April The 23rd is the anniversary of the birth (and death) of a man regarded internationally as our greatest poet and dramatist. Wordsworth once let it be known at a dinner-party that he could have written the works of Shakespeare "if he had had the mind." Shakespeare, Dante and others rejoiced in heaven as they read a new work by their equal, Victor Hugo (admittedly, they chose to inform the world of this in French and at séances held by the Hugo family). Most writers may be less sure of themselves, or careless of the dignity that goes with being an original artist. The posthumous fame of Shakespeare (if not his actual style), became unassailable in the 18th Century (Sir Edward Elgar's favourite period in Shakespeare criticism), and later fuelled romanticism, more or less indirectly influencing most major European writers, composers and artists in their outlooks and work. In many cases, if there had been no Shakespeare, there should have been no leading light, no new illumination.
From the Augustan period, through the cultivation of the picturesque, the instinctive, the gothic, the revolutionary, the nationalist, the Imperial, and later, the Modernist, Marxist and Post-modern, every age has had its idea of Shakespeare as well as the works. His phrases are found everywhere (many of them came into his works from everywhere), his plots and characters remain what they always were, an international mix of European tales perspicuously Englished, and purely home-grown histories and knockabouts - and invitations to the play of very English verse, worse and prose. Simplicity breeds humanity and profundity - and a measure of agelessness.
The scope and depth of Shakespeare's life's work are unparalleled, from the pen of one who was described in his lifetime as having "little Latin and less Greek'. Perhaps his lack of scholarship has been more than made up for since his death: generations of First-rate minds have built heights of ivory towers on him. Not all seem to have been disinterested in their estimate of him. For seventy years, George Bernard Shaw wasted thousands of pages in telling us how vulgar and incompetent an artist he was - how greatly inferior to Shaw (who was himself once cuttingly described as being 'all intellect and no brain'). Again, there have been many many conspiracy theories - or disputes over who Shakespeare really was. Obviously, he must have been too brainy not to have gone to college. A bloke who held horses and acted a bit must simply have put his name to works by a true intellectual, such as the great lawyer and essayist, Sir Francis Bacon, or the foppish but decidedly clever Earl of Southampton...
How to write a programme so much as involving Shakespeare? This man who finds a place in everyday conversation, even if the speaker has no notion that he is quoting him? This man whose concocted situations have a way of being played out most affectingly off-stage and in very different circumstances and language?
Composers, the makers of non-verbal magic sounds, can help us out there. This week and next, enjoy the Shakespeares we come up with, and either reaffirm what it meant to study him at school or college, or try to see and hear him anew.
Classical
Break Shakespeare (Rpt)
Hullo, this is Classical Break, and I’m Mike
Burrows.
Today on Classical Break we shall be hearing
works inspired by the plays of Shakespeare, and we start with the concert
overture Julius Caesar by the German composer, Robert Schumann. This year, in fact a few days ago, was the
bicentenary of Schumann’s birth in Saxony on June the 8th, 1810. He died at the Endenich Hospital outside Bonn
on July the 29th, 1856. Julius Caesar was written in 1851 and is
intended to evoke the splendour of Caesar’s career and the vain masterfulness
of his nature, as portrayed by Shakespeare, rather than actual scenes from the
play. The fact of Caesar’s assassination
is turned around by a coda in the major.
Some have said that this piece could be about any tragic hero; how does it evoke Caesar or Ancient Rome, Circa
44BC?!
Track
One: Julius
Caesar (Robert Schumann)
Perhaps he should have called it A Hero’s Life, and thus confounded our
more literal-minded critics! This is a
very German Caesar - a Rhineland Caesar.
Though never of the extreme Nationalist tendency, Schumann was very
conscious of his Germanness and desired to make German music. For the rest, as in all his character
studies, he identified with the figure portrayed. Here, in its monumental but
unWagner-like scoring - some tricky parts for valved brass instruments and
violins, a warm, glowing woodwind palette softening their effects - a strong
bass and stubborn dotted rhythms - Schumann created a kaleidoscopic work of
nobility and real determination - well worthy of Shakespeare, or Caesar!
Julius
Caesar
has been described as magnificently aggressive!
Schumann was forty-one when he wrote it, starting out on a new career as
Kapellmeister at Dusseldorf. His first
year in his position - from 1850-1 was successful; this piece was written with
his work with the orchestra in mind. In
music, he could feel with a conqueror:
in life...it was not to be.
When a patient at Endenich, the Overture may
have been the last music that he played with another - the young Brahms visited
and they performed it together in its piano-duet-arrangement. Poignantly, Brahms remarked later that
Schumann confessed to being out of practice.
This is Classical Break and Somer Valley
Radio, and I’m Mike Burrows. We’re
hearing music inspired by the plays of Shakespeare.
For our second piece I have chosen music by Jean
Sibelius, born in Finland in 1865, who again came to Shakespeare surprizingly
late in his career, most substantially when he was asked to write incidental
music for a prestigious Copenhagen production of The Tempest. Overall, this
music seems to me quite possibly the greatest expression in music of
Shakespeare’s magic and romance. As the
entire score lasts just under an hour, it was extremely difficult to choose a
number from it; many of them last under two minutes, some only a matter of a
few seconds, but all are miracles of economical expression and character. Others have written striking music to The Tempest, composers as diverse in
time and style as Purcell, Tchaikovsky and Frank Martin, but to me, Sibelius
simply comes closest to realising the Shakespearian interplay between the magic
of elementals and the warmth of human love and anger. My excerpt comes from Scene Two Act Two, The Oak Tree: the Spirit of the Air contemplates the
punishment of being imprisoned in an oak tree as threatened by his master, Prospero
the magician. Sibelius wrote extensively
for symbolist plays by Finnish, Swedish and French dramatists and writes here in
a similar, infinitely subtle, terse and uncanny strain.
Track
Two: The
Oak Tree (Sibelius)
My next piece is the song from As you like it: It was
a lover and his lass, and this was the work of Thomas Morley, whose dates
are 1557-1602. He was the organist at St
Paul’s Cathedral and a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal. He and Shakespeare were neighbours for a time
and his would have been the tune used in contemporary performances of the play.
Track
Three: It was a lover and his lass (Morley)
Now we move on to the music of Sir Edward
Elgar, who lived from 1857-1934 and was born and died in Worcestershire. Falstaff,
A Symphonic Study, dates from
1913. This tone poem portrays the famous
character from Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 and Henry V as opposed to the Falstaff of the Merry Wives of Windsor.
A complexly comic figure, this man, a Knight, has lived out the end of
his life in the stews of London trying to maintain a riotous pace in the
company of the young Prince Hal and his more fashionable companion, Poins, and
the common folk of the tavern, figures such as Mistress Quickly, Bardolph, Nym
and Pistol.
Like Shakespeare’s prose, Elgar makes the
most of his larger-than-life personality.
Latter Spring, All-hallown Summer.
We shall hear the death-bed scene at the very end of a highly eventful
score.
The old King has died; his son, whom Falstaff
thought his friend is now Henry the Fifth, and has banished Falstaff and his
Eastcheapers, commanding them sharply never again to come near his person on pain
of death. We are with the old Knight -
perhaps we are he - in his last, slowly lapsing moments when, stricken by flux,
‘he babbles o’ green fields’, drifting in and out of consciousness, the
thematic material not merely pathetically descriptive of his state but
recalling former times. The violin-slide at the start is like a bed-curtain
lifted. We hear him stirring, his deep,
unsteady voice rising out of the murk he feels about him. A soft music seems like echoes of the orchard
or childhood. Mistress Quickly is
recognised dimly, he hears her, not so shrilly as during the rest of the
tone-poem... Softly, very fondly, there
is a full statement of the Prince’s theme, the strings leading it. All seems to drift away. Falstaff tries to respond, but sinks
deeper. At last, listen for the clarinet
- beautifully despairing and swooning, a brass C-major cadence - and a leap,
brazen and with side-drum - the old man starts up for the King, all Hal’s
humanity has been purged away, his title, perhaps, is a last cry - before a
still more abrupt, pianissimo, pizzicato chord tells us that he falls back,
dead. A terrible war was about to change
Elgar and the world forever.
Track
Four: Falstaff (Elgar)
And now, we're going to hear Watchman’s Song by Edvard Grieg, who was
born in Bergen in Norway in 1843 and died in hospital in Oslo in 1907. Watchman’s
Song comes from the first book of Lyric
Pieces for piano. He wrote ten books of these genre pieces. They
were extremely popular in the Nineteenth Century and more than once, Grieg
bewailed the popularity of his simple music for amateur performance, on one
occasion, writing that it wasn’t his fault that his music was played in
third-rate restaurants and by schoolgirls.
It was his misfortune, no-one else’s, it has to be said. Every time he mailed the later books, his
publishers, on receipt, raised a flag on top of their buildings! This music was written in Copenhagen, not
long after he had left the Leipzig Conservatoire. It owes much to the character pieces of Schumann. The watchman is the porter in Macbeth.
The central section, comprised chiefly of little scale figures perhaps
suggests the man’s superstition and...things that go bump in the night. For such a short piece, Watchman’s Song is very effective and memorable.
Track
Five: Watchman’s Song (Grieg)
That was Watchman’s
Song. At the age of three I listened
as my mum played it. Either you grow up
with music like this or it grows up with you. Grieg loved his country’s
folk-tunes but was also one of the most exciting harmonists in Nineteenth
Century music. Throughout his career
showed that it was possible to use harmony to create a size in music alike to
Wagner on a miniature scale. It may be
because of this and because he was extraordinarily gifted at paring back his
style that he remains one of the more consistently fresh voices in music.
Our next piece is an overture to The Taming of the Shrew by the Liverpool
composer, Alfred Reynolds, who was born in 1884, and died as recently as
1969. This work is about as far as you
can imagine from Kiss Me Kate and
belongs to what is known as the British Light Music tradition - which in
practice often used to mean warmed-over Sullivan. This is much much better than that! It is a lively, brightly-scored piece and has
a poignant humour about it that makes me wish it were much better known. It was composed for a 1927 production at the Lyric
Theatre. Reynolds worked chiefly as a
conductor and composer for the theatres of London.
Track
Six: Overture,
The Taming of the Shrew (Reynolds)
Gerald Finzi was born in 1901 and died in
1956. He was a musician quite different
from Reynolds. One of the more self-critical and anxious of composers, he wrote
in the traditions of the folksong/pastoral school of British music. Like all the best of such composers he was
not over-indebted to existing melodies. Like many driven artists, he had other
interests to fall back on. Besides building a wonderful library of contemporary
poetry - he was a superb song-writer - he planted an orchard of rare strains of
British apple in the garden of his farmhouse at Ashmansworth in Berkshire. He refused to make his living from
professional music-making or, for most of his career, from teaching. He did not solicit commissions, either, believing
that inspired music was the only music worth writing. Inspiration was fitful and it was only
towards the end of his life that he produced works on a large scale. Here is a song from the cycle Let Us Garlands Bring, which was written
between 1929 and 1942, the year in which he wrote O Mistress Mine, from Twelth
Night.
Track
Seven: O Mistress Mine (Finzi)
Back to Sibelius: a setting of Come Away, Death (from Cymbeline)
in Swedish translation. It is one of two
settings of songs from Shakespeare, the other being When that I was and a little tiny boy. Sibelius wrote these two songs at the age of
forty-four and living with the threat of throat cancer. On this recording the soloist is the great
and versatile soprano, Kirsten Flagstad.
Her performances of Sibelius songs with orchestral accompaniment date from
near the close of her long career. The
music looks forward to the mysteriousness, rich technique and emotional appeal
of the music for The Tempest.
We return to The Tempest for a part-song by Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958),
whose gift for ‘magic’ ranks with that of Sibelius. Of the Three Shakespeare Songs we are going to
hear Full Fathom Five. This was written to a commission associated
with the Festival of Britain in 1951.
Vaughan Williams - it was always Vaughan Williams, not Williams - refused the commission, then changed his mind. He sent them these songs with the words “Here
are the three Shakespeare settings, do what you like with them.” This wasn’t the spleen of a famous composer
put on the spot but his habitual attitude of modesty towards his own
productions. You may remember that he
said of his devastating Fourth Symphony that he wasn’t sure he liked it, but it
was what he had meant at the time!
Track
Eight: Full Fathom Five (Vaughan
Williams)
Vaughan Williams wrote a piece for brass band
descriptive of the Battle of Agincourt.
In it he employed two of the tunes that were used also by Sir William
Walton in his soundtrack for Sir Laurence Olivier’s film of Henry V.
This music, written in the middle of a war whose outcome was becoming
more certain and on which far more depended than it had on Henry V and his band
of brothers, is one of the finest achievements in not only patriotic British music
but also art-music as a whole. I choose
to end this programme, then, with two pieces from the later stages of the film,
the Battle of Agincourt and the Agincourt Song. The means of describing battle are little
different from those of say, Prokofiev’s portrayal of Alexander Nevsky’s defeat
of the Teutonic knights in the Battle on the Ice (also written for
a film), but the music remains terse.
Track
Nine: The Battle of Agincourt (Walton)
The
Agincourt Song
rises in full glory of choir, brass and strings in-filling. It is grandeur on the greatest scale, though
within short duration. It has much to do
with who we might be and nothing to do with football!
You have been listening to Classical Break
from Somer Valley Radio, and this is Mike Burrows. Hope to have your company again, soon.
Track
Ten: The
Agincourt Song (Walton)
© Mike Burrows 2010
