Musicking Shakespeare: A Conflict of Theatres (Eastman Studies in Music) [Hardcover]

Daniel Albright (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2007 | ISBN-10: 1580462553 | ISBN-13: 978-1580462556

In this book, Daniel Albright, one of today's most intrepid and vividly communicative explorers of the border territory between literature and music, offers insights into how composers of genius can help us to understand Shakespeare. Musicking Shakespeare demonstrates how four composers -- Purcell, Berlioz, Verdi, and Britten -- respond to the distinctive features of Shakespeare's plays: their unwieldiness, their refusal to fit into interpretive boxes, their ranting quality, their arbitrary bursts of gorgeousness. The four composers break the normal forms of opera -- of music altogether -- in order to come to terms with the challenges that Shakespeare presents to the music dramatist. Musicking Shakespeare begins with an analysis of Shakespeare's play The Tempest as an imaginary Jacobean opera and as a real Restoration opera. It then discusses works that respond with wit and sophistication to Shakespeare's irony, obscurity, contortion, and heft: Berlioz's Roméo et Juliette, Verdi's Macbeth, Purcell's The Fairy Queen, and Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream. These works are problematic in the ways that Shakespeare's plays are problematic. Shakespeare's favorite dramatic device is to juxtapose two kinds of theatres within a single play, such as the formal masque and the loose Elizabethan stage. The four composers studied here respond to this aspect of Shakespeare's art by going beyond the comfort zone of the operatic medium. The music dramas they devise call opera into question.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Winner, CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award, 2008 The strength of this study lies in Albright's understanding of the dramatic meanings of musical performance. . . [Contains] a must-read introduction that discusses a typology of singing characters and how the playwright uses them dramatically. . . . This important contribution to the study of text/music relationships should be in all music collections. Summing Up: Highly recommended. --CHOICE [George Torres]

I would urge anyone interested in Shakespeare and music to read [Albright's Volume]...In the central Macbeth section,...Albright provides readers with a nuanced and productive interpretive framework for understanding both play and opera....A feisty and often inspirational contribution to Shakespeare Studies and the dialogue between the disciplines. --MUSIC AND LETTERS [Julie Sanders]

Engrossing, . . . learned and enlightening discussions of how literature always aspires to the wordless power of music.-BIBLIOTHEQUE D'HUMANISME ET RENAISSANCE [Leonard R. N. Ashley] This lively book draws our attention to conflict with the theatre, [and] to ways dramatic works-be they plays or operas-have the capacity to undermine themselves in a paradoxically productive manner. . . . A rigorously interdisciplinary project. . . . Albright treats composers as literary critics and their works as commentaries upon Shakespeare's texts. . . . Illuminating comparisons. . . . Albright gives us an extremely personal account of these works that displays all the passions and pleasures of reading-and listening to-Shakespeare. --MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW [Hannah J. Crawforth] --Various

About the Author

Daniel Albright is the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 332 pages
• Publisher: University of Rochester Press (July 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1580462553
• ISBN-13: 978-1580462556
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,495,609 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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