Shakespeare's Musical Legacy

We often talk about Shakespeare's lasting influence on literature, but sometimes we neglect his influence on other forms of art: visual art, film, and music. In this post, we'll explore some of the musical works that the Bard has inspired over the centuries.

Shakespeare and Musical Theater

Let's start with some of the most well-known musical adaptations of Shakespeare. Musical theater provides a wonderful opportunity to explore the works of a playwright, of course, because of its self-conscious theatricality and showmanship.

Cole Porter, Kiss Me, Kate

Cole Porter wrote both the music and the lyrics to Kiss Me, Kate. The characters of Kiss Me, Kate are actors preparing for and executing a production of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. The play itself was inspired by a true story: the producer, Arnold Saint-Subber, had seen a married couple of actors  whose offstage conflicts bled onto the stage as they were performing The Taming of the Shrew. Porter was called in to write the music and lyrics, and the first Broadway production of Kiss Me, Kate opened on December 3, 1948.

The musical includes some songs and scenes which map directly to Shakespeare's text (though in modern English, of course). Porter brings out Shakespeare's salacious side in some wonderful numbers given to Bianca like "Tom, Dick, or Harry" and "Always True to You in My Fashion" (though the title and refrain comes from a different English poet, Ernest Dowson).

Leonard Bernstein, West Side Story

This is perhaps the best-known musical theater adaptation of Shakespeare: Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story, which displaces Romeo and Juliet onto the mean streets of New York City in the 1950s. Two young lovers come from warring gangs, rather than families: the Montagues become the Jets, and the Capulets become the Sharks. Bernstein uses the familial tensions in Shakespeare's work to explore racial tensions in the musical, as the Jets are white inhabitants and the Sharks are Puerto Rican immigrants. The Broadway production opened in 1957, and won several awards (and was nominated for several more) at the 1958 Tony Awards. Bernstein does not track Shakespeare's play entirely: most evidently, Maria (the adaptation of Shakespeare's Juliet) remains alive at the end of the play.

Shakespeare and Classical Music

Translating Shakespeare's storylines into music does not require spoken lines or sung lyrics. Classical composers have been inspired by Shakespeare for centuries, so let's consider some beautiful instrumental works.

Mendelssohn, Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night's Dream

You have probably heard part of Mendelssohn's incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream without knowing it: this work includes his "Wedding March." Mendelssohn took up the subject of Shakespeare's green world comedy twice in his career: first in 1826, when he composed an overture (Op. 21), then again in 1842 when he wrote the incidental music (Op. 61). Incidental music is intended to accompany a performed play––the live performance equivalent of a movie soundtrack. 

Mendelssohn composed the overture at the age of 17 after having read a German translation of Shakespeare's play. 16 years later, he composed the incidental music as a commission from King Frederick William IV of Prussia, who enjoyed spectating his favorite plays alongside Mendelssohn's incidental music. The overture was incorporated into the incidental music; the famous "Wedding March" served as the interlude between Acts IV and V.

Tchaikovsky, Romeo and Juliet

Tchaikovsky wrote three works inspired by Shakespeare's plays (Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, and Hamlet). For his 1859 Romeo and Juliet, an orchestra work of about 20 minutes in length, Tchaikovsky renders two central motifs from the play into his music: the rivalry between the Capulets and the Montagues, and the love between the two titular characters. The composer makes use of specific instruments to capture moments from Shakespeare's plot, such as symbol crashes to allude to the sword fight in Act III, Scene 1 that results in the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt. Scholars have surmised that the profound emotion and high drama of Tchaikovsky's score might also be influenced by the suicide of a boy with whom he was in love, Eduard Zak.

Prokofiev, Romeo and Juliet

While Tchaikovsky wrote his Romeo and Juliet as an orchestral work, Prokofiev wrote his version of Shakespeare's tragedy as ballet in 1935. The ballet initially had a happy ending; the score was altered significantly by choreographer and dancer Leonid Lavrovsky (over Prokofiev's objections) and performed in Leningrad (today, St. Petersburg) in 1940.

Sibelius, Incidental Music for The Tempest

Sibelius worked on his score for The Tempest from 1925-26, when the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen performed the play (the composer made some final touches the following year). Like Tchaikovsky does in Romeo and Juliet, Sibelius renders specific characters and moments in the text with specific instrumentation: notably, he uses both harps and percussion to capture Prospero's ethereal and dark sides. 

Shakespeare and Opera

The high-stakes drama of Shakespeare seems perfectly suited to the opera medium. And Shakespeare is certainly a favorite of opera composers and librettists, as over 300 operas have drawn from his works for inspiration.

Charles Gounod, Roméo et Juliette

Roméo et Juliette (which premiered in 1867), evidently inspired by Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, was Gounod's second major opera based on a play, following Faust (which premiered in 1859). This opera remains popular today––in fact, it will enjoy a summer run at the Opéra National de Paris in 2027. It remains notable for its four duets between Romeo and Juliet and the waltz "Je veux vivre" ("I want to live") sung by Juliet. 

Verdi, Falstaff

Verdi composed three operas inspired by the Bard: Macbeth (1847), Otello (1887), and Falstaff (1893). He was also a big fan of King Lear and considered writing a work based on Hamlet. Falstaff was the last of Verdi's operas (26 in all). The opera draws mainly from The Merry Wives of Windsor, with additional excerpts from Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2. Verdi wrote the music inspired by both Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor (which he had read) and by the Italian-language libretto for Falstaff, which was written by Arrigo Boito. Boito had written the libretto for Verdi's Otello and wrote the libretto for Falstaff after Verdi mentioned his desire to write an opera based on a comedy. 

At the first performance of Falstaff at La Scala in Milan in 1893, the audience applauded Verdi and the cast for over an hour. Despite its initial success, the opera fell into neglect until it was produced repeatedly in the 1920s by conductor Arturo Toscanini at La Scala, who insisted that it was of the same quality and deserved the same acclaim as Verdi's Rigoletto and La Traviata.

Benjamin Britten, A Midsummer Night's Dream

Our first 20th century opera is Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream, inspired by Shakespeare's play of the same name and premiered in England in 1960. The libretto was a collaborative effort between Britten and his collaborator Peter Pears. Like much of the instrumental classical music inspired by Shakespeare, Britten used specific musical landscapes to delineate and accompany the three social (and overlapping geographical) worlds in Shakespeare's play––the rustics, the lovers, and the fairies. Britten captures the comic power of the rustics' performance of Pyramus and Thisbe in Act V, Scene 1 of Shakespeare's play with a musical parody of nineteenth-century Italian opera. Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream is the only English-language opera based on Shakespeare's works to be regularly performed today. 

Anthony Davis, Lear on the Second Floor

Davis's Lear on the Second Floor is not only the most recent opera in this post, but also the opera most removed from Shakespeare's original play. It is not a musical adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear, but a musical rendering of an adaptation of King Lear created by Davis and playwright Allan Havis. In performance, the opera is often subject to the same critiques as a spoken adaptation of Shakespeare: do adaptations help Shakespeare's plays resonate further with modern audiences, or simply feel awkward and undermine the timeless nature of the works that has kept audiences hooked for centuries?

In Lear on the Second Floor, Lear is not a king, but a neuroscientist (Dr. Nora Lear) with early onset Alzheimer's Disease in the 21st century. The composer himself describes the protagonist as "a post-modern view of Lear as a person of authority who is losing her grip on her power as well as her faculties." Notably, Nora Lear and Nora's Mind are two separate characters in the opera. Nora's Mind uses improvisational techniques, to echo the mental wandering caused by dementia. The Fool is Nora's late husband, Mortimer, visible only to her and to the audience. The opera was produced in 2012 at Princeton University and the University of California at San Diego.

Shakespeare and Jazz

Davis's Lear on the Second Floor serves as a good transition into our next category, as he uses in his opera some of the sounds of jazz composer and bassist Charles Mingus. 

Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, Such Sweet Thunder

Duke Ellington's Such Sweet Thunder is an 12-tune jazz suite inspired by Shakespeare's plays and even the playwright himself. Duke Ellington and his right-hand man, arranger and pianist Billy Strayhorn, had traveled with the Duke Ellington Orchestra to give two performances at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, Canada in August 1956. In between performances, they caught several performances of the Bard's plays and stayed for most of the week. By their departure, they had promised a suite of Shakespeare-inspired pieces for the 1957 festival.

Ellington annotated his copies of Shakespeare's plays thoroughly and Strayhorn knew his Shakespeare so well that some of the band members nicknamed him "Shakespeare." The two men would buy printed editions of the plays and read them while on tour with the big band. As Ellington enjoyed incredible popularity in the mid-1950s, he and Strayhorn came down to a three-week time crunch to write the tunes for the suite. Two of the tunes ("Half the Fun" for Cleopatra from Antony and Cleopatra and "The Star-Crossed Lovers" for the titular characters of Romeo and Juliet, of course) were not written specifically for the suite, but were renamed versions of previous tunes ("Lately" and "Pretty Girl," respectively).

The first 11 tunes of the suite, all premiered together, are explicitly dedicated to Shakespearean characters. The last, "Circle of Fourths," is dedicated to Shakespeare himself. While it may seem straightforward to map an Ellington/Strayhorn tune to its Shakespearean inspiration, it is most complicated than that. The title of the suite and its first movement, "Such Sweet Thunder," is drawn from A Midsummer Night's Dream, but the composition is actually inspired by the moment from Othello where the protagonist tries to impress his new wife's father, Brabantio, in Act I, Scene 3. "Sonnet in Search of a Moor," the fifth movement, seems to refer to Othello. But it might also refer to the Three Witches from Macbeth (who lived on a moor) or be a pun on the French word for love (amour). 

Ellington and Strayhorn paid deep attention to Shakespeare's verse throughout the suite. The suite contains four musical sonnets: 14 lines of 10 beats in iambic pentameter, grouped into three quatrains and a couplet. As a result, one can sing almost any of Shakespeare's sonnets directly to Ellington and Strayhorn's musical sonnets––no changes necessary.

Dick Hyman, Sullivan, Shakespeare, Hyman 

Much less known than Ellington's Such Sweet Thunder is Dick Hyman's 1994 album Sullivan, Shakespeare, Hyman. The album is a collection of settings of Shakespeare's verse to music, including lines from his plays ("Will you buy any tape?" is from Autolycus's speech in Act IV, Scene 4 of The Winter's Tale), songs from his plays ("Come away, come away death" is Feste's song from Act II, Scene 4 of Twelfth Night), and his poems ("Blow, blow, thou winter wind").

Shakespeare and Pop Music

Shakespeare lives well into the 21st century, including through transformation and adoption into popular and commercial forms.

Sting, "Sister Moon"

While "Sister Moon" in the literary context is usually associated with St. Francis of Assisi, who used the phrase in his c. 1224 religious praise poem "Canticle of the Creatures," Sting's song of the same name actually invokes Shakespeare. It is the tenth song from his 1987 album Nothing Like the Sun––which is the first hint at Shakespeare's influence on the album. The tune "Sister Moon" reprises the whole line from Shakespeare's Sonnet 130: "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun."

2Pac, "Something Wicked"

2Pac is the artist name of rapper Tupac Shakur, who released "Something Wicked" as the seventh track of his debut album 2Pacalypse Now in 1991. Shakur is a big fan of Shakespeare's plays, specifically Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth. This song uses as a refrain the beginning of the phrase "Something wicked this way comes," pronounced by the Three Witches in Act IV, Scene 1 of Macbeth.

Taylor Swift, "Love Story" and "The Fate of Ophelia"

Known for her songwriting, Taylor Swift often draws inspiration from other writers for her hits. The Bard is one of her favorites. She has drawn from Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet as a point of departure for her hit songs "Love Story" and "The Fate of Ophelia," respectively. She even uses the same phrase as 2Pac––in full––in the song "CANCELLED!" from the album The Life of a Showgirl (the same album that contains "The Fate of Ophelia"). You can read our post on Shakespeare and Taylor Swift here.