Tale, a kaleidoscopic work that develops the game of contrasts provided by the Shakespearean plot. One great originality of the new version of The Tempest by Thomas Adès (born 1971), first performed at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in 2004, resides in its libretto by Meredith Oakes, a completely rewritten text following the original plot but allowing an English-speaking composer to benefit from the same distance as Continental musicians working with translations. Adès adopts an eminently lyrical and introspective approach, with a gentle Caliban who seems to be Prospero’s doppelgänger. The opera, which in 2005 won an Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Opera, is notable for the instrumental treatment of the part of Ariel, whose coloratura vocalizing contributes to create the supernatural atmosphere that underscores the whole piece.

More than 200 operas based on Shakespeare’s plays have been written since 1945, but very few of them have remained in repertory. Coming a few years after Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate (1948; a lighthearted version of The Taming of the Shrew), Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story (1957) was a landmark at the frontier between musical and opera that transposed the story of Romeo and Juliet to a mid-20th-century New York torn apart by rival gangs, but it circumvented many key elements of the Shakespearean original, most notably Juliet’s suicide.