That seems entirely plausible, Richard. I didn't know about the Fool in Reimann (not knowing the opera at all). When it was given in English translations, do you know if they went back to the Shakespearean text, or did the German get re-translated back again?

The extra line ("Compelling thee to marry with Demetrius") is Pears's, I believe. Mary will correct me if I'm wrong, but I've always understood that the bulk of the work on the libretto was his.
The part of Puck was conceived for an acrobat - or at least a very agile performer: an immediate reason for the role to be spoken. He's also an outsider: the bridge between the three worlds, fairies, higher mortals and mechanical, yet a member of none. Britten assigned each of these three worlds a different range of voices: the fairies from the bright coloratura of Tytania through the children's voices of the attendants to the counter-tenor of Oberon, the higher mortals from the soprano of Helena through to the heroic baritone of Theseus, the mechanicals from the buffo tenor of Flute down to the bass of Quince. Every register of the male voice was already covered: the spoken register of Puck sets him aside from everybody else.

There may be another practical reason: the age of the original EOG Pucks. The opera that preceded MND, Noye's Fludde, ran into difficulties when the voice of the eldest of the three boys playing Noye's sons broke during rehearsals, and the part had to be rewritten. Because they often sing in unison, or simple harmony, it wasn't too difficult to transpose his notes down an octave or revoice the chords, whilst still leaving a top line in the right place: they're not massive parts either, so presumably it wasn't a huge job or too time-consuming in rehearsal hours. Puck's a rather larger part, and has far more interaction with other principals. By specifying a spoken role, it could be entrusted to an experienced youngster without the risk of having to redo everything or recast and re-rehearse if his voice went: indeed, a breaking (or broken voice) could even be an advantage when it comes to imitating the rival males' voices as he leads them around the wood. (It's interesting that the both Britten's first and last pivotal child/adolescent characters are virtually mute: one sobs and screams, the other only dances.)

A qualified failure? I couldn't disagree more. I'm of the opinion that Lear is in the absolute front rank of Shakespeare's works. I can think of no other work of his in which the disruption of the natural order (which takes place in the very first scene - before we even really understand who/what any of the characters and their motivations are) so permeates every level of the ensuing action. This work is both visceral and cerebral, and while it may be true that the 'bard's reach exceeded his grasp', what he did manage to grasp is (I think) something deeply profound.

But this is probably not the place to be discussing the relative merits of Shakespeare's play. Ahem.

Yes. My edition includes the melodies as an appendix. I don't believe these were actually written down by Shakespeare himself, but were subsequent transcriptions of what was originally performed. I'll check up on this when I get home tonight. I remember seeing a production that used these melodies, but played onstage by Feste in a kind of 'modernised', 4/4 acoustic-rock arrangement. It worked in context, but I couldn't help but be reminded of James Brown's version of Burt Bacharach's What the world needs now.


I have my own little fantasies about about an opera based on Titus Andronicus. I'll probably not get the chance to do it, though. Opera Australia doesn't seem to be too keen on new work (although their Sydney season this year contains works as recent as Billy Budd and The Makropoulos Case, and next year we get Lady Macbeth! Oh My!)

I'm unconvinced by this theory about second-rate theatre making first-rate opera - let me explain why I think so?

It was put into words neatly by one of the librettists in the FIVE:FIFTEEN performance (Scottish Opera's program of "5 x 15-minute" operas on one bill) that I saw last week.

"You can't be too poetical in a libretto - you have to be simple, to give the composer room to work.  If you've said it all in the libretto, the composer has nothing to add".

This might be why Chekhov has been so rarely set in the opera-house?  His plays are an infinitely-nuanced exploration of character and motive,  with actual plot-material being factored-out almost entirely.  (viz THE CHERRY ORCHARD, whose plot is "the Cherry Orchard is sold in an auction".  And in fact, we never even see the auction, the only element of action in the play!).

Perhaps I am guilty (Martle & RB may take particular exception to this) in believing that music's capacity for carrying forward plot elements is more limited than its powers for evoking atmosphere, mood, emotion and sentiments subtler than words can convey.  Those areas where music CAN carry the forward forward independent of the text seem limited to a restricted number of circumstances whose musical connotations are defined by prior association...  ceremonial scenes, battles, marches etc.   I don't say it's not possible - but it's harder to do.  (An example of a master of the genre achieving it is in my favourite MAZEPPA (Tchaikovsky), in the duet face-off between Maria and her mother...  the entire character of a domestic fracas is altered in scale and scope by the sound of the offstage band warming-up for the Execution of Maria's father).

Is music more suitable to some kinds of drama than others?  Shakespeare is almost always preoccupied with the thoughts and feelings of the "small people" whose lives are smitten by the events of the plot, rather than the plot itself.  Emotions and reactions work in music - IMHO - enormously better than large-scale action.  Librettists of the wiser kind have always known this.  Instead of showing a people being ruthlessly repressed by a tyrannical Govt,  Beethoven's FIDELIO opts for a microcosm of the event, and shows us two small people caught-up in larger events - without the need to show those larger events.  Maybe Shakespeare's prediliction for the "personal" over the "municipal" has made his works more suitable for operatic treatment?    With a few notable exceptions, the Histories haven't been set as operas nearly so often as the Tragedies and Comedies,  and that cannot be coincidental

As an actor himself, Shakespeare must have been more than aware that the text is only the start of the performance - what is explicit in the text leaves the implicit open to interpretation, and herein lies the craft of the actor and director...   to lift the text off the page.  The composer is involved at this point - to find the abstract and emotional that's not notated in the play-text, and give breath and life to it.

The rather TOP-like view that Shakespeare's texts are sacrosanct is piffle - to read or act the text alone is like believing you've seen and experienced a great movie by reading the screenplay.  They were conceived for performance,  and deserve it

There are problems with setting Shakespeare's texts, though, Rei, and more often than not, it's one of diminution.

Setting his words themselves, when they have so much music of their own, requires an absolute genius: even Britten doesn't manage it all the time, although his hit-rate is pretty high: composers who are not setting his original words, but translations of them into any other language - even modern English - don't have that hurdle to surmount.

Unless the opera is going to run to Wagnerian proportions, the plot will have to be simplified, sub-plots excised, characters conflated: in effect returning to Shakespeare's sources as much as his actual drama. Surely the point that was being made about drama which is not absolutely first-rate being turned into opera is that there's a likelihood that the piece will gain thereby: it's not holding Shakespeare sacrosanct to suggest that turning his plays into opera risks the opposite.

It's pretty good Walton, though! (I heard it recently for the first time. I think I'd sort of avoided it earlier on the assumption that I already knew all the really good Walton and didn't want to confirm my suspicion there was a lot more that was fair to middling ...)

Time² thinks someone should make an opera out of The Proposal (The Marriage Proposal??). I don't know it.

Incidentally, on the subject of Philippe Boesmans (whose Winter's Tale was mentioned earlier), has anyone heard - or seen (there's a DVD available on the Bel Air label, which I once saw just a couple of scenes of) - his opera Julie, after Strindberg?

Are there any Ibsen operas? Robin Holloway's made some sort of choral drama out of Brand, though I don't know it, and he's also made a multi-media work out of Peer Gynt but it's never been performed. I'm not sure anyone could beat the full dramatic version of Grieg's "Peer Gynt + music" hybrid, though.

Yes, its first production was in 1938 and it had a critical reception in the German press until Hitler attended a performance and declared his approval, but the last production in the Third Reich took place in 1940. Egk's music became rather successful in Germany in the immediate postwar years, despite his having been an official of the Reichsmusikkammer, but I think I'd be right in saying that somehow the label "Nazi composer" stuck to him a lot more firmly than in cases like Orff and Strauss. Certainly his music seems to be nowhere to be seen or heard these days, even in Germany. Is it really so awful? I have no idea.