1. Class Title 1 (Simon Keenlyside) 2. Waterhouse: Miranda (1916, private collection)

The Tempest (1611) is the last play which Shakespeare wrote alone. It has been described as the most musical of his works, on account of the number of songs in the text, the interpolated masque in the last act, and because it works less through cause and effect than through enchantment, an intrinsically musical quality. It is the only play for which we have any of the original stage music. And according to Wikipedia, it has inspired over four dozen operatic or musical settings. As early as the mid-seventeenth century, managements were adapting the play as a kind of masque, rather than performing the original.

3. Ariel’s Tempest in Columbia

I’m also somewhat familiar with it myself. I directed the first performance of The Tempest by American composer Lee Hoiby in the late 1980s, and wrote my own adaptation in 2011 for composer Douglas Allan Buchanan, a 60-minute condensation that we toured to young audiences all over Maryland.

4. Round table discussion at the Met

But the version we are watching today is the work of the two people in the middle of this picture: composer/conductor Thomas Adès (b.1971) and the Australian playwright Meredith Oakes (b.1946), seen here with Met General Manager Peter Gelb and stage director Robert Lepage. The picture comes from an intermission feature in the Met’s 2012 Live-in-HD transmission of the opera; I thought of playing it, but it is hard to hear and rather light on information. I would rather play more of the opera instead.

5. Thomas Adès’ Tempest at Covent Garden, 2004

The Tempest was commissioned by the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and first performed in 2004. Although the reviews were ecstatic, I cannot find any pictures of the production that I find half as evocative as the later one at the Met. But it is the music that counts. Before we do anything else, let’s look ahead to the Prelude to Act III of the opera, with Adès conducting the Met orchestra. You may not be able to hum the tunes, but watch him and how his music flows through him.

6. Adès: The Tempest, prelude to Act III 7. Critical responses to the first performance

What did you think? For me, this is clearly a composer believing in the power of his music as an emotional force, and conveying it to the orchestra with energy and passion. Here are two responses to the musical aspect of the London première in 2004. Note the things they imply that operatic music

— 1 — typically does, and that this opera does excellently: the evocation of mood, the delineation of character, and the control of dramatic pacing. This is a challenging opera at times, but at other times it is an utterly lyrical one; the point is whether the composer uses the contrasts of moods for dramatic or structural effect. I think you will find that Adès does.

8. Chart of the portions played in class.

Here is what we are going to do. I am going to play three extended passages: the last 20 minutes of Act 1, the last 10 of act II, and after the break the last 35 of Act III, plus a few shorter snippets to make particular points. In the first act, I want you to listen to some of the musical contrasts we have been talking about. In the second, we shall concentrate of the unique nature of Meredith Oakes’ words. And in the third, we shall see how it is all put together.

9. Robert Lepage at the Met

But first, I do need to say something about the stage director Robert Lepage. We associate him mainly with his ultra-hi-tech Ring at the Met, which can be impressive at many moments, but risks crushing the characters under its juggernaut mechanics. But The Tempest is wonderfully simple, Lepage at his very best. It all stems from his brilliant idea of making Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan, the impresario of Milan’s La Scala theatre, and playing his tricks in terms not of computer-age but nineteenth-century technology. Look at the lower picture: the auditorium is a projection; all else belongs to 1850: a wooden platform, footlights, a prompter’s box, a chandelier, and a model ship. Even the wooden bridge that will fly in with Ariel is standard 19th-century equipment. Oh yes, and he adds a blue cloth covering the stage when the curtain rises; you will see its use in this opening scene.

10. Adès: The Tempest, opening of Act I 11. Musical sections in Act I

The chart shows the remaining musical sections in Act I. I am omitting the 12-minute scene that follows the storm; it is taken up by Prospero telling Miranda about the circumstances of his ouster from Milan, but we can read all that for ourselves. Then follow his scenes with the other main forces in the story: the sprite Ariel, the indigenous savage Caliban, and the shipwrecked son of the King of Naples, Ferdinand. This last turns into a love scene when he first catches sight of Miranda, and she of him, but Prospero intervenes. Note the very different musical languages which Adès uses for each.

12. Adès: The Tempest, remainder Act I 13. — still from the above

Let’s discuss what you heard.

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14. “Full fathom five,” text

If you know even a few sections from the play, you will have heard echoes of the original text that nonetheless do not continue as you might expect them. This is particularly noticeable in those parts of the original that were intended for music in the first place, such as Ariel’s song “Full fathom five.” This is one of the few instances where we have a setting more or less contemporary to the play, and there have been numerous others since. Most of them are very pretty little ditties. But Adès wants to do something quite different. There is nothing pretty about his Ariel, who uses her song to impale Ferdinand and pluck him out of the depths of the sea. What Meredith Oakes does is to condense the text into its main images, often with only two or three words per line. He lines make sense as a sequence, but she has no interest in connecting them syntactically; she leaves it to the composer to make his own connections.

15. Where Angels Fear to Tread, poster

As it happens, I am a librettist too. I know, of course, that a composer is going to set my texts any way he pleases, and that all my poetry will become secondary to his music. But I still like my words to have a certain elegance; I could never bring myself to write texts that read as such a flat travesty of the original, as Meredith Oakes does. Yet I have to admit that she is probably the better librettist, precisely because she keeps her own artistic ego totally out of the way, and allows the composer a completely free rein.

16. Text for opening chorus of Act II

Let’s look at the opening of Act II, and see how Adès builds an effective musical number out of these short, short phrases. The almost total lack of verbs or punctuation adds to the sense of disorientatation. And a word about the staging too. We are now seeing the stage from the audience side. Lepage remains entirely within 19th-century technology, sliding some scenery across the stage on scrims while the chorus walks on backwards, but the effect is utterly magical.

17. Adès: The Tempest, Act II opening 18. Caliban and “Be not afeared” text

I said that The Tempest—Shakespeare’s play, that is—is full of music. Shakespeare’s greatest and most surprising stroke is to give the richest poetic tribute to the power of music to what one might otherwise think the least poetic character, the savage Caliban. Here is his text in the play. When I did my own adaptation, I kept these nine lines intact, and the composer added some lovely music. But it was hard to understand the words. For these are the long lines of iambic pentameter, not a little ditty. It relies on syntactical structures that sometimes span many lines; from “Sometimes a thousand twanging instruments” through “I cried to dream again” is a single sentence.

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19. — the same, with libretto text added

But that is not the way the ear works when listening to music; we tend to pick out striking images and ignore the syntax that ties it together; one of the first things I used to teach in libretto-writing is to keep the lines short. But I never imagined anything so short as these lines of Oakes. But I think she has it just right. In terms of text to be read on paper, it is a trite travesty of the original. But listen to it when set to music, and listen, if you will, in two layers: the singer in the foreground producing this chain of images, while the music in the background provides all the poetry you could want. The task of continuity has been transferred from syntax to sound, and in opera that is exactly where it ought to be.

20. Adès: The Tempest, Act II, Caliban’s aria 21. Angelica Kauffman: Miranda and Ferdinand (1782, Vienna Belvedere)

In the play, Prospero sets Ferdinand the arduous task of piling logs. Miranda comes to help him, and this leads in steady stages to their declaration of love. I send the text out in advance; there are 97 lines in it, and it takes 6 to 8 minutes in performance; the beauty comes in the slow blossoming of a love that we all know to be inevitable. But music works in a different way; to express love, the composer needs to linger, and he cannot waste time getting there. So this version is much, much quicker; "Do you love me?" is Miranda's fifth or sixth line! And very soon after that, we are into a lovely but totally manufactured duet, "High on the headland." This leads to some choregraphed love-making, and the striking ending: "My lover smiling/Blessed asylum/Beautiful island/All I desire" It looks trite on paper, but it does work. The rapid pace of the action makes it possible for the music to be slow, which is what matters. Lepage gives it a beautiful, because very simple, ending; is it a tribute to Shakespeare in Love?

22. Adès: The Tempest, Act II, final scene 23. Class title 2 (Still from the above)

24. Set for Act III

The end of any play is going to be concerned with putting it all together, which in the case of a comedy means making it come out right. And Shakespeare’s late romances, A Winter’s Tale and The Tempest especially, have to do with righting wrongs committed a whole generation earlier. So the test of any production of The Tempest, or any musical setting, is how well it can convey the necessary sense of completeness. We’ll hear how Adès handles it in a moment. But Robert Lepage choses to make the journey to completeness as long as possible, temporarily suspending his metaphor of a 19th-century La Scala, and showing instead the bare bones of a modern theater, the actual Met. There is bare steel scaffolding onstage, a Genie lift and random bits of scenery in the background, and the old chandelier on its side in the front. Not without reason do the Chorus sing “The island is a maze.”

25. Adès: The Tempest, Act III, entrance of the court 26. Ariel (Audrey Luna) appears as a Harpy

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The business of putting it all back together begins, in the opera as in the play, with a trick of magic. Ariel conjure up a sumptuous banquet, then turns herself into a fearsome Harpy and forbids them to eat it. At the same time, Robert Lepage is doing his own transformation, turning that scaffolding into the auditorium of La Scala, a sagittal view, cut down the middle; watch carefully, or you’ll miss it; Lepage is a magician too. The rest is a matter of personal revelations: Miranda and Ferdinand tell Prospero that they are now married; Prospero reveals himself to the King of Naples, restoring his dead son; and all except Prospero’s usurping brother accept the restoration with grace.

27. The quintet, “How good they are!”

To make this happen musically, the composer would traditionally create a big ensemble, and Thomas Adès is no exception. I’m pretty sure he has been listening to the Quintet in Act III of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, for this one begins in the same way, with each voice coming in with the same tune in turn. The words with which it begins, “How good they are, how bright, how grand; and I am loved by Ferdinand,” make me squirm a little, but Adès develops it so magnificently that my qualms are soon forgotten. Indeed, all the writing from here to the end of the opera is superb. The courtiers leave for the ship; Prospero frees Ariel, breaks his staff, and abandons his magic.

28. Caliban’s envoi

Shakespeare ends here, and so did both the operatic adaptations I worked on myself. But Oakes and Adès have one last brilliant stroke. The stage—the empty opera house—is left to its resident phantoms, Caliban and the unseen Ariel. Theater, after all, is the art of illusion. Was this all a dream?

29. Adès: The Tempest, Act III, last half-hour 30. Class title 3 (Prospero)

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