August 2, 2011
Top Ten Shakespeare Operas
2 comments
Shakespeare lovers don't necessarily love what musicians and librettists do to his plays, and composers struggle under the weight of a full pentameter line, heavy with imagery and some of the most world-famous sentences ever written. And yet, there are by now well over 200 operas based on the Bard of Avon because the rich characters and wild stories are too great a temptation to resist. Though some of the librettos on this list are distinguished more by what they remove than what they retain, all drew inspired music from their composers, testament enough to the enduring power of the originals.
2. Otello
Giuseppe Verdi: The Verdi-Boito version this time, which manages the startling trick of being faithful to Shakespeare and many Italian opera conventions too. No one, including Shakespeare, ever caught Desdemona's anguish so perfectly.
3. A Midsummer Night's Dream
Benjamin Britten: Even folks who don't like 20th-century opera can revel in this tuneful dream of an adaptation by Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. Uses original Shakespeare lines!
4. The Tempest
Thomas Adès: Not yet a decade old, Thomas Adès opera takes on the play from a slightly novel angle and jettisons most of the original language. "Full of airy beauty and eerie power," in Alex Ross' apt phrase.
5. Beatrice et Benedict
Hector Berlioz: Berlioz' delightful opera jettisons most of the plot of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, yet its score continues to win laurels and performances.
6. Macbeth
Giuseppe Verdi: Verdi's first Shakespeare opera is usually performed in its 1865 revision. Which, on the whole, is a really good decision.
7. The Fairy Queen
Henry Purcell: Henry Purcell's "demi-opera" is rarely heard in its adapted-from-Shakespeare context, but the score is brilliant and still performed.
8. West Side Story
Leonard Bernstein: OK, it's not a proper opera, but it's clearly the most popular (and best) theatrical adaptation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
10. Falstaff, ossia le tre burle
Antonio Salieri: Antonio Salieri, Mozart's friend, made a sparkling comic opera out of Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor. With four recordings released, opera fans are beginning to notice.
Comments
Personally I'd be happy to
Personally I'd be happy to boot either Purcell or Salieri from your list to make room for Vaughn-Williams's Sir John in Love. Verdi's Falstaff is a completely wonderful comic opera, but Verdi and Boito transformed it so well that if you didn't look at the program notes you might never guess that it takes place in England and not Italy. Sir John in Love is not always as deftly constructed, but its music conveys a love of the English countryside and the feel of country society in Elizabethan England. That feeling is what makes The Merry Wives of Windsor special — Shakespeare wrote much better constructed comedies than this one, but Merry Wives is the only play that Shakespeare set in anything like his own time and place.
Lear
I would bounce West Side Story - that is cheating! - in favor of Reimann's Lear....an opera I managed to miss in San Francisco in the 1980s, when I was an irregular opera-goer at best.
For that matter, I would swap A Midsummer Night's Dream into second place, because I consider Verdi's Otello to be seriously flawed.
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