‘Let your indulgence set me free’

Abstract

Director Julie Taymor and her partner, composer Elliot Goldenthal, collaborated on two location-shot Shakespeare films: Titus (1999) and The Tempest (2010). The freshness of the collaborators’ cinematic approach to Shakespeare is in part a consequence of their having also worked extensively together in the theatre (including stage productions of these two plays, and a filmed theatrical performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream released in 2015) and their refusal to eschew dramatic stylization on the silver screen in favour of a populist realism. The eclectic music for Titus ranges from choral incantations to distorted jazz idioms, dynamic minimalism, searingly expressive orchestral writing, mesmerizing electronics, and a black-comedy application of carnival music familiar from the collaborators’ stage work; almost all the music is foregrounded, yet little attempt is made to endow this powerful composite score with the specious unifying function traditionally demanded of film music. By contrast, the score to The Tempest is more subliminal in its effect, while still experimental in its exploration of soundscapes which shift from Caliban’s ‘thousand twangling instruments’ to sparse ideas expressed in novel guitar tunings and sonorities, evocative keyboard timbres, saxophone multiphonics, glass armonica, and steel cello. Above all, the film’s soundtrack is distinguished by its contemporary response to the play’s songs, which here include an additional lyric borrowed from Twelfth Night in order to enhance the romantic subplot, and the climactic isolation of the (female) Prospera’s epilogue in the end credits.