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Shakespeare and Opera

I'm working on something for Just sheet music about the large portion of the operatic canon that has Shakespearean inspiration.

Front Cover

Consider this a preview. One of the operas I plan to highlight is Le Marchand de Venise (1935), by French composer Reynaldo Hahn and librettist Miguel Zamacois. I've just described Hahn as a "French" composer advisedly. Though he was born in Venezuela in 1874, he arrived in Paris at the age of three, and stayed there through two world wars, dying there in 1947. Indeed, one reference book calls Hahn "one of the most fragrantly Parisian of composers."

I'm not sure that isn't a misprint. Wouldn't "flagrantly" have been a more natural turn of phrase?  Nothing in the context supports the notion that it's an intentional pun. But, hey, follow the above link and decide that for yourself.

The opera involves the usual compressions: the five acts of the Shakespeare original are turned into three, and some characters are dropped in the process.

Here's 12 minutes of it, courtesy of YouTube.

In 1994, a critic writing in The New York Times lamented that this work is too seldom pertformed. The critic, Allan Kozinin, wrote admiringly of the "touches of tone painting" such as "the gently bobbing music that underlies the discussion of the gondola that will spirit away Jessica and Lorenzo."

Historically, Merchant has been an especially fraught play because its blatant appeal to the anti-Semitism expected of its earliest audiences raises tangled questions about the relationship between aesthetic appreciation and moral judgment. Harold Bloom has written that were he a director, he would be baffled by "how to stage a romantic comedy that rather blithely includes a forced Jewish conversion to Christianity on penalty of death. When Shylock brokenly intones, 'I am content,' few of our audiences are going to be content, unless you can conjure up a cheerfully anti-Semitic audience somewhere."



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