Shakespeare and the Nineteenth-Century Italian Operatic Stage

Abstract

At least a dozen of Shakespeare’s plays provided the basis for nineteenth-century Italian operas. Poets and composers took on the double project of transforming the playwright’s work into a text suitable for musical setting, and then producing a work of dramatic vocal music that could succeed in the fertile and competitive world of nineteenth-century opera. The century’s operatic output is marked by monumental gateposts—Rossini’s groundbreaking Otello (1816) and Verdi’s final stage works, Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893)—but many other significant Italian composers, including Pacini, Piccinni, Vaccai, Bellini, Mercadante, Marchetti, and Faccio (whose recently recovered Amleto is of special interest) would contribute interpretations of Henry IV, Henry V, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and Hamlet. Even non-Italian composers, such as Halévy and Balfe, composed Italian-language operas based on Shakespearean subjects. These operas also mark at least two trajectories of interest to Shakespeareans. First, the development of a Shakespearean ‘voice’—the movement from a vocal world dominated by tenors and women’s voices to what we view today as the more ‘realistic’ distribution of gendered sounds heard in Verdi’s musical Cyprus and Windsor. Second is the recovery of the Shakespearean text—the movement from fanciful or surgically expedient versions of Shakespeare to linguistically and poetically attentive settings of Shakespeare’s dramas. Such developments connect opera, the most extravagant of theatrical forms, to the literary history of a translated, internationalized, and now fully musical Shakespeare.