Inspired by the Bard's Words, but Not Their Equal

(Valentin Baranovsky - Valentin Baranovsky)

There are some tantalizing "what-ifs" in the history of Shakespeare and music. Verdi was determined to make "King Lear" into an opera at various times during his career, but despaired of finding the right singers to carry it off. Beethoven toyed with composing an opera based on "Macbeth," but left only a few sketchy ideas. And yet, for all that we lament these might-have-beens, it's almost certain that they would have suffered from the curse that has dogged almost everything that composers and other artists have produced based on the Bard: There never seems to be much Shakespeare in them.

Which is not to say that there isn't a wide catalogue of successful music, ballet, poetry and other artworks derived, in some form, from Shakespeare. Classic Shakespearean titles grace staples of the concert hall repertoire (Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet" and Mendelssohn's overture to "Midsummer Night's Dream"), opera classics (most famously Verdi's "Otello" and "Falstaff") and ballets (Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet"). But each of these works is successful on its own terms, as a piece of music, a music drama or dance. None of them ever leaves the audience with the sense that they have seen Shakespeare successfully transformed or translated into a new medium. With other writers, something is always lost in translation. With Shakespeare, almost everything is lost.

Which is, perhaps, the elephant in the room as the Kennedy Center begins its ambitious six-month Shakespeare festival, which began last night and will include more than 100 performances or other events by more than 60 different arts groups. With the exception of some musical curiosities by Dvorak and Smetana on a National Symphony Orchestra program in April, and a production of Verdi's "Macbeth" by the Washington National Opera in May, most of the major musical and dance events are front-loaded into the first months of the festival. Between January and early March, visits by the Kirov Opera and Ballet, American Ballet Theatre and New York City Ballet will cover some of the monumental masterpieces of Shakespearean-inspired dance and music, including Verdi's opera "Falstaff" and George Balanchine's "A Midsummer Night's Dream."

But while they are monumental, they are rarely monumental in the way that Shakespeare is monumental. Verdi's "Falstaff," his last and maybe his greatest opera, is not so much a summation by one of the 19th century's greatest Italian opera composers as a final gauntlet thrown down to his younger contemporaries: This is what Italian opera is capable of, now go forth and top it. But it is also a radical distillation of Shakespeare's "Merry Wives of Windsor" with a nod to his "Henry IV" plays, a condensation of Shakespeare's drama and language and poetry into a single, brilliant musical portrait of its title character.

The opera ends with a breathtaking fugue, a demonstration that Verdi's talent hadn't dimmed in old age (he was almost 80 when it was premiered), and that fugue is perhaps a sly way of acknowledging the very thing that music can't capture about Shakespeare: The vast multiplicity of voices, the endless horizons of language. While a fugue is a tight, controlled weaving together of musical lines, it is only an approximation of the far vaster and chaotic Babel of Shakespeare's text.

Balanchine also felt the need to condense in his "A Midsummer Night's Dream," a popular story ballet. He confessed that while he loved the Shakespeare (and played an elf in a St. Petersburg production when he was 8 years old), he was inspired mostly by Mendelssohn's incidental music. And as for the play itself: "I think it is possible to see and enjoy the ballet without knowing the play," he wrote. "At least that was my hope."

The two-act ballet also ends, formally, with what may be a nod to that largeness of Shakespeare that is unreachable by anything other than a production of Shakespeare. After dancing a bare-bones version of the play's plot in the first act, the second act is given over purely to dance, a set of divertissements that push the drama from narrative to an abstract celebration of love and coupling. Choreographers often use weddings as an excuse to stall the narrative flow and insert a lot of dancing, but in this case there is perhaps a deeper acknowledgment that a plot line borrowed from Shakespeare is merely a pretense, an excuse to dance. To attempt anything more is hubris.

Among the great symphonic scores inspired by Shakespeare, there's hardly a page of music that doesn't seem anachronistic, or wrong, or utterly perverse to anyone who loves the corpus of his plays. Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet" is sumptuous music, romantic, tender, overheated and light-years away from the delicate balance of vulnerability and violence that one finds in the original text. Prokofiev's ballet based on the same play (and the popular concert suites derived from it) has all the vigor and muscularity of great Soviet poster art, but its aesthetic effect is too crude and too seductive to bear comparison with the impact of Shakespeare's original.

The problem, of course, is language. There is no Shakespeare beyond the language of Shakespeare. Anyone who has sat through a production of Verdi's "Otello," another great autumnal work, knows the disorienting phenomenon of reading supertitles that are English translations of an Italian version of the original Elizabethan English. Very few dramas could survive this double degree of the old game of telephone, but Shakespeare can't survive even a single translation -- which is why the popularity of contemporary-English "translations" of his plays is so depressing. The power of Shakespeare is in the puns, the wordplay, the allusion; even his characters, who seem so real, are merely woven from the peculiarities of their language usage. Remove this, and there is no Shakespeare.

Remove the endless quibbling over language, and you can't separate the pedants from the quick-witted. Remove the multiple meanings of a single word, and whole scenes lose their force. There's no way a translation could capture the meaning of "Light, seeking light, doth light of light beguile," from "Love's Labour's Lost." And, set to music, there isn't enough time to comprehend it beyond a string of nonesense syllables.

So symphonic poems about Shakespeare are merely musical constructions. They aren't really "about" Shakespeare at all, nor are they "about" the composer's reaction to Shakespeare, except in the most blunt and meaningless way ("this play is sad"). Even musical settings, in English, of Shakespeare's original text don't get us much closer to the real power of Shakespeare. Music slows everything down, which means vast quantities of text must be sacrificed if one aims to compose an opera of manageable length (film versions, such as Michael Radford's 2005 "Merchant of Venice," suffer from the similar problem, cutting text in favor of cinematic pacing). Musical settings of Elizabethan English rarely do justice to the cadences of the spoken text, and often muddy the clarity. And worse, any musical setting is an "interpretation" which ties down to particular musical ideas words that are inherently ambiguous, ironic and multivalent.

It's tempting to paraphrase Romeo's great soliloquy and say that all the music and other works inspired by Shakespeare are inevitably shamed by the original as "daylight doth a lamp." But that's unfair, because if judged on their own terms many of them are satisfying pieces. Rather than say that Verdi's "Falstaff" is to Shakespeare's "Merry Wives" as a lamp is to daylight, it makes more sense to say that Verdi's "Falstaff" is to every other Italian comic opera as Shakespeare's comedies are to all the rest. And occasionally, working through different means, without hope of translating the whole of a Shakespeare play, some artists have succeeded in putting forth a kind of snapshot of Shakespearean atmosphere, such as emerges in Berlioz's "Beatrice and Benedict," based on "Much Ado About Nothing," and in W.H. Auden's "The Sea and the Mirror," a long poetic meditation on "The Tempest."

A lot of disappointment can be avoided if one forgoes a few cliches and a lot of fuzzy metaphorical thinking about art. Opera is not "a marriage" of music and words, at least not in the sense that there is some kind of higher fusion that transcends both. And thus there will never be a Shakespearean opera that both incorporates all of his genius and transcends it into something higher. Composers or choreographers may speak of being "inspired" by Shakespeare, but there is really no such thing as inspiration, if by that one means some kind of mystical, creative inhalation of the spirit of Shakespeare. Artists have enthusiasms, and they want to pay homage to Shakespeare, but if you go looking for some tangible thing such as inspiration, you will always be disappointed. It's as misleading as the belief that happy composers write happy music and sad ones write sad music.

All of which calls into question the basic premise behind this boilerplate on the Kennedy Center Web site: "So whether you know all the sonnets by heart or are discovering his work for the very first time, Shakespeare in Washington will bring you closer than ever to the man they call 'The Bard.' "

Going to see the plays, yes. Going to hear the operas and concerts and watch the dance? Probably not. But getting closer to Verdi, Prokofiev and Balanchine on their own terms isn't so bad.