Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 3 Number 1, April 2002
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Graham, Arthur. Shakespeare in Opera, Ballet, Orchestral Music, and Song. Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen, 1997. 213pp., ISBN 0-7734-8515-5 (Hbk), $89.95 US. £ 49.95
Reviewed by
In his preface to Arthur Graham’s Shakespeare in Opera, Ballet, Orchestral Music, and Song, Robert Egan writes that the work “can validly be called a textbook and syllabus.” The book is, indeed, an excellent syllabus for an introductory cross-disciplinary university course comparing Shakespeare’s plays with the music they have inspired. Teaching such a course would be easy work after reading Graham; he provides his reader with a component-by-component blueprint of how the material should be taught. Each chapter offers a brief module on a specific Shakespearean play and on the operas, ballets, and incidental music spawned by that play. The language is clear and concise. Knowledge of music or of musical theory is not a prerequisite for the reader.
On the other hand, finely crafted arguments and thought-provoking open-ended discussions are in short supply in Graham’s book. He does not go into great detail on any subject, preferring instead to direct his reader, in a bibliography, to other books on Shakespeare biography and Shakespearean criticism. He tends to deal with his material on a simplified level. The book offers an instructor fine resources with which to begin discussions—passages from Shakespeare, lyrics by Verdi, criticism by George Bernard Shaw—but it does not offer the student enough direction to make meaningful decisions about the operas and ballets discussed. Graham prefers to make few pronouncements about the music other than to point up differences in the way characters and themes are handled between one medium and the next. An argumentative edge is generally absent from the book.
Perhaps an easy way to underline this shortcoming is to make a brief comparison between Graham’s book and one of the books in his bibliography, Gary Schmidgall’s Shakespeare and Opera. Schmidgall begins his book with a close examination of a little-studied passage from Titus Andronicus, which begins with Marcus’ “O brother speak with possibility,/ And do not break into these deep extremes.” After asking, “Wherein lies the synonymy of Shakespearean and operatic?” Schmidgall divides Marcus’ and Titus’ speeches into recitative, slow aria, and fast aria and then finds an answer to his original question: “It is thus no coincidence that the performance of an aria or a set speech can usually be appraised according to the same technical desiderata: breadth of range, suppleness of phrasing, justness of emphasis, keenness of diction, mastery of tonal nuance, security of projection, coherence of the whole, and so on.” Later, in a discussion of Reimann’s adaptation of King Lear, Schmidgall writes that Henneberg’s libretto is “colorless and empty after the fashion in which Peter Brook rendered the world in his powerful film of Lear a stark black and white.” Schmidgall’s brand of out-of-the-box thinking is not a characteristic of Graham’s book. Graham begins his Chapter One with the question “What is Opera?” and the answer is typically matter-of-fact: “An opera, essentially, is a stage play set to music with orchestral accompaniment.” This simplified tone is maintained through the remainder of the book. On page 107, Graham is still reciting easy facts: “The term quarto refers to a size of book. Four pages are printed on each side of a large sheet, which is folded twice before binding.” Most chapters of Graham’s book begin, predictably, with a lengthy plot synopsis of one of Shakespeare’s plays. Where Schmidgall’s book offers food for thought, Graham’s is full of the factual information.
As a syllabus for an introductory college course, however, Graham’s book has many charming qualities. It offers a scene-by-scene comparison of the plays and the operas in layman’s language. The structure of the book is good; each successive chapter deals with a progressively more difficult issue or with a more in-depth view of the plays and operas. Graham begins with an introduction to opera and a brief discussion of Verdi’s Macbeth. By Chapter Three, he is dealing with the theme of comedy in music and how comedic elements are handled in opera, discussing deliberate parody of dramatic arias and the disconnect between beautiful vocal delivery and character gesture in the performance of basso buffo roles. In Chapter Four, Graham offers an in-depth comparison of Shakespeare’s Othello, Verdi’s Otello (1886), and Rossini’s Otello (1816). The chapter features a great deal of raw material for classroom discussion: comparisons of text from play and operas; critical discussion of character from Charles Boyce, Peter Levi, and others; and George Bernard Shaw’s review of Verdi’s opera, published in The Anglo-Saxon Review in 1901. Graham includes a valuable appendix of titles of recommended recordings referred to in the text. I only wished that a companion set of compact disks could be sold with the book.
Shakespeare in Opera, Ballet, Orchestral Music, and Song contains all the elements of a wonderful cross-disciplinary course in Shakespeare and music; one reading will make you want to teach such a course. If you are looking for cogitation about some of the more difficult aesthetic issues in the interface between Shakespeare and opera, or for a working through of serious argument, those things are not to be found in Graham’s book.
Dwayne Brenna
Univ. of Saskatchewan
Biographical Note:
Dwayne Brenna is Associate Professor and Head of the Drama Department at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada.