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The Place It Held in His Mind and thePlace He Has Filled in 'ts History

Written for THa NEw YOax TIMrs

By Richard Aldrich

S ,04-HAKESPEARE lived at a period' when England was one of the most

musical nations of Eirope. Not

only did the England of that periodproduce 'composers ranked' among the

greatest, but the love and knowledge of

music-a practical and often advanced

technical knowledge-was widely spread

among people of all classes, high and low.

Every person claiming any title to educa.

tion or social prominence was expected to

. be able to take his part In extemporaneouspart singing; he. was also expected to ba

able to play at sight,' and even to impro-vise according to the rules of counter.

, . point, In performao on stringed Instru-'5"'. ' * me

n ~ «*. , .e* nts .I : .W'. 'omen of the upper classes were gean-

Se 'rally expert practitioners upon the vir-

ginals, a smaller-esed harpsichord; the

spinet and warpsichord were no strangersIn most houses. Pepyse' diary gives an

illustration of how much a gentleman of a

generation or two later than bhakespeare'atime concerned himself with music. Pepys

, was, as he calls himself, a "lover of

Musique"; but he was* hardly an es'

ceptional case-he was tfa less an excep-

tional case than siuch a man would be InE ngland or America today.

This universal knowledge and love of

: music among the people of angland-thats, among the audiences who listened to

Shakespeare's plays when he producedthem-are reflected in the plays then.-

selves. There are few of them that donot contain some reference, often many

and copious references, to music; some

figurative mention of music; frequent pun-

ning allusions to musical terms. Many ofsuch passages are elaborated and havemore than passing significance In the play.Thus, the passage about the " recorders,"In which Hamlet turns upon Rosencrantsand Guildenstern; the punning contest In"The Taming of the Shrew," Act II., be-tween Hortenslo and Baptista; Lorensosexquisite passages In "The Merchant ofVenice," Including the allusion to thePythagorean " music of the spheres "; andnumerous others of a similar sort willoccur to most lovers of Shakespeare. Itis hardly possible to read through any ofthe plays, especially the comedies, withoutcoming on such.

These facts suggest two things. One Isthat the incessant allusions to music andpuns Involving technical terms, which haveto be explained in the notes for modernreaders, must have been perfectly clearand Intelligible to the contemporary audi-ences. The other is that Shakespeare'smusical allusions show the same range otknowledge and accuracy as has been no.ticed In regard to so many other technicalsubjects In other branches of art andscience. Some of his puns may be far.fetched; discouraging, considered merelyas puns. But they never show a faultytechnical knowledge. Music had a placeand an important one, In the "myriadmind" of Shakespeare.

Among the musical allusions In Shake-speare are naturally not a few to con-temporary songs. Mistress Ford, In the" Merry Wives of Windsor." observes thatFalstaff's disposition and the truth of hiswords " do no more adhere and keeppace than the Hundredth Psalm to thetune of ' Green Sleeves.'" Later In thesome play Falstaff calls upon the sky to" thunder to the tune of ' Green Sleeves.'"The tune meant Is "A new courtly sonetof the Lady Green Sleeves," a song ofHenry VIII.s reign, Immensely popularthen and later. In "Much Ado AboutNothing" Beatrice says that she "maysit in a corner and cry 'Heigh ho for aHusband'"; and there Is another mirthfulreference In the play to this old tune."Heart's Ease " Is urgently called for fromthe musicians In the fourth act of " Romeoand Juliet" by Peter; another old tunethat goes back at least to the middle ofthe sixteenth century, Twice the tune of" Whoop, do me no harm." Is mentioned In" A Winter's Tale," " Malvollo's a ' Peg-a.Ramsey' and ' Three Merry Men Be We,'"says Sir Toby Belch tin "Twelfth Night,"referring to two well-known old songs. In"Miuch Ado About Nothing" Margaretproposes to Beatrice to "clap ts Into

' 'Light o' Love'; that goes without a bur-i: den "-chorus or retrain-" do you sing It

and I'll dance to It." Unfortunately, shedid not sing i t; and th original wordts ofthe song, partly as a nsoeenace o herneglect, are now unknown,

Many other songs are mentioned andquoted In the plays. The Inference is ob.vious that they were all familiar to theaudiences, and that' Shakespeare's fefr-ences to them were found apt and sug-gestive. , .

Shakespeare calls for songs to be sungIn the course of many f his plays. Theyare too frequent and many of them are toowell known to need more than Instancing;such as the "Willow" song-In "- tello""0 Mistress Mine" in Twelfth Nght"It Was a *Lover and Is .Lass" In "AYou Like I!i" "Where th Bee Sucks"In "The Tempst." There /are. aymore. It Is likelythat Shakespeare wrotemany of thes. veses to tune alls-ay Inexistence and spoptar atthe t.l. btthe Investigators have not arrved at cer.tainty on this point.

Unfortunately there are only six songsof which we can be at all' sure that wepossess the music exactly as It was sungIn the plays In Shakespeare's time. TheGlobe Theatre was burned In 1618 andwith It were lost most of the performingmanuscripts. Including the music of thesongs.

Only one of his class of songs was by acomposer whose fame has endured. Thatis Thomas Morley, distinguished as a writerof madrigals, who In the author of themusic of "It Was a Lover and HisLass" In "As You Like It," appearing inthe first book of his "Ayres or Little ShortSongs," published In 1600. Robert Johnson,a composer and lute player of, thae earlyseventeenth century, wrote music for" Where the Bee Sucks" and "FullFathom Five" In "The Tempest," prob-ably for performance In the play In Shake-spear's lifetime. The other four that aresupposed to be contemporaneous and tohave been sung as we now possess themare the "Willow" song In "Othello." "0Mistress Mine" In "Twelfth Night," bothby unknown composers; "Lawn as Whiteas Driven Snow" fromi "The Winter'sTale," and "Take, 0 T4ke. Those YipsAway." from "Measure for Measure."these two being variously attributed toboth John Wilson and Robert Johnson,

Musical settings of the songs in theplays are simply legion in later year, andthe list 'of them grows with every yearthat passes. Shakespeare's songs havebeen always a strong temptation to com-posers, and began to lee, of course, assoon as they were known. Naturally Eng-lish composers turned to them first.Henry Purcell, besides his complete operabased on Shakespeare, " The Fairy Queen,"adapted from "A. M idsummer NIght'sDream,' composed much Incidental musicfor the plays, as for "Macbeth " and orShadwell's versions and tinkerings of"Timon of Athens" and "The Tempest."From the latter we posess the familiar.songs, "Come Unto These Yellow Sands,""Full Fathom Five." and, for chorus."Hark. H ark, the Watch Dogs Bark."John Banister and Pelham Humfrey fqundInspiration In Shakespeare even earlier.

To enumerate even the most noted comr-posers and the favorite settings of Shake-spearean songs from that time to thiswould be to set up a catalogue. Dr.Thomas Augustine Arne, composer Of"Rule Britannia,', among other things,wrote many. some of which are still sung.Sir Henry R. Bishop, most famous, per-haps, as the composer of the melody of"Home, Sweet Home," was remarkably In-dustrious in writing music for the plays,Sir Arthur Sullivan provided music for"The Tempest," "The Merchant of Ven-ice," the "Merry Wives of .Windsor.""Henry VIII,"" "Macbeth." Mendels-sohn's music for "A Midsummer Night'sDream" Is, of course, better known thanany other incidental music for Shakespeare.Sir Hubert Parry and Sir Charles Stanfordhave In recent years added to the list ofShakespeare songs.

A few of the most beautiful and mostfamous Shakespeare songs have come tous from Germany. Haydn, whose visitsto England brought English verses to hisattention, set music for "She Never ToldHer Love." which is not among the betterknown of his English songs. It needhardly be said that two of the most per-fect of Shakespeare settings are Schu.bert's. Best known Is probably "Hark.Hark the Lark," that "wonderful sweetair with admirable rich words to It"; that"very excellent, good-conceited thing," asCloten calls it, when he persuades Imogento sing It. Unforgettable, too, Is the storyof Its origin, as told by Schubert's friend

~i e's deln OT4. .'r.,0.oeq TA's v1 lp"*NS

COS.L LOT/ON

Doppler, and thus presented by Sir GeorgeGrove;-

"turnt fromn a .Sunday stroll withsome friends through the village ofW ng he saw a friend sitting at atable in the ber garden of one of the

had a volume of ;hakespeare on the table.chubert seized t and began to red; but

before he had turned over many pagespointed to 'Hark, Hark the Lark,' and ex-claimed: 'Such a lovely melody has comeinto my head, If I had but some mualopaper.' * Some one drew a few staves onthe back of a bill of fare, and there, amidthe hubbub of the beer garden, that beau-tiful song, so perfectly fitting the wordsso sIlllful and happy In the aecompani-ment, came Into perfect existce."

Hardly less popular and widely belovedthan the eraade le "Who Is Sylvia?from "The Two Gentleme% of Verona."The third of Schubert's Shakesperean et-tinge, the drinking song, ' Come, ThouMonarch of the Vine," from "Antony andCleopatra," is much Inferior to its com-panions. and Is correspondingly littleknown.

It is natural that the operatic librettists,an Insatiable tribe, rummaging throughall the world's literature for their material,should repeatedly_ have laid violent handsupon the plays. These have served as abasis for more operas than the works of allthe- other greatI poets put together.Shakespeare, however, has had his revengeof almost all of the librettists and compos-ersa The quality and substance of theplays have shown themselves to be some-thing that has rarely failed to plant theseeds of more or less speedy death In anyperversion of them. Not till the true spiritof the lyric drama came to the conscious-ness of both composer and librettist wasIt possible to make a Shakespearean operathat had the breath of life In It and thatwas In any essential other than an Indig-nity to a masterpiece.

This achievement was made by an rtal-ian, with the Invaluable and Indispensableaid of another Italian, both of whom as-similated the spirit and meaning ofShakespeare as no other dramatic cor.poser nd librettist before them had everdone. They were Giuseppe Verdi and Ar-rigo Bolto; and their joint works, "Otello "and "Falstaff," are today the only Shake-spearean operas that really represent inthe lyric drama the full significance oftheir great prototypes.

It Is not from want of trying that In-numerable masterpleces In Shakespeareanoperas have not been composed. The firstof a great number appears to have beenHenr.v Purcell's "Fairy Queen," based on"A Midsummer Night's Dream." Thelibretto was adapted by an anonymouswriter, and the opera was first played in10B2. One peculiarity of the libretto Isthat not a single line as Shakespeare wroteIt appears with Purcell's music. The scorewas lost in 1700, and a reward was offeredfor It in that year. By an extraordinaryturn of events, it was found In the libraryof the Royal Academy of Music In LondonIn 1901, and It has since been published.

Perhaps the first of a long and venture-some line of musicians outside of Englandto evolve a real opera from a play of'Shakespeare's was Francesco Gasparlni,who composed an opera, "Ambleto." whichowes Its origin to "Hamlet." It was firstheard in 1705 In Italy, and was one of thepieces produced in London by Handel inthe course of his disastrous experiencesthere as an operatic manager. Another" Amleto "-so spelled this time, and oneof a number from Italy In the early eight-eenth century-was by Domenico Soar-latti. It was first given In Rome in 1715;and though its composer is known to allmusical amateurs as the composer ofharpsichord music that still lives and Isenjoyed, "Amleto" has long since gone tothe llmlbo that was awaiting other operatie"Hamlets."

Max Maretzek, still remembered in Newyork as an operatic manager In the free-booting days of Italian opera, composed a

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" Hamlet" that was once performed InGermany, The one " Hamlet' that Is stillknown Is that of Ambroise Thomas, aFrench "Hamlet." whose libretto by Bar-bier and Carre, responsible for many thingsof the kind, Is a shocking and foolish per-version of the great tragedy. It has beenheard In New York as lately as 1912, notbecause any one wanted to bear It, butbecause Tetta Ruffo wanted to sing It, and'"baritone'e operas" are not abundant. Itis a soprano's opera, too, and Emma Calve,In a still memorable year, found In it acongenial qpportunity, as did earlier Chris-tine Nilsson and other great sopranos.

Better known to operagoere of the pres-ent day. and somewhat less tnjurious tothe source from which It is derived, isGounod's " Romeo et Jullette," the librettoof which was written by the same ruth-less pair of collaborators, Barbier andCarrY, This Is not yet ancient history.though it has not been in the list of theMetropolitan Opera House for some fouryears; .but the gloy that was shed uponIt In the days of Jean and Edouard deRieske, of Mme, Melba, of Mme. Eames,not to go back further. does not seemlikely to be restored,

More than almost any other play ofShakespeare "Romeo and Juliet" offerspewatic matrial appetidng to the corm-

poser and librettists; and they have notneglected t. The lt " eo and Juliet"that preceded Gound's was " I Capuletti edI Montecehi" of Belluni, first disclosed In

1880. It soon gained-great popularity, ow-ing partly to the singing in it of GiOudittaPasta, for whom, tholugh a soprano,curiously enough as It seea In these days,the part of Romeo was written, and ofGrisi as Giulletta and Rubtnl as Tebaldo,a character considerably more prominentIn the opera than In the play. In thathistoric and momentous operatic season of1826, when Manuel del Popolo Garciabrought his family to New York, and withthem Italian opera for the first time Inthe New World, he produced, among manyother things, a "Romeo e Glulietta" byBellini's master, Niccolb Zingarells. one ofwhose titles to fame Is that he was thefavorite composer of Napoleon. The librettoof this opera. in accordance with a customnot then entirely obsolete, Bellini after.ward made use of, unchanged, fQr his.

Richard Wagner wrote a Shakespeareanopera, though the world has not beeo al-lowed to become acquainted with it sinceIts single performance. This opera, "Das,Lebesverbot," was a version of "Measurefor Measure." freely treated. As in all hisother lyrlo dramas, he himself wrote thelibretto. The opera was finished in 18,6.when he was 23 years old and was mu-sical director of a theatre at fagdeburg.There was one disastrous performance.there, and then the opera was shelved.Ht himself in later yees spoke of itsweakness; of the "reflex of modernFrench "-that is, the modern Frennch o1 88"ahd as concerns the melody, of

Italian opr. upon my violently excitedMsa" Of the score only one or twoshort extracts, and of the libretto nothingtave peen publiehed, although most of thecrap, even, of hs other early effots,

have aeen religiously put Into print. Wag-ter called "Das Aebeaverbat" a "youth-

fual Iscre'." Apparently It was so In-tha I cannot be allowed out of

thB " erchive of Wahnfried.""Mgbeth" has attracted many ambi-

tious omppsers; but not one has beenble. to male for it a musical setting thathas long kept alive. · The most significantis Verdl's, which he wrote in T184 to alibretto by irancesco Plav, who pur-veye4 libretts for a nuambel of his opras,Including "Rg

loletto" and "Li Traviate."

Verdi rewrote the opera tr performance'In P i n 1885. It ad:.,not been VetY8uccesful before, and was not succefulthen In ts new form.

Among other attempts at a "Macbeth.

that oft the French composer ChOlard In.1827 ist no*able only becaise the librettowas wrttt by Rouget de l'lle,> whog' mm l ortality as thel author of "Ia

Vdt's "Ottlo " seems to have had onlyone predec or, also emanating from Italyand enjaOyng a large measure of favor inIt dty. That wa Rosne'a It was fitproduced in Naples in 1816, less than ayear after "II Barbiere dl Blvligiia" heprincipal opra part was written ftMmm, CobraPn. whom he afterward *r-'ried. The opera became greatly popularand eeme4 destined at one time to outlive

The Barber," which has ust celebratedIts hundredth birthday. It was con -ered to have "very dramatic music";sae m -mar |i favorabv In nyi *.n VW

quite subwouatu e caWsIe.rn PAt. UPa prominent one. The Instruments.was thought to be shockingly noisy; ag

the' o guig dramatic standards of ittime are llustrated by the anecdote oflitener whom the denouement of the orecaused to cry 0t* In excitement, "noaGodi the tenor Is murdering the soprano!

The " Merry Wives of Windeor ". ha apealed strongly to constructors of opera Ithe comic vein, many of whom have a;tempted It; The liveliest of all of "VFstaffs" predecessor is Otto NIcolwithe "Merry Wives of Windsr," whlican almost lay claim to the title of a reShakespearean opera, ft Is not un4knwoto New York In recent years.

We are to have this season at the MeOt-polit, itf promises are kept, an opebased on "The Taming of the ShrewHermann Goetz's "Der WldereplstZahmung," which has also been heardNew York already. The title of anothone is preserved, "La Capricclosa cretta," composed in 1785 by one MartinSoler, once considered a rival of Maorof which the chief point of Interest Is tlthe libretto was by Lorenzo da Ponte, wttasted of immortality through the thrlibrettos he wrote for Mozart, and wtlved his last years, died, and was burlin New York.

A certain Interest attaches to HmecBerllos's ope Shakespearean opera, ' Betrice at Bafldict." It is, of course, bhason i Much Ado About Nothing." Berltwas one of the few Frenchmen of his titwho really understood and admired Shalspeare. Shakespeare was, indeed, onebhils passions; and to be one of Berleo

passions meant something. He himsarranged the libretto. It must. be sehowever, that, notwithstanding his rev"ence for Shakespeare, he departed widifrom his play. He reduced all the seordiate characters to mere " feeders" 1the two principals, and Introduced a Done, Intended to burlesque his redoubtaenemy, Fetls But the opera has mOvery little stir upon the musical watseven in the great patriotic Berlioz othat has arisen In France since 181 ICharles V. Stanford has added: to IShakespeare operas a "Much Ado AbiNothing" that was produced at CoviGarden, In London, some years ago, 4shas left no sign. At least twenty "Tepest" operas, all forgotten, mightenumerated.

The orchestral works, overture, t4poems, and other symphonic Illustratliof Shakespeare that have had a moreless prorinent place tIn modern musicmany. Some of the most familiar nbe named, as Techalkowsky's " Romeo IJuliet" and " Hamlet" overtures, (alsocidental music to "Hamlet";) his "Tipest" fantasia; Berlicsf " Kg LOverture and his elaborate " RomeoJullet" symphony, with solos and chorusLiszt's symphonic poem " HamlDvorak's " Othello ' overture, Elag"Falstafft," Joachim's "Hamlet" overttMacDowell's "Hamlet" and "Ophelisymphonic poems, David Stanley Smtl"Prinee Hal," that has been played hthis Winter; John K. Palne'p "As 'Like It " overture and his symphonic peon " The Tempest," Richard Strauss'sphonic poem on "Macbeth," Felix WIgartner's on "K ng Lear," and OoleridTaylor's on "Othello," Among the curlIttles, scarcely more, may be mentionedfact that "William Shakespeare" wroteorchestral overture called "After SBRolsi Play 'Hamlet"' Wilam ahlspeare Is a well-known teacher of sinIn London.,Copyright, We, br The: Now TYork tn Oes

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