We open our program with a 19th century setting of this poem by George Macfarren. Macfarren’s music matches the consolatory tone of the poem, speaking of music’s power to be a balm for even the most distressing emotions. Shakespeare well understood the power of music in our lives, and how sly of him to do this through describing the powers of Orpheus, the supreme musician in ancient Greek mythology. In that time music and poetry were inextricably bound, as evidenced in the first line of Virgil’s Aenead, an epic poem from the later era of the Roman Empire: I sing of arms and the man.

The Canadian composer John Cook wrote three works to be performed for the 1955 production of The Merchant of Venice at Stratford, Ontario, although only this one actually uses a text by Shakespeare. Cook organizes the work with the recurrence of the interval of a falling fourth. The piece begins with the voices entering successively in held notes a fourth below their predecessor; this has the effect of creating a sense of suspense illustrating a listener’s impatient desire to hear what is to be told, something he reinforces by his abundant use of chords built of fourths among the voices. The setting of reply alludes to the opening with the voices entering again from the top but this time with a line that itself starts with a rising fourth. In the second half of the work Cook has an extended musical depiction setting the line Ding dong bell in dense counterpoint* in which each line initiating the melody begins with a falling fourth. This has the effect of imitating the kind of celebratory bell ringing heard when all churches in a town ring their bells simultaneously to mark a special occasion. Even the final chord, with its fundament of an A major chord, has three successively higher fourths piled atop the major third.

Thomas Morley, a prolific British composer of the Tudor era, was also a contemporary of Shakespeare’s; in fact, John Long wrote an article for the journal Modern Language Notes in 1950 attesting to the fact that they knew each other and were possibly even friends. He based this on Morley’s two settings of songs from plays, the other being O mistress mine, as well as Shakespeare’s description in The Taming of the Shrew of a musical term put forth in Morley’s theory book A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musick published in 1597. I have been informed by another conductor, Nancy Holland, that the lyrics to the madrigal were not penned by the bard himself, and even that they might have originated with Morley. However, if Shakespeare deemed it worthy of inclusion in As you like it, we see no reason to exclude it in our concert.

Many of tonight’s settings of Shakespeare are by Scandinavian composers. Sven-Eric Johanson, a 20th century Swedish composer, flirted with twelve tone writing but towards the end of his life wrote his choral Fancies, from which tonight’s selection is taken, in distinctly tonal style. The triple meter* is incongruent with the seriousness of the text, creating in the music a nonchalance to life’s inevitable end. At the same time the piano accompaniment becomes much more elaborate and subdivided, perhaps as an allusion to life’s evanescence.

I find it interesting that both Johanson and the Finnish composer Komulainen seemed eager to set English texts without always observing the cadence of the English language. The latter unifies each of his works with a melodic phrase. In the case of O Weary Night this melody is passed among the voices with the words opening the poem until its final iteration, when the basses use it to sing the line From these that my poor company detest and all four voices cadence homophonically*. There ensues the second half of the piece wherein Komulainen introduces new musical material to describe the refuge of sleep; this includes a marvelous interchange of perfect fifths among the voices to create a hypnotically soporific mood. For Three words he assigns the melody to the soprano with the alto in duet, befitting since Juliet speaks it, while the tenor and bass voices provide accompaniment with wordless sounds or bits of text. For Tomorrow and tomorrow Komulainen sets the first two lines of text each with its own distinct melody and passes its iteration among all the voices. He then uses these same melodic lines to set successive lines of the soliloquy, but in the middle section he establishes a sense of ponderous inevitability to describe dusty death by assigning the tenor and bass the theme in octaves while dramatically slowing the tempo. To my mind the resumption of the faster tempo to set the final lines of the text underscores the fleeting nature of life interrupted only by the finality of death.

The American composer Emma Lou Diemer is still alive at 96, although her Three Madrigals for chorus and piano was published over sixty years ago in 1962. She provides symmetry within the set by flanking the middle piece, written in a slow tempo* and minor tonality,* with the two pieces having fast tempi and major tonalities. The entire set lasts less than five minutes but comprises a satisfying whole with its cheery outer works bookending the somber middle one.

Amy Beach, known in her lifetime by her married name, Mrs. H.H.A. Beach, composed compositions for choruses, soloists, orchestras, chamber groups, and piano. She set Shakespeare texts for both treble chorus and for solo voice, and we perform one of the former tonight. I love the way she constructs her music to illuminate the text. In the opening section, describing a fairy’s movement through the air, she juxtaposes a duet between the treble and low voices in a two-word phrase that gets increasingly higher in register*. It allows me to hear the fairy flitting from place to place as described in the next lines of text: I do wander ev’rywhere, / Swifter than the moon’s sphere. Beach divides her music into two more sections to differentiate the sprite’s declaration of service from the description of the flowers needing a pearl in ev’ry… ear.

We perform two pieces of vastly contrasting moods by the unjustifiably less known New Zealand composer David Hamilton. The Willow Song, sung by Desdemona in Othello, is folk-like in nature with a melancholy melody in the lower treble timbre of the alto register* accompanied predominantly in vocalise* by the other parts. This shifts in the last line so that the male voices of the tenor can speak the lines of the feckless lover. In And let me the canakin clink Hamilton has good fun with the swing rhythms common to jazz and the wonderful melisma* on the word soldier to convey the narrator’s inebriated state.

The Swedish composer Daniel Helldén, like many of his generation, studied with Carl Orff and then introduced his teaching methods throughout Scandinavia. His Rosemary, published in 1973, was one of three pieces he set to texts of Shakespeare. He sets the opening line with a jaunty motif in the uneven meter* of 7/8, then changes the meter to 4/4 and slows the tempo dramatically to set the next line Pray, love, remember. One might construe the music of this middle section to allude to those memories less pleasant. This extended section reiterates with small changes one line passed among the voices in shorter and shorter increments before returning to the initial musical material in the slower tempo to describe the pansies for thoughts. A reprisal of the opening section provides symmetry to the piece.

Our selections return to the 19th century with works by two English composers. Pearsall lived primarily in the first half of the 1800s, and George Macfarren followed him a generation later. The former’s work represents the only repeat of a text on tonight’s program, but I loved both settings too much to take either one out. As it is, the two highlight different interpretations of the text. In the case of Diemer’s setting, the minor tonality* and slow tempo engender the sense that those lips have in fact been taken away, and she reiterates the music and lyrics of the opening of the poem to bookend the work. Pearsall’s selection of a major tonality*, on the other hand, seems to create a sense of wistful longing for something that may indeed come to pass, a feeling reinforced at the end of the piece by his use of suspensions* to delay the resolution of harmony.

Macfarren creates quite a different mood from our opening piece in When daisies pied; the literal sound of the cuckoo in the soprano at the end of the piece gives it a humorous bent. The sprightly dotted rhythms in the women’s voices over the drone* provided by the men in parallel fifths at the opening imparts the bucolic scene of spring described in Shakespeare’s words. Then, when the cuckoo calls, which Macfarren sets to the falling major third of that bird’s song in the high tessitura* of the sopranos, the lower three voices reiterate O word of fear as the bass part rises by half steps, creating an anxious suspense in keeping with the association of the cuckoo’s call with a wife’s infidelity.

We include two of the 12 Shakespeare settings by the American composer Matthew Harris in tonight’s program, each of them having a radically different mood. Who is Sylvia? with its upbeat tempo and jazzy rhythms captures the ebullience of new love, while the pensive minor of Hark, hark! The lark seems somewhat incongruent to the lover’s entreaty to his love to arise. Perhaps Harris set it this way to maximize the contrast between this simple poem and the lines that immediately precede it in Cymbeline, in which Phyllis would be awakened in a far cruder way. In any case, the treble duet opening the piece represents the lark’s call before the four voices join in homophony to tell the rest of the story.

The music of the Finnish composer Jaakko Mäntyjärvi attests to the strong tradition of choral music in Scandinavia and the Baltic regions. His reiteration of the music to the repeated words Come away death and Fly away breath in a 6/8 meter give a seductive tone to those entreaties. He also interrupts the poem to repeat the word weep with held chords in a 5/8 meter; this irregularity, along with a swelling and dying of sound on each chord known as messa di voce, mimics the gasping breathlessness experienced in extreme grieving. I don’t know whether Mäntyjärvi was aware of the exaggerated melodrama of the poem in the play’s context; his minor tonality would seem to interpret it literally. In Lullaby he makes use of chromatic* descent through an octave to open the piece and has it recur several times throughout, perhaps as an allusion to ‘falling’ asleep. In fact, most of the chordal movement when it occurs, is also chromatic, giving cohesion to the work.

His setting of Double, double toil and trouble is a tour de force of dramatically intense creepiness. It opens with the uneven 5/4 meter* that dominates the work; its lopsidedness engenders a feeling of unsettledness and foreboding. He highlights the witches’ ‘witchiness’ with the falling glissando* lines that accompany the iteration of the incantation and by a middle section whose slower tempo refers to their sinister nature; I envision them, as Walt Disney sometimes did in his cartoons, rubbing their hands together in evil glee. This middle section is capped off by the chorus speaking a part of the spell that gets successively louder and overlayered, as though the witches cannot contain their excitement about creating this curse. And the manic energy with which the piece ends conjures up a scene of Saint Vitus dancing on All Hallows’ Eve.

As tonight’s program demonstrates, Shakespeare’s eloquence inspired many composers. Considering the first work heard tonight, however, one has to wonder if Shakespeare himself valued music even more highly than poetry. How ironic it would be if the ultimate wordsmith found the art of music to be an even more profound art than his own. ▣

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