Shakesong Composers

Only two composers, Thomas Morley & Robert Johnson, are known to have set Shakespeare’s song lyrics to music during his lifetime. Of the two, Johnson is rumored to have worked most closely with Shakespeare and may have had personal input from the Bard on some of Shakespeare’s last productions, such as The Tempest. However, many of Shakespeare’s lyrics (both song and non-song) have been set to music since that time. Indeed, famous composers from the Renaissance onward often considered doing a Shakesong the acid test of their abilities. Some, such as Benjamin Britten, composed entire operas of the plays. Below is a sampling of some of the most notable Shakesong composers to transform Shakespeare’s song lyrics into something “rich and strange.”

 

Matthew Locke (1622-1677)

Choir Master of Exeter Cathedral. He converted to Catholicism and flourished under the reign of Charles II, becoming royal composer, organist to the Queen, and supplying music for Charles II’s coronation. His chief distinction as a Shakespearean music composer is the score he supplied for Dryden and Davenant’s production of The Tempest, in 1667. He is also often credited with writing music for a revival of Macbeth in 1689, but that music is now believed to have been written by his close friend, Henry Purcell, who succeeded him as royal composer. Locke is rumored to have had a difficult personality and was embroiled in many personal disputes. His most notable dispute was with Thomas Salmon, who advocated the writing of all music on one clef. Of course, musicians today know that Locke’s views about musical notation prevailed.

Benjami Britten(1913-1976)

Britten is considered one of the foremost English composers of the 20th century. A child prodigy, his first exposure to music came through his mother. Later, he was discovered by composer Frank Bridge, who was a talented composer in his own right and highly influenced by the modern styles of Bartok and Schoenberg. Britten studied at the Royal College of Music, but found little inspiration there, because his mentor Bridge was not widely regarded by the establishment. Britten's first professional job came as a television composer. During this time, he also met the poet W.H. Auden, and used his poetry in Hymn to St. Celia (1942). Britten already had several operas to his credit by the time he began work on A Midsummer Night's Dream in August of 1959, including such notable works as Peter Grimes (1945), Albert Herring (1947), Billy Budd (1951), and The Turn of the Screw (1954).

A Midsummer Night's Dream was created for a performance to celebrate the renovation of Jubilee Hall in 1960. Adapted by Britten and tenor Peter Pears, the libretto is wholly based on Shakespeare's text (about half is cut). In an interview with the BBC just prior to the work's first performance, Britten said, "my main feeling in setting this work was an enormous love and reverence and respect for the text. I feel that everyone ought to set Shakespeare to music in order just to get to know the incredible beauty and intensity of these words." Britten received many prizes and honors, including becoming a Companion of Honour in 1952, and a member of the Order of Merit in 1965. At fifty he won the Robert O. Anderson Aspen Award in the Humanities, which was a $30,000 prize, and two citations from the New York Music Critics Circle for A Midsummer Night's Dream and the War Requiem. He was also made a life peer in 1976, the year of his death. Britten's version of A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of only 5 operas based on Shakespeare recommended by the Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians.

Roger Quilter (1877- 1953)

Roger Quilter was a writer of songs, and virtually nothing else. He composed over one hundred songs, at least half of which remain in the repertoire, loved by performers and audiences alike. This popularity perhaps arose in the first place from the absence of great technical demands being made on the performers (or intellectual ones on the listeners), but the fact that this popularity has never waned owes everything to Quilter's individuality: the addictive qualities of his vocal lines and his uniquely involved accompaniments. Roger Quilter was born at Brighton on November 1, 1877, the son of Sir Cuthbert Quilter, a wealthy business-man, landowner and politician. His education began a predictable course: prep. school (at Farnborough) followed by Eton (which he hated). But instead of continuing the chartered voyage to Oxbridge, he proceeded to Hoch's Conservatorium in Frankfurt-am-Main. Here he studied for four and a half years with the eminent Russian professor of composition, Iwan Knorr. Quilter realised from the beginning that songwriting was his natural métier and he made his London debut as a composer with settings of his own verse, Four Songs of the Sea (1900). But it was the practical encouragement of the great tenor, Gervase Elwes (1866-1921) that established his reputation. Greatly impressed by Quilter's setting of Tennyson's Now sleeps the crimson petal, Elwes persuaded Boosey to publish it, and from then until his tragic death (crushed by a locomotive during a tour of the USA) Elwes was to introduce some of Quilter's finest songs, notably To Julia and the Seven Elizabethan Lyrics. These, with the Three Shakespeare Songs, Opus 6, established Quilter as the foremost English songwriter of his generation. From 1900 until the late 1940s, when mental illness hindered his ability to compose, Quilter published well over 100 songs. He died on September 21. So popular were Quilter's songs during the first decades of the century, and so evocative of their time, that they quickly became period pieces, soon to be ignored, indeed ridiculed and despised. It is only in the last few years that Roger Quilter's very individual voice has come to be valued for its true worth.

Thomas Arne - Father of Bard Song

When it comes to Shakespeare’s vocal settings, Thomas Arne is the archetypal Shakespeare songwriter. Born March 12, 1710. His family business was upholstery, and they were successful enough to be able to afford to send him to Eton College. Upon graduation, Arne articled as a lawyer, but when his father discovered his son’s musical inclinations, he was persuaded to let him give up law for music.

Arne was a progressive musician for his day, eager to try new styles of music heard on the continent. The most famous of Arne’s songs were published in 1741, when he was 30. They appeared in a volume entitled “The Music In the Comedy of As You Like it”. The collection contained songs from several Shakespeare plays including Twelfth Night and Love Labor’s Lost. These settings have become classics of Shakespeare song.

Famous settings by Thomas Arne

• Come Away, Death
• Blow Blow Thou Winter Wind
• Under the Greenwood Tree
• The Owl

 

William Boyce

Born 1711 London. His parents were cabinet makers. He began his musical education at age 12 as a choir boy at St. Paul’s Cathedral. When his voice broke, Boyce was apprenticed as a pupil to the cathedral organist, composer Maurice Greene. In 1736 he was appointed composer to the Chapel Royal, a post which allowed him to compose some of his most famous anthems and church music.

"The Battle of the Romeos"

In 1750 a “war” broke out between two rival theatre companies in London-- Covent Garden under Christopher Rich, and Drury Lane under David Garrick. The two companies unveiled competing productions of Romeo and Juliet. The centerpiece of the Covent Garden production was a funeral dirge for Juliet, composed by Thomas Arne. The musical addition resulted in huge crowds and box office response. Garrick and company only had a week to respond, so they hired Boyce to write music for their production. The result was even larger crowds for Drury Lane’s version, thus beginning a competition known as the “battle of the Romeo’s”.

Thomas Linley the Younger

Thomas Linley (1756-78) was a gifted Shakespeare composer who died at the age of 22. A musical prodigy, he studied with William Boyce beginning at the age of seven, an apprenticeship that lasted five years.

At the age of 12, he dazzled critics with his performance as Puck in the Covent Garden Opera House’s production of “The Fairy Favor”, a masque. Shortly thereafter, he departed for Italy and the tutelage of the violin master Pietro Nardini.

While in Italy in 1770, Linley met Mozart. The two were exact contemporaries and both prodigies, and became fast friends. They continued to correspond with each other after Linley returned home to England.

In 1776 Linley wrote his masterful “Shakespeare Ode”. A dictionary of musicians in 1824 states:

“Neither Purcell nor Mozart ever gave stronger proofs of original genius than could be traced in this charming ode...” Sadly, Linley died in a boating accident in 1778. Of him, Mozart said: “He was a true genius”.

Maurice Green

Born in 1696, Greene studied under composer Jeremiah Clarke. In 1717 he accepted the post of organist at St. Paul’s Cathedral. A teacher as well as a composer, his students included many other soon-to-be famous composers, including Wiliam Boyce. Greene founded many musicians’ societies during his lifetime, including the Royal Society of Musicians (a fund for needy musicians and their families) and the Academy of Ancient Music (which specialized in early music performances).

Greene himself made an early setting of “Orpheus with his lute” from The Tempest, in 1745.

Greene was friends with the composer Handel, but fell out of favor with him after befriending one of Handel’s rivals, composer Giovanni Bononcini. Greene was dismissed from the Ancient Academy after an incident involving a misappropriation of creative credit (of which he was entirely innocent). He responded by setting up the rival Apollo Society with his friend Bononcini, at the Apollo Room of an establishment known as the Devil’s Tavern. This turn of events caused Handel to remark of Greene: "Dr. Greene has gone to the devil!"

 

Ralph Vaughan Williams

The greatest of modern-day Shakespeare composers is undoubtedly Ralph Vaughan Williams, who died in 1958. He made settings of "O Mistress Mine" and "Willow" as early as 1890, when he was only 18. He also made two solo settings of "Orpheus with his lute"; part song settings of "It Was a Lover and His Lass" and the dirge from Cymbeline.

His three Shakespeare songs of 1926 includes "Orpheus" "Take O Those Lips Away" and "WhenIcicles Hang". He even composed a Shakespeare opera, "Sir John In Love". His last Shakespeare tribute was an SATB setting of 3 texts "Full Fathom Five" "The Cloud Capped Towers" and "Over Hill Over Dale"--- pieces of the rarest imagination.

 

Gerald Finzi

Among the host of recent Shakespeare composers, none showed greater sensitivity than Gerald Finzi-- his song cycle dates from 1942, and includes "Let Us Garlands Bring" "Come Away, Death" "Who Is Sylvia?" "O Mistress Mine" and "It Was a Lover and His Lass".