Daniel Albright

Musicking Shakespeare (eBook, PDF)

A Conflict of Theatres

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

Demonstrates how Purcell, Berlioz, Verdi, and Britten, responding to Shakespeare's juxtaposition of contrasting theatrical styles, devised music dramas that call opera into question.

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. Thefour 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.

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

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
• Seitenzahl: 332
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. Juli 2007
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781580466929
• Artikelnr.: 63931683

Autorenporträt

Daniel ALbright is Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature, Harvard University

Inhaltsangabe

The Veronese Social Code The Code of Love Love against Language The
Afterlife of Romeo and Juliet La lance branlée: French Opinions of
Shakespeare Berlioz in the Plural Roméo et Juliette: Introduction Roméo et
Juliette: The Symphony Roméo et Juliette: The Opera Resumes Shakespeare's
Random Magic as Theft Prophesying Squinting at Consequences Macbeth's
Children Macbeth as an Actor Two Theatres Witches Amok Sortileges of Speech
Lady Macbeth as Witch Time Slips La Sonnambula Cosmicomedy The Picture of
Cupid Depictorializing Cupid Cupid's Wax The Tedious Brief Scene Other
Dreams in Other Summers: The Aesthetic of the Masque Purcell's The Fairy
Queen Lampe's Pyramus and Thisbe Experimenters: Mendelssohn and Korngold
Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream